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Am I the only SEO on the planet who is basking in the afterglow of the most recent Penguin update? The main site for which I do in-house SEO picked up 72 newly ranking terms in one day with this most recent update. Hallelujah! It's about time some hard work started to pay off! The best thing? They aren't just any 72 keywords, they are 72 targeted keywords. Love it!
Have you tried getting rid of your Tag Cloud?
My initial thought as a first-time user is that your site is a collection of advertisements. Please, don't be offended. I know that's not probably what you are intending, it was just my impression.
Try taking out the tag cloud and see if there is any positive result.
Have you been tracking your rankings for important keywords? Have these changed recently?
The short answer is, yes, you can do it. It's not easy, but it can be done. I was once the lone SEO for a company of about 100 and I left. They were relying heavily on link-building (via blog networks) and I fundamentally disagreed with their approach (the basically set up fake blog networks all over the place and piled them high with links and over-optimized anchor text.
I am now the lone-SEO at one of their competitors and encouraged to engage in white hat SEO. If you are on your own, the best place for you to keep up with the ever-changing world of SEO is right here at SEOMoz and I'd also follow the guys at Distilled, Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land, the good folks at Search Engine Journal and if at all possible, attend MozCon in Seattle this summer. It will be worth every penny your company spends to send you.
Good luck Jean-Pierre. Just remember to prioritize stuff. Know what's going to have the biggest impact on your company's business goals and go after that and be able to prove your results. Then hang out here when you get stuck or just need a pat on the back 
Dana
Hi Paul, I think you do get it, and quite well. I think the other thing you are discovering is that SEO is a very long process. Last summer at MozCon, Rand shared some stats from his blog in the early days. He had post after post where it seemed like no one was reading, and certainly no one was commenting. It's hard work. It takes time. One of my favorite quotes is from a great master French flutist, Marcel Moyse. He would always say that becoming a great musician was a matter of "time, patience and intelligent work." I think you are doing the "intelligent work" part. Just keep at it. The "time and patience" part is hard, especially online because everyone expects the Internet to abound and placate us with instant gratification. You are doing all the right things. Trust in the force 
You'll get there. Just persist.
Dana
IMHO in this specific situation I don't think it matters a whole lot, one way or the other. As long as you don't have a page filled with 500 manufacturers and you're linking to all of them, which would be horrible for your users, I really don't think it matters.
Regarding whether or not you should have the manufacturers who've been gracious enough to link to you put "nofollow" on your links? Please don't do that. The business relationship you have naturally warrants a link. If they've been kind enough to give you a regular link, thank them and move on. If you have manufacturers who aren't linking to you and you think they probably should, contact them and ask them for a link. We do this all of the time. We deal with many manufacturer who don't sell directly to the public. They often include a directory that allows regular consumers to "Contact a Local Dealer" or "Find a Reseller Near You." Asking to be included in that type of directory is a completely natural business relationship. Whether that link is rel="nofollow" or not doesn't matter nearly as much as making sure potential customers searching in that manufacturer's directory can find you there and click through to your site.
Regarding "nofollow" of your links out to sister sites or other manufacturers, I would make that decision based on what you want your visitors to do. Do you really want them to go visit these other sites? If so, leave off the "nofollow." If you are simply referencing another site within your content, or to make people aware that you carry specific brands, you might want to use rel="nofollow" You might also consider just mentioning them in the text without a link at all (if your goal isn't really to funnel traffic to their site).
I hope that helps a little!
I would try getting rid of the tag cloud and see what happens. maybe it has no impact, maybe it solves the problem, at least you'll be able to eliminate it as the culprit.
The homepage of the blog. All of the blog posts were news stories about products, promotional stories, added to Adwords Ads, banner ads, and a big link in the navigation that says "Buy advertising"...all sent signals to me as a visitor that this site was about profiting from advertising.
Again, please don't be offended. I am one user, and I am only offering one user's opinion. I could be a sole instance, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
The best way I have ever found to keep track of historical rankings for keywords is SEOMoz Pro. You can get a free membership for 30 days.
If you had a good idea of what your rankings were before for specific keywords, put them into simple text list and load them into SEOBook's RankChecker Firefox extension and see where you are at now compared to where you used to be. Just beware that if you load in more than 50 words at one time to Rank Checker it will probably crash, so do them in groups if you have to.
