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Hi Bob, There's a few key areas which have an impact on app store rankings: keywords in title and description ratings (therefore make sure you're addressing any issues and responding to negative reviews) downloads You can also translate the title and description into other languages, as this can help increase downloads from other countries (provided your app works internationally, international users will potentially be able to use it even if its primary language is English). And you can promote it on your site; ideally, detect the user agent of your mobile visitors and show them the version for their device. I'd also suggest testing Facebook promoted posts which allow users to be taken directly to the app store to download your app. Hope that helps!

Hi James, Don't worry too much about visual aspects - Matt Cutts once said that Google doesn't pay a lot of attention to this themselves as there are some amazing white-papers out there with amazing work, but they are just pages of text and have none of the latest visual wizardry that we tend to see. Have a look through the site. Does the content read well? Does SEMRush throw up any concerns? Does the content seem unique (check this through Copyscape or pull some sentences out and search for them through Google)? Where you can, just try to get a feel for what the site has to offer and how you can envisage trying to get a link from them. -Andy

It's not an exact science in regard to any one signal, however yes, the more you can reinforce the ability to strengthen topical focus, the less likely Panda would find category pages to be weak.

Too close on those numbers, especially in terms of spots 8,6,5 & 2. You're going to have to take a deeper look. I'd start with digging into the link profiles. Find the links that your competitors have that are really high trust links--I'm talking BBB, industry accreditation sites, quality PR hits/mentions etc. Find the easy wins and try to identify the really high level links that your competitors have that you may be missing. My second priority would be to check out your bounce rates and time on site. It may be that traffic is better served on those sites and therefore Google is giving them the nod in the rankings. Third, I'd check out http://moz.com/blog/ranking-factors-2013\. Dig in and see where your competitors are beating you in that regard step by step. Process of elimination I'm afraid....we can't really know for sure!

Bob, I would suggest creating great content and then using social media and email to spread the content like fire. A term that we stole from Jay Baer is content is fire and social media is the gasoline to that fire. For example why don't you add an important piece of content to your email signature or email it to a few influencers in the community. They might find it important and want to share it with everyone or even link to it.

Hi Bob, Just to extend on Jane's point and answer your question - if you 301 redirected every single page on your site, it would overtime slow down your website and if a lot of those pages don't have strong authority then it might be detected and potentially harm your sites rankings. A link to a quora post below provides additional reasons. http://www.quora.com/Why-should-one-avoid-overusing-301-redirects

I'm not sure that you'd encounter a situation where Google is intuitive enough to decide on UX and equate it to a ranking factor - although they do definitely try to render pages and understand websites from a user's point of view. Not to get all UX on you on an SEO Q&A board, but if this truly is a bad user experience, consider investing the time to fix it, but as long as Google can crawl a sensible hierarchy through internal linking (ignoring the breadcrumb issue), I don't believe this will be actively moving you down the rankings. Cheers, Jane

I opened the question with "Panda 2.0", where I meant "Penguin 2.0". And I didn't give the date. I'll try again in another questions. This one's confused.

Frankly...the reason for the slip is irrelevant. Probably Penguin / Penguin 2.0 but you really have 2 choices: Get rid of the paid links and start being smarter about your SEO, you'll probably lose some more traffic in the short term if you're not currently getting an algorithmic spanking from the links in question already. Don't get rid of them and watch your traffic continue to fall as your paid links slowly get devalued. The net result is the same. Get rid of the paid links and start again now rather than dragging it out ad having to start again later.

Hi again, This could be dampening Google's view of the site, but I would be interested to see what the link building and other promotional activity of your competitors looks like. DA might not have caught up with what they're doing yet, but the subtle improvements are enough to make the "playing field" a little tougher for you. When you're being slowly out-done, I'd definitely recommend making sure the site is absolutely perfect from an on-page point of view. If you suspect you're keyword stuffing at all, resolve that and tidy up any other house keeping issues you come across. I don't think that would be enough to take a site from top 3 rankings to page 2, but it won't help if there are other competitive aspects you are being beaten on. Forgive me for linking to my own post, but I wrote about competitive link analysis a few years ago and it might be helpful if you're looking at what others are doing as far as links go: http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/competitive-backlink-analysis.html

I'm actually not going to rewrite the URL since, based on the responses, it's not too spammy. I was just wondering if it was spammy since it was long and jumbled. But what an awesome post by Paul Thompson! Taught me a couple of things! Thanks!

