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Adwords will help a bit. Many people don't click on Ads that often, and a video thumbnail is very enticing for a click-through. Especially one that appears negative.

Hi SanketPatel-

Open Site Explorer is my favorite backlink checker as well, but ahrefs usually has a much fresher index. OSE updates approximately once each month with ambitions to do so more frequent.

So if something dramatic happened a few days ago (like 100 lost links), ahrefs would be the quickest place to diagnose the problem. Compared to waiting another 20 days or whatever for the OSE index to update.

I have not ever seen proper documentation on this type of remarketing policy, but I have retargeted to a Partner Website in the past and our Google PPC rep was aware and more than OK with the process.

In general, I think if the result is "you spend more on Google ads" they tend to be OK with that.

Hi Rosh-

Sorry to hear about your ranking misfortune.

Your blog post is very nice and clearly deserves to have a spot in the SERPs.

Since it vanished nearly completely and is having serious trouble ranking (googling a quote from the article leads to /tag pages of your site outranking it) makes me think there might be some sort of over-optimization going on.

I don't see any major red flags so I'm not quite sure what it is. I only say this because I worked on a blog that had a similar problem (posts weren't ranking, things as small as tweets were outranking the post) and the problem was over-optimization on page.

First things I would test:

• Remove tags or NoIndex /tag/ pages
• Get rid of the sitewide link on this site: http://www.thedrivenbusiness.com/ since it is sending 548 anchor text links to your site. Perhaps just link to it from your homepage.

I'm not overly confident either of these things are your problems, but they are the first two things that came to mind after looking at your situation for 5 minutes.

Tough break and best of luck regaining your spot on page 1.

Some good responses so far. In short: Content wins, can't predict virality.

If you have the content part down (great book that people actually want), you may find this blog post useful.

http://unbounce.com/social-media/how-i-created-a-viral-ebook-landing-page-for-8-using-themeforest-paywithatweet-kissinsights-and-unbounce/

It appears you have a problem with improper canonicalization.

I clicked on the first post I saw:

http://www.indieshuffle.com/two-door-cinema-club-next-year-rac-mix/

That page, has the canonical tag set to your homepage. That would be a great reason for Google to choose not to index your post. You are essentially telling Google your posts are your homepage.

Remove that canonical tag or change it to reflect the actual post URL.

I think those all look fine. If your categories are making it easier for your users to find what they are looking for, then they are good to go.

Do not make tiny categories for SEO purposes that don't help users shop.

I think either of those options is just fine.

URLs on the left are short and sweet. URLs on the right are a bit more descriptive.

I would draw the line at this question: Are you doing multiple things only for the search engines and not for the users?

My two biggest tips would be to 1) Write naturally (page titles, copy) and 2) Link naturally (descriptive, not over anchor texty)

If these are the two options you are considering, I would definitely go with #2. Keep it under one domain, with multiple subdomains.

Since it sounds like a new site, I would strongly consider keeping it all under one domain and just using subfolders for each "specialty store" - mazsports.co.uk/running/

Ideally when creating a new staging area, you'd want to exclude crawling via robots.txt.

Add the NoIndex tag to the head of your pages to get them removed from the SERPs. Make sure the page is still crawlable though, as if you exclude it in robots.txt first and then NoIndex it, Google won't be able to see the new NoIndex tag.

If there are not a lot of pages to remove, you can request page removal within Google Webmaster Tools.

When I say 'Tiny' I mainly am getting at the fact that it is either a category with 1 or 2 total products inside it. Or, it is named after an obscure term with almost zero search volume.

I find that going to level 3 can be ok, but try to stick to two levels deep.

I would include the word server in the example listed above.

There is no limit. I would list your most popular and profitable categories on your home page.

It's nice to have all URLs be consistent (all lowercase for example) but there is nothing wrong with having capitals in your URL. As you mentioned, the chance that someone types in a long product URL instead of copy/paste is very low and even if they do, they'd probably check their link to your site. I would leave it as is and not worry about it.

Amazon uses capital letters in many of their product URLs. The only difference is their non-cap versions work as well.

Disagree 100% with the Wistia mention. Do you know how Expensive it is to pay for bandwidth for a video with 500,000 views on Wistia? To me, the original question sounds like he wants to make money now. Not spend money for some links to his website.

I know Moz is tight with Wistia, but I'm seriously doubting why this was marked a Good Answer.

If you are going for Virality (and you don't want to sell the rights over), use YouTube. Perform outreach to media outlets yourself. Get it on paid StumbleUpon. You can earn a lot of money with the Google ads on top of the video and you can still build backlinks in the process (if that's even a concern of his).

I haven't visited your site or looked at the backlinks, but most likely, you were hit by either Penguin/Panda or both. Save yourself some time and use Panguin Tool to look at your traffic stats compared to Algorithm updates. This is the best tool for a quick insight into potential traffic loss. http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/

See if your traffic drop-off aligns with a particular update(s) and then move forward with fixing it from there. If nothing lines up with the algorithm updates, perhaps your own site has made a mistake during a code update.

My simple advice: Create the best page you possibly can around a few of those topics. Make the page compelling and informative and then see what it ranks for. If you are focused on the basic topic (kayak fishing) the keywords will find their way in naturally.

After a bit, you may notice one of the pages ranks well for 'kayak weight limit' and decide to make that a more prominent headline and include the exact phrase when editing.

Some content ideas:

• Essential Gear for Successful Kayak Fishing
• Top 5 Kayaks for Fishing
• 8 Tips for The Beginner Kayak Fisherman
• Rigging Your Kayak for a Day of Fishing

Make these pages be awesome. Put some nice pictures in there. Don't make them just because you want to include keywords. Awesome pages will earn shares and links. Helping you eventually rank for more competitive terms such as 'kayak fishing.' In the meantime, you will get quality long-tail traffic that you didn't even try to target.

Posting links on Google+ has been a really good way to get new pages crawled and indexed. Even if these pages are not new, I think if you could get a few G+ profiles to submit it, it would increase the likelihood that Googlebot would crawl the page.

You are right on. It can be very, very expensive.

Don't get me wrong, I love Wistia. I'm a Wistia customer myself. I just don't think it's right for every client/video/goal.

Use YouTube. Use YouTube analytics to find out what websites embedded your video. Perform outreach to those websites, asking for a link crediting you as the resource. Make sure the YouTube video is embedded on your website and the actual video description links to your website, to verify proof of ownership.

Hi Jim-

There are plenty of good articles about Penguin recovery, but here is the main goal:

Remove unnatural backlinks: Look for non-relevent backlinks, backlinks with manipulative anchor text or unnaturally high anchor text ratio, sitewide links, etc.

This can vary with each site and please don't look at my blurb and just start getting rid of backlinks. There has been a ton of discussion on Moz about Penguin recovery, which you should read up on: http://www.google.com/#q=penguin+recovery+moz.com

Do a lot of research if you are going to tackle it yourself instead of hire it out.

Best of luck!

I'm not experienced in the insurance industry, but I think your suspicions are correct in that you will have problems competing with the big players in the industry.

One question for you: Does a search for something like 'Quakertown PA auto insurance' bring up local results (map) or just standard results?

I would put my focus on the city level. Try to build links and local citations. Also, focus on what sets you apart from the big agencies. Perhaps there are people searching for 'locally owned insurance companies in Quakertown.'

Be sure you are visiting /robots.txt  In all of your copy above, you are referencing robot.txt

Also, check to see if it possibly is only showing up on the www. version or the site or the non-www version of the site.

To be sure if it's working, you can test URLs of your website within Google Webmaster Tools. Go to Crawl->Blocked URLs and scroll down to the bottom.