There is a way you can report the offending sites to Google if you can prove your content was created first.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en

If you are using a CMS, check the publish dates of the articles.

Like it has already been stated, do a search for some of the content by doing a search in Google for a section of content, surrounded by quotation marks. This tells Google to search for something exactly as it is entered, and return exact, not relevant results. If you see exact phrases that are duplicated word for word, you could contact either the site owner, or look up who hosts the site in Whois, and contact the hosting provider.

Once its all fixed, you should see start seeing changes in about a month or so. There really isnt any specific timeline, and all you can do is get the errors fixed, and resubmit the sitemap and use the "fetch as google" option in Google WMT. Sometime changes can happen in a week, all depends what your crawl frequency is set to. In your sitemap, do you have it set to daily, weekly, or monthly?

"What is the most common problem to be solved when optimizing web sites?"

Poorly optimized content and layout.

We often run across pages that have zero header tags, content without keywords, bad URL structures that do not include keywords, etc.

Are you wanting to know for your own website, or for a client? If it is one your personal site, why not post a link so we can see if there is any existing on page issues? I'm assuming you are asking due to having difficulty ranking?

Personally, I think true directory or public information outlets are the best.

I would look at the service or product you provide, and try to understand where people would go to look for that item. If it is a service, where do people go to find out information about that service? Are there any leading authorities that you could become a member of, or post content to?

If it is a product, how do people look for it? Where do people go to look for it? Do people review it? Is your focus local or national?

When looking for opportunities, you have to be creative. I understand you are looking to increase your ranking, but you also want to have links that people will USE, not just to sit on some directory in a hope of being a ranking factor. If you are deadset on getting just links, use the MOZ backlink analyzer to see who your competitors have linking back to them.

Wow, lots of info here lol. Lets begin with the basics.

It sounds like you have had a lot of domain changes, edits, moves etc. Does Google know that your site is the "final and latest" version? Have you resubmitted the site in every available fashion (sitemap, 301 redirects, URL fetching) to Google?

Also, since you have changed to domain, any of your other authority may have been lost, especially since you state that "with all associated urls (.uk, .net, etc...) and subdomains shutdown. I've allowed all the old spammy pages (thousands of them to 404)." Some of the other sites may have had weight or authority, even if they were a bit spammy. I doubt they were being as harmful as you think, or you would have gotten a warning / penalty.

Now you are in the position of essentially starting over fresh, with little to no links, or mentions. Even if you get good "seo scores" your competitors have years of links and mentions under their belt, not to mention domain stability. Here is a starting point:

1. See if any of the old domains had domain authority or pagerank. If yes, 301 redirect to your new site.
2. Look for any pages that are indexed highly for the old domains, and 301 to the appropriate places on the new site.
3. Look at any and all social profiles connected to any of the old domains. Make sure to update to include the new URL
4. Same with directories and citations. Makes sure all display the new URL. Also look for new citations and backlink opportunities. You need to create a push of new trusted (not spammy) link to send a signal the site and URL exist.

**Also wanted to add that sometimes you can see an initial spike in rankings after launching a new site. Generally, the real results will come at arount the 30-45 day mark, once things have had time to settle, and Google has had time to fully recrawl your site.

There are two ways to fix this.

First is to redirect all the pages to the proper home page, using a 301. Duplicate pages are bad for seo. Google likes to see one set of content, for each URL. See the webmaster tools article on duplicate content here.

Second is to go into webmaster tools, and set the true URL for this page, using the "URL parameters" function. This way, you can set the proper version of the page, so Google knows what to index. Be very careful when doing this, as you can mess up the way Google sees your site. There is a video on the link, I would watch it, and do a bit of reading first.

I love these types of questions

It always gives me a chance to support one of my favorite tools, SEO-browser. This tool allows you to see what a search sees when they come to your site. What you see is not always accurate. Here is a quick crawl of your page in question:

http://seo-browser.com/index.php?address=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.seniorplanning.org%2Fassisted-living-phoenix-arizona%2F&button0.x=54&button0.y=9&button0=Simple

You can see that your H1 shows up high in the content, and that the image slider is not pushing your site further down other than visually. I don't think that the "above the fold" is as important as other areas of the algo. I have seen hundreds of sites do amazingly well with very large or fullscreen image sliders, and H1's after the scroll. As long as you are covering your main keywords in your content, H tags, meta and page titles effectively, I think you will be fine.

If you are going to do some edits on your site, bookmark that tool. It helps to see when sidebar headers or template headers are rendering out as h1, h2, or h3's.

Its cool, we're still bros lol. I understand what you mean, I was just giving him an example of what to look for, or how to optimize for his search audience. Honestly the best way would be to run an Adwords campaign for a month, and look at the Dimentions>search terms to see how people are searching for his products. Could also use the keyword planner, but I have found that to be...lacking in some areas.