I certainly hope this helps in some way. I understand how disconcertin huge drops in traffic can be.
Good luck!
Thumbs up and thanks to all three of you for the tips. I am going to use Followerwonk to evaluate who I should keep following and who I can stop following.
Bas made a good point about the DM. I used to write a personal thank you to everyone who followed me, until that became too overwhelming. Then I tried setting up an automated response in IFTT...which I think I disconnected a while ago, but I am going to check to see if maybe it's still active. Perhaps it is and that could maybe be hurting the "happiness level" of new followers.
Thanks guys!
Hi Bob,
Having worked with both very large and very small e-commerce sites, I'd recommend in this particular case (especially if these 300 products are going to be broken into 20 categories), that it would be best to just keep the Nav as flat as possible and yes, avoid pagination and put all the products onto one page. Scrolling is faster then the latency of moving from one page of category results to another. It simplifies everything for users (and search engines too!).
Good luck!
Dana
P.S. When I say "put all the products onto one page," lol I did not mean that literally. I meant once the products are in their respective categories, leave the category pages so that all the products in that particular category are available on that one page.
If you are starting every page title with "Photographers Miami" then I think that's probably not the best because you'll be trying to target the same keywords with every page. If, on the other hand your page titles look more like this:
Photopgrahers Miami | Cameras & Accessories
Photopgrahers Orlando | Cameras & Accessories
I think these are perfectly fine. You might notice that exchanged the word "equipment" with "cameras.: Equipment could mean anything. I assume you are selling cameras, so why not say so? Also I removed the word "Find." Save your call to action for your Meta description. That word "Find" is not helping your title at all. However, it's perfect for a meta description.
Those are my thoughts. I hope they help!
Hi ursalesguru. I'm not trying to be flippant, but man, if we all knew the answer to that question, none of us would be here.
It's a struggle. Search engine spiders like Googlebot are really stupid...no, really, they are. They can't see some of the obvious things that human beings can see when looking at a page. That's why SEOs spend so much time writing "alt" attributes, meta tags, <h>tags, transcribing videos, researching anchor text and building links and adding structured data as prescirbed by schema.org. All of this is an attempt to try to get search engines to see a page the way a human sees a page.</h>
Still, it's possible to get all that right and still lose. It requires time, patience and intelligent work. Our mutual frustration is one reason this forum is so gosh darned popular
Keep on keeping on. Learn, read, stay passionate. The rest will follow.
Dana
If you are posting, verbatim, your content might very well be attributed to Facebook instead of your site because Facebook has so much more authority than your site. If your ultimate goal is to rank for your content, then posting your content on your site and linking to it from Facebook is the way to go. If your goal is attention to your content, then perhaps posting it on your Facebook page and linking to your site is the way to go.
Is it duplicate content if posted in both places? Yes. You could put a canonical tag on your site, but if the content gets posted on a site of higher authority, chances are that site will get credit for the content, canonical tag or no canonical tag.
Hyphens vs underscores doesn't make a difference any more. If you're purely thinking of making the change for SEO purposes, I wouldn't do it. I agree that the drop in traffic you are seeing has more to do with replatforming and rewriting all of your URLs. This is pretty normal. Hope that helps!
I always like to begin my responses to questions pertaining to prediciting what Google might do with the caveat that I can't predict anything Google might do.
That being said, I think you are fine and don't need to do anything. Industry relationships like this are normal, common, widespread and accepted. For example, there was a trade publication that picked up info on hundreds of our products earlier this year and put links to them all over the place. It was an official industry magazine. It was a great thing, and we didn't even have to pay for it. Eventually, they moved on and picked up someone else, so the links gradually dropped off.
The same kind of thing can happen, say, for example, if some news about your business makes the front page of Huffington Post. Suddenly, you are going to get thousands of links because there might be a headline link to your website from every page of the Huffington Post. Then, gradually they will drop off.
Don't worry about this scenario. That's my advice. These are the kinds of relationships you want. Going around cleaning up like this is not really going to effect Google at all and it's going to cost you a lot of time you could spend building new links.
Hi Rafqual,
3 years ago I might have answered differently. Article marketing, as a whole, just doesn't work any more for SEO. However, there may be isolated instances where it makes sense to submit an article about your brand or niche product to various article receptacles. I'd be very, very wary. Research the articles to which you are considering submitting. Ask Yourself these questions:
God luck and happy holidays. I hope this helps!
