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Thanks for the response Lesley! You're right  about Microsoft having their own way of doing things. We're doing a lot of branding and design work for Sharepoint, and it's been an... let's just go with interesting... few years since we started offering it as a service. Great thinking on checking the site in Bing -  Seems like common sense fails again: Bing is ignoring the tag too. Looking at our more recent projects in Sharepoint 2010 and 2013, the tag doesn't seem to exist at all, and there is no documentation on it. I can only assume that even Microsoft has dropped it at this point. Thanks again for the help. Bede

Hi Bede, Got it. No, I have not run into this or seen it reported. Very interesting. I think that might be worth reporting to Google via their data issues phone number, though I suspect they might tell you to merge the listings...in which case, I personally wouldn't follow that advice. You could try to call them about it, though: http://support.google.com/places/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1386120&page=ts.cs Wish I had more insight on this, but I've not seen it before.

Sorry to hear that Chris. Bede, would you happen to have an update on what you reported about your client on this back in March? I'd love to hear, too.

That makes sense, Thanks Miriam!

In addition to what you have, maybe something about mobile SEO. How to make the phone number clickable on your site on a mobile device. Maybe something about responsive. How about something about <a class="attribute-value">http://schema.org/LocalBusiness. A little advanced, but hey it's a meetup. If they wanted the basics they can just Google it.</a>

Cheers for the responses everyone. What everyone has said is pretty much in agreement with what I was thinking, and it's nice to have it confirmed. Thanks!

I recommend reading through the entire spreadsheet from start to end and color coding every different intent keyphrase that you come across. Any keyphrases which have identical or very close intent matches should be color coded together. I do this process manually then I write down every intent variation that I came across. It usually ranges from 10 - 30 different intent buckets. Once I have the pieces of the puzzle, I start piecing together the search funnel for the business. Who are your known demographics (the personas that your marketing team talks about or your target audience)? Are there intent buckets that do not map to these personas? If yes, then you may be attracting a demographic that is unaccounted for. See if you can figure out who this demographic is. Is it a worthwhile demographic? Pull out your conversion data. See if you can use the master list of intent buckets to break down the search funnel into a flow chart for each demographic by using the keyphrases mentioned in the first paragraph of this response. I'm assuming that you have some kind of an employment website like Indeed or Monster. There are different kinds of personas that I can think about off the top of my head. For example: 1. Employed 2. Unemployed 3. College Student 4. Remote Worker On 4 different documents, you'd write down the keyphrase intent buckets that you know for a fact are associated with each persona mentioned above. You'll want to use conversion data or pages on your website that are built for specific target audience groups to help you make this decision. For example, if you had a page targeted at a college student, then you could analyze the keyphrases that drive traffic to that page to determine whether your intent bucket is grouped correctly with your correct demographic. You could go one step further by looking at the keyphrases that possibly convert into an email subscriber whom you know is a college student with 100% certainty. Once you have a bunch of intent keyphrases mapped to each demographic, then you would try to break down the steps. Put yourselves in the shoes of a single demographic and make a decision tree. Write down all the possibilities that one would take online in a sequential set of steps and see if you can map your keyphrases to that list. There's more but this exercise will get you started and help you figure out the different target audiences that come to your website and highlight their search behavior from keyphrase to keyphrase. It will show you the best points to attack them from an online marketing perspective by tailoring your messaging to distinct steps in the funnel. Please let me know if this was helpful.

Hi Ben, Thanks for the response. I did check the rank tracking software when I saw it, and unfortunately it's not what's causing the problem. It's not causing massive traffic changes to the site - somewhere in the realm of 5% to 15% depending on the month. It's still a decent chunk of people, though.

On one of the websites that I work on I have pages for geographic area that I am targeting for the same thing, these pages are all ranked on the first page for their location related search. I think the key is to have well written unique content for each of the pages with content that is specifically relevant to that area. Just because you are targeting the same thing in a different area doesn't mean you can't have pages that are unique yet cleverly target the same service in a different area. In these circumstances I always find it useful to use examples and testimonials for each area if appropriate. Bring input from locals that you work with to give the page a local feel. The recent changes with Penguin/Panda have not had a negative impact on my sites and I am not planning on changing my tactics, because at the end of the day Google is looking for better quality search results so when I produce a page I try to make sure it truly does serve a purpose for a visitor and isn't just spam.

Hard to say without details, but I'd definitely get those 301s in place fast, if they fell through the cracks. Possibly the new site introduced a couple of home-page duplicates as well? (like "/" vs. "/index.html"). Might want to check the internal links and add rel-canonical to the home-page.

Offer sweet deals that blog readers will think are exclusive to them - and put a time limit on them. "Today only, for our dedicated blog readers you can buy half a pair of pants for just $10"

Greetings, Bede, So sorry about the line breaks. We've been having a little problem with that, and I hope my response to you isn't one big paragraph The process you have been using for your Local clients remains a best practice, in my experience. Not only does this separate the information out as best you can for bots, but it is a good practice for human users who will be signaled upon reach such a landing page that they are looking at information about their own geographic location. You are so right that things keep changing in Local, but this is one area in which creating unique, rich content landing pages is still a smart choice. In regards to Schema vs., for instance, hCard, the benefit is that Google, Yahoo & Bing have all agreed on this markup as standard. However, definitely read this 2011 discussion at Mike Blumenthal's blog in which Mike opines that rushing to switch from hCard to Schema may not be your #1 top priority: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2011/10/07/a-free-tool-to-build-geo-sitemap-and-schema-org-compliant-files/ Through 2011, I continued to use hCard on my Local clients sites without issue, but it is certainly smart to acquaint yourself with the features of Schema that apply to Local. The tool linked to from that post is a great place to begin. Hope my feedback is useful! Miriam

Ah, I see. That has happened, but only to a very small extent - when I look at analytics, I can attribute  70%+ of the dropoff to a two-word phrase with 3 variants. It was their primary phrase by a good margin, and the traffic has tanked, even though they maintain rankings for it. It's very confusing. I did notice on insights that in 2010 and 2009 there were a few months of each year where insights went from very high interest to 0 interest. It's happening in 2011, too, and we're currently in one of those periods. The start of that 0 period in insights coincides roughly with the traffic dropoff. That said, I'm wary of deciding that that's the reason. There -were- changes to the title tags and content at that time, and it's hard to believe that it's just bad luck . The primary traffic source for this phrase was Yahoo, not Google. The traffic drop has occurred in Google, but to a much lesser extent (Yahoo dropped about 50%. Google only dropped about 20%). Another reason for me to not want to give too much credence to the insights info.

I would suggest both, since someone might be searching for it while on a trip or visiting the family during the weekend and hence might not be geographically in the town at the time of his/her search.

I've noticed a decrease in brand-focused searches for our site, but for our actual terms, no, no changes. Entry pages have definitely switched up, however. Did your ranks end up getting negatively effected by the recent switch-ups, or are different pages literally being switched out at the same ranks?

Thanks, Ryan.

You could try: http://validator.w3.org/checklink