It all depends on how and why the 404's are there and if they are linked to. I have worked with a client who killed about 35,000 pages over the course of about a month (to get rid of duplication) and it only had positive effects. -Andy

Hi Oleg, Thanks for the informative reply. Yes, if we can do a 301 redirect, we will - but what if we cannot? Do I need to properly optimize for recent updates the old category URLs since they will be crawled? Do I have to worry about duplicate content between old and new? What is the best approach if a 302 is all that we have?

Hi Bob, If there's NAP consistency issues that you've discovered, they are almost certainly harming the business' ability to rank well locally. If the client has a very small budget, perhaps the best thing to do would be to offer her an hour or two of consulting to teach her how to find citations and correct them on her own. If a business owner doesn't have budget, they have to be able to invest time if they want to have some ability to compete, right? So, offering to train her to discover and correct her citations wouldn't require much of your consulting time and would really empower her to take control of her presence on the web. That would be my thinking on this.

I'd like input from other experienced inbound marketers on Ramonk's suggestion. Basically, since I have 15 or so backlinks, I could find two quality niche directories and get one dofollow link from both of them. I wouldn't feel comfortable with more than two. But those aren't editorial at all, so I have a lot of hesitancy about that. Same with a couple of linking root domains from niche forums. Suggestions on if these links would be helpful at all?

before I could tell you the best way to get your ranking backup I would have to look at your site. I Would bet you that because you have bad back links that you try to remove you might've missed a few. "There are 2 other paid links from two PR4 sites that look editorial. There are other links on the sites to other websites that are paid. All links for these 2 sites look editorial." Google it is a $40 billion a year company that has the resources and ability to figure out if it's a paid link or looks like a paid link. They will find out from other sites using similar services paid links are one of the worst things you can have in my opinion. Do a title tag like this is spamming running shoes | walking shoes | cross-training shoes using something like Shoes - Walking - Running - Cross-training would be a better title tag "Google changes the way the title tag is displayed sometimes in the search engines." This is normal for Google will change your title tag to suit the queried keywords. It is supposed to help you. "We may have many 404 errors (due to some mistakes we made with the URLs in our cart) - if Google hasn't deindexed them all then we could have dozens of 404s on important category pages. But nothing is showing up in GWT." Are you only using Google Webmaster tools to try to figure out if you have for 404's? when you say blogs I'm assuming your meaning posts? when you delete blog posts and other parts of the website you're essentially deleting interlinking, back links that you may not know about, your changing your website structure. If you have not corrected all possible 404's or at least most this will hurt you quite a bit. For instance when people redesign their site and do not 301 redirect properly even sometimes when they do 301 redirect properly they go down drastically in the SERPS this is because Google does not trust change immediately. if you scroll down you'll see my answer in this post and its relevancy to changing parts of the website and Actually trying to keep your site rank. http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-keep-old-url-juice-during-site-switch " We have a lot of subcategory pages that rel=cononical to main categories in the menu." That might not be the wisest idea. I would strongly recommend a site audit. if you give me your URL I will run it through some tools for you and give you my opinion. Sincerely, Thomas

I agree with Moosa - his suggestions on checking things besides links are spot on. If rankings are dropping continuously over a 9 month period, that doesn't sound like just a links issue. Algorithmic penalties (speaking from experience) cause a drop at a certain point, but they don't make rankings continue to drop. If other things look fine and you think links may be the problem, run Link Detox. You'll still need to manually review each link in there (you'll occasionally find false positives), but it'll give you a very good idea of how healthy your backlink profile is.

Ill just give a practical response based from my own ecom projects Category optimisation DOES wonders for impressions and SEO. You've seen it work. In my case, increasing the content length DID help get more impressions but not conversions (directly) If it helps people to make choices for products, go for it. If you are just increasing the length just for the sake of SEO, that's where you will need to make a judgement call. Consider your traffic data and conversion funnels that you have right now and make the decision based on that. Hell, if I was asked this personally, Id just say go for it, test it and see what happens, but like Doug mentioned, it might make you lose money if you are already converting well and that's the last thing we want to happen

Hi Bob, This effect is done using a background image. The image being used is this one: http://www.3dcart.com/images/5/main-panorama3.jpg It has a width of 2500 and height of 444. This ensures that it takes up the whole screen on devices less than 2500px wide (which is most of them). The image has feathering on the left and right - which allows it to fade to the same as the black background on devices largest than 2500px. The site specifies the image, width and background colour in their CSS file: .panel0 {      height: 444px;      background: #18100d url(../images/5/main-panorama3.jpg) no-repeat center top; } and to display the background image - they use HTML similar to this: [SOME STUFF] I hope that helps.