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Hi,

I had a similar problem where our homepage was out ranking the target page. It was down to a number of things but mainly the fact that a lot of links using the keyword anchor text were pointed at the homepage. I would be surprised if your new page replaces the homepage in the SERPs soon after launching it. You'll need to do a few things first.

• Either build new links or get the existing links repointed to your new landing page
• Make sure your on-page SEO is spot on
• Use your internal links effectively to point to your new page using the targeted keyword

Hope that helps,

Brendan.

Hi Gerard,

In my experience the SEOmoz ranking report is fairly accurate. It's sometimes a few places off but it's good enough. I suspect that you're seeing personalised results which would account for the difference in rankings. To make sure that you're not seeing personalised result, add pws=0 into the URL. For example, if I search for widgets, I should see the URL as http://www.google.co.uk/search?pws=0&q=widgets

If you're using Chrome, I wrote a blog post about how to easily get non-personalised results.

Hope that helps,

Brendan.

You're right that it does mean Friday. If it hasn't shown up yet, I'd fire an email to help@seomoz.org who'll be able to help you out. They're usually super speedy at replying.

Thanks,

Brendan.

Hi,

I think the best one around is Excellent Analytics. It's a free plugin for Excel, has decent(ish) 'how to' guides on their site and is recommended by Google so should do everything you're looking for.

Hope that helps.

Hi Rob,

I wouldn't waste your time trying to clean up your backlink profile. It's more than likely that Google will simply ignore these links anyway. You're much better spending time creating some great content that will help to make the web a better place and attract good, natural links which Google will count.

Hope that helps,

Brendan.

That's right. You won't see a negative effect, rather no effect at all from these links. These are the links however which are using your targeted phrase as anchor text.

Oh, and I'd also remove Mansfield web design from your title tags on all pages other than your homepage. Remember one targeted phrase, one page.

I've only had a quick look but I suspect it's your backlink profile. OSE shows that although you have quite a few links with "Mansfield web design" as the anchor text, most of them are junk which are probably being devalued by Google. I'd work on building a lower number of high value links.

Hope that helps,

Brendan.

Hi,

You've got some good answers there with regard to the Facebook links. If you're looking to post images, I'd use pinterest.com. Use the Google Chrome plugin to pin the images directly from your site and you get a do-follow link back. The value of the link is up for debate due the sheer size of the site but I've seen decent traffic levels coming from Pinterest recently.

Make sure you write a decent description for each image you pin, engage with other users and I'm sure you'll see results.

Hi Keri,

We took all of the above on board and decided to redesign the page completely adding more content to the page and decreasing the number of links. Our rank improved almost immediately so a great result!

Thanks to all who helped out.

hi Philipp,

We did something very similar recently. Our rankings had dropped significantly for a particular keyword. We added 2-3 paragraphs of well optimised text to the page (amongst other changes) and our ranking recovered within a couple of days and is now back on page 1.

I'd absolutely add some text to the page you shared but it seems to have other problems too - 298 links on the page for example. I'd look to cut those down too.

Hi,

Make sure you've got the SEOmoz toolbar installed in your browser. This will give you a decent idea of page and domain authority and trust.

Is the topic of the page and other links on the page relevant to your site? Are there links for all sorts of sites and industries on there with no clear focus? That's a sign of site which is selling links.

Put the URL of the page in to Google and make sure it ranks first. If not, steer well clear. Also take a few title tags from random pages on the site and google those too to make sure they're ranking and haven't received a penalty.

There are many more factors but I hope those will get you started.

Hi,

I've always just just used the Akismet plugin for WordPress which comes with the WordPress installation. You just need to sign up for an API key. It's not perfect but does a pretty good job and is more elegant than using captcha.

Hope that helps.

Hi,

I'm looking at adding my site to a directory. It's highly relevant to my industry and has relatively good PA/DA.

The external links on the directory uses some PHP code like the following:

http://www.ThisDirectory.com/visit.php?i=3141635&url=http://www.ExternalDomain.com

Obviously the links works as a redirect but they do not show up in OSE. Would Google count this link as an inbound link?

Thanks,

I'm 100% confident that nothing breaks Google's guidelines. The only thing I can think of is that our anchor text is overly optimised. That's my worry.

Thanks again,

Brendan.

Thanks Robert,

You've managed to calm my nerves somewhat!

Now I'm off to take a look for those Chinese Gambling Sex Enhancer sites you speak of!

Thanks again,

Brendan.

Hi Robert,

Thanks for your reply. The reason I asked about the penalty is because the new links used keyword rich anchor text. Couldn't this be the proverbial straw that triggered the Google penalty? Obviously I take this in to consideration when link building and mix it up as much as possible but the vast majority of links to this page are internal and as such use 100% keyword matching anchor text.

For your info, the site is very well established in the market however we have made a lot of changes to the target page recently (URL, page title, alt text etc). I know there can be no categoric answer to this but you seem confident that I shouldn't panic and just sit tight. Could you tell me why you think I haven't been penalised? Are there any methods of testing for keyword specific penalisation?

Thanks again,

Hi all,

We've been working on improving our ranking for a specific keyword for the past couple of months. Progress has been steady if not spectacular (it's a very competitive keyword). Last week we obtained (not bought!) a site wide link from a partner (nothing fishy, they are business partners in the same industry) as well as a link each from a relevant resource site and a directory with good PA/DA. The anchor text used on the new links is keyword rich.

This week our rankings have fallen dramatically from page 2 to page 39 for our targeted page although other pages on our site still rank well for this keyword. The targeted page is still indexed by Google.

Could Google just be reassessing our ranking for this page and it will return to its previous rank or is it likely it has received a keyword specific penalty?

Thanks in advance.

You should include the rel canonical on both pages. Eg:

Page One
<title>Page one</title>

Page Two
<title>Page one</title>

Hope that helps,