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yes, very useful. Many thanks

Philip,

Thanks for the reply. I will check out that link.I also seo for another seo for same client and that has been impacted too. I seo for about 20 terms for that client. 19 of the terms are ranking as well as ever, however, the only term which they have a google local listing for (motorhome hire) has seen the organic listing drop down to page 3 from page 1.

Looking over the analytics for both websites it appears that the drops started about 2 weeks back which seems to tie into a Google Panda refresh.

The type of business in my first post is a BBQ catering company, they run catering for parties, weddings etc.

Anyone seen this lately; I have a client who is in the food catering business and for the seo we target a lot of local keywords (event catering Hampshire, for example). In the past couple of weeks search engine traffic to the website seems to have dropped by about 60%. However, rankings do not seem to have dropped.

What I have noticed is that up until a couple of months back, the client would be ranking first page in the Google local and also have a listing in the 'normal' serps. It appears that the non local pages have vanished. Checking a couple of their competitors and it seems the same there.

This has led me to start to believe that Google are now only giving a local position or a normal position on the first page and not both, as previously. The non local pages are sitll listed but seem to have dropped way back to the 4th or 5th page when previously they would have been first page.

It would of course help if the client were to give me access to the webmaster tools!!!  Hate it when client's only give you half the information you need and then expect you to tell them what's up!!

Anyone seem this?

Thanks, Carl

Thanks EGOL

Very useful information there, exactly along the lines of my thinking (disproved my idea mind you hehe). I guess i'll have to find a 'level' for my domain and keywords which match that

Hi Mark

Just to pick up on your remark: To say that they are "ranking for the keywords because of their strong DA rather than any seo work" doesnt make sense. The reason their domain authority is high is because of the SEO.

What I meant there was that the pages I looked at appear to be ranking because of the root domain authority/seo rather than any specific seo to that page. The pages have little to no external links. Sorry, probably didn't explain it the right way.

Thanks. Carl

Hi, sorry if this is an obvious one...

I am doing some keyword research tool and have a few keywords I wish to ran for. Looking at the DA of the sites on the first page they are averaging 60ish, my site is 33. However, for the keywords I am targeting they seem to have PA of 1, or at best, 5.

From what I can make it out appears they are ranking for the keywords because of their strong DA rather than any seo work.

If I were to target these keywords and send backlinks to the individual pages and so build up a PA on my pages would this be enough to challenge the competitors or would I still be at a major disadvantage because of my lower DA?

Hope that make sense? I know what I mean but hard to explain it

Thanks

thanks, that's along the lines of what I was thinking. Given the age and the score of the domains I would rather word to get them back again than start again with brand new domains.

Hi all, first post here so sorry if in wrong section.

After a little advice, if I may, from more experienced SEOers than myself with regards to writing off domains or keeping them.

To cut a long story short I do a lot of affiliate marketing, back in the day (until the past 6 months or so) you could just take a merchant's datafeed and with some SEO outrank them for individual products. However, since the Google Panda update this hasn't worked as well and now it's much hard to do - which is better for the end user.

The issue I have is that I got lazy and tried to see if I could still get some datafeeds to rank with only duplicate content. The sites ranked very well at first but after a couple of weeks died massively. They went from 0 to 300 hits a day in a matter of 24 hours and back to 2 hits a day. The sites now not rank for anything which is obviously because they are duplicate content.

The question I have is are these domains dead, can they be saved? Not talking about duplicate content but as a domain itself. I used about 10 domains to test things, they ranged from DA 35 to DA 45 - one of the tests being can a domain with reasonable DA rank for duplicate content.

Seeing as the test didn't work I want to use the domains for proper sites with proper unique content, however so far although the new unique content is getting indexed it is suffering from the same ranking penalties the duplicate (and now deleted content) pages had.

Is it worth trying to use these domains, will Google finally remove the penalty when they notice that the bad content is no longer on the site or are the domains very much dead?

Many thanks