Dana
Hi! Okay, first, here's the hard data you seek:
http://beingyourbrand.com/2012/10/21/social-media-case-studies-twitter-successes-to-learn-from/
And then this, Facebook custom audiences....I don't understand why more marketers aren't using these:
There are definitely more directories, in addition to Yahoo, that are still very worthwhile. I think the key is...balance. If the only links your site has are from directories, then they aren't going to be as valued. if you have a good balance of inbound links from directories of other sites, then you're okay.
Here's my "fast and dirty" list of things to check before you decide to get listed in a directory:
I recently updated an excellent list of 100 reputable Web Directories just a few days ago. You can view it here: http://www.danatanseo.com/2012/03/high-pagerank-web-directory-listings.html!
I hope this helps!
Dana
I agree with both of the excellent comments above, with one exception, I don't think adding more text to your page will help your SEO in this case. More content? Sure. But that doesn't necessarily mean more text. How about an original video? How about a video that's share-worthy? I particularly agree that you need to pursue more social shares on the page you want to rank. In our own testing we have seen significant upward moves on pages/keywords that received 100 or more social shares. Hope that helps! Good luck!
Hi runnerkik,
Wow, when I read your question all I could think was "I'm not alone!" Seriously, I am with you sister. I was hired as an in-house SEO in September 2011 for a medium-sized audio-video equipment retailer. After building an unrelated niche site for them (which has kick butt rankings and almost no technical SEO problems) I transistioned over to begin working on the main site.
At every turn, it's a technical SEO nightmare. I spent a couple of months building links and traffic started to increase, and increase. Great right? No. Our organic traffic is up 45% year over year. I had a choice. I could approach it with the attitude of "great, organic traffic is up, I'm doing a great job." On the other hand, our conversion rate is plummeting, due largely to sever technical issues that no one is willing to acknowledge as serious, or even worth fixing. Our organic traffic is up 45% but our conversion rate is down 50%. All that means to me is that all this link-building is me spinning my wheels. Why bust my butt delivering traffic if it's not converting?
I have literally gotten to the point where I am considering paying for the technical audit and remedies out of my own pocket. (Not that I'm recommending that by any means).
My suggestion, is gather as much serious data as you possibly can. Include point by point, the problem, the remedy, the cost for the remedy, how long the remedy will take, and the potential/estimated ROI from the remedy. This is exactly how I'm going to have to approach this. I don't just have to sell it to the CEO, I have to sell it to five owners of the business, all of which have their own agendas.
Money talks. You have to put the technical problems of the website into money terms and your presentation of that has to be 100% believable (i.e. supported by real data, not just emotion).
I think your situation (and mine) are an example of current and future SEO and what we as SEOs must all be able to present and improve upon at the companies we are trying to help.
I'd love to know hoe this goes. Please let me know how you proceed. I have basically just had to learn technical SEO in order to convince my company where the real problems are and how and why those are undermining any link building activities I do.
Good luck!
Dana
Hi Devinder,
Definitely 100% get rid of that Meta refresh. I am just now dealing with this exact same problem on a large site for which I do in-house SEO. Try this, put the URL http://agaalpet.com into Open Site Exporer and compare it to http://akaalpet.com/default.aspx
Thanks very much to Jenn Lopes at SEOMoz I was able to articulate to management why this was bad and worth spending (in our case) $1,000 to have it fixed.
You are fragmenting the authority of what is probably your most authoritative page by having the meta refresh. It's definitely not OK in Google's eyes because people used to use it for nefarious purposes [SPAM]. Here's a screenshot. See how it's fragmenting your links? Oh heay, one other important thing is that your most authoritative page, http://www.akaalpet.com isn't passing any of it's link juice down to your other pages. The meta refresh is causing that too. Hope that helps!
This is a great question. Yes, you should use a canonical tag. But, I would suggest that your canonical tag needs to be:
Notice the addition of the '/"
THe, I would also make sure that these URLs produce 301 status codes when going through your server:
This is very important so as not to fragment your link profile and also not to produce massive amounts (potentially) of duplicate content in Google and other search engines.
Hope that helps!
Dana