I agree in that one of the most important areas to look into would be the backlink profile, as it seems that he is losing authority to his competition.

We have been seeing some strange things happen in Google local after the most recent update. We used to show up in the maps all the time and have made no major edits or changes to the profile.

Now when we search for our services, we show up high in the organic results, and not at all in maps (local listings). We have our profile setup as a service area since we do meet with people and provide services at their location, but also have checked the option that we also serve people at our address.

I am wondering if the recent update favors actual storefronts when people are searching for services. Any ideas? Technically all the actual work is provided at our location, and the service we provide at the service area locations is based upon consultations. If we switched it to an actual storefront listing could that possibly help? Our profile is fairly strong, and has reviews, long history of posts, etc.

What gives Google?

I understand that the client may not want that, but it may need to be explained that redirects are probably a good idea.

I have a few questions:
1. Do the old domains have links pointing at them, or any type of domain authority, domain age, etc? Might be worth it to park the domains on top of your new one, and do a redirect so Google doesn't index them both.

2. Why does the client not want the old domains pointed to the new one? If you still own the old domain, you can install the 410 code on the page, and request that it gets removed from Google in webmaster tools.

A brief update on what a 410 is:
"The Web server (running the Web site) thinks that the URL requested by the client (e.g. your Web browser or our CheckUpDown robot) is no longer available from that system. This is not a 'never heard of it' response, but a 'does not live here any more' response."

"The 410 error is primarily intended to assist the task of Web maintenance by notifying the client system that the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the Web server wants remote links to the URL to be removed. Such an event is common for URLs which are effectively dead i.e. were deliberately time-limited or simply orphaned. The Web server has complete discretion as to how long it provides the 410 error before switching to another error such as 404. "

We had to use this on pages that kept showing up for a local contractor. Once they were submitted to Google, we saw them removed within a week.

"When to use a 410 gone – error code?

If you intend to remove a page or file from your website and you very deliberately want visitors and search engines to know that it is really gone, you should use the 410 gone – error code. If you do not, and rather just delete the page or file, the visitors to your site will get a 404 – not found error which means that the URL you requested has nothing there. This should really ONLY be used if you are sure your intention is to tell the world this file is no longer here and to tell the search engines to take it out of their index."

You can read more here: 410 explained

I always preach to use your heading tags like you would when writing an article in Microsoft Word, and use 1 H1 tag per page.

Main Subject Line that Includes Keyword or Mission

Words that explain the information you are trying to cover, and your "mission statement". Include higher amounts of keywords within first paragraph while not stuffing. Should also contain some sort of conversion statement or button

Secondary Information or Second Viewpoint

Words that include keywords and viewpoint.

Last Heading Includes Summary or Closing Arguments

Include high points of what has been covered

CMS sites often render out header tags like mad, causing you to have multiple H1 tags on a page. To check to see if yours is doing this, use SEO Browser. IMO, you can have more than one H2, as you may have multiple high level topics to cover on one page. Keep in mind, you can always use CSS to make

text render as a heading tag, so your page doesn't look goofy. For example:

If your h1 css looks like:
.h1 {
font-size: 28px;
line-height: 29px;
font-weight: bold;
}

then set up a div class:

.largeptext {
font-size: 28px;
line-height: 29px;
font-weight: bold;
}

and they will look the same, but not render an additional h1 tag per page. Use this for your sidebar and page styling areas that also render h tags.

Google has been messing up a lot lately.

First, the new Google Business manager is HORRIBLE. (sorry, had to get that out of the way first). Google Plus and Local used to be so easy to manage and use, but now you have to go through more page to do the same things. Just my personal opinion.

We have also been noticing reviews disappearing from local listings, and when we call them and ask what's up, they (Google) say it is a technical issue with Google Business and that the reviews "may" return once the bug is worked out. We have a lawyer-client that has worked extremely hard to get over 90(!) legitimate 5-star reviews, only to see them cut that back down to 60. Then, after we called and complained, 3 days later they were back.

I'm not sure. It could be that on the other domain the brand name or some similarity existed, and that is what Google is using to tie them together.

Along with using the 410, make sure to place the proper robots data on the page, meaning use "no-archive" so the search engines always keep display the most recent result.

• NOINDEX tag tells Google not to index a specific page
• NOFOLLOW tag tells Google not to follow the links on a specific page
• NOARCHIVE tag tells Google not to store a cached copy of your page
• NOSNIPPET tag tells Google not to show a snippet (description) under your Google listing, it will also not show a cached link in the search results

:insert animated gif from sandlot movie FOR-evv-err:

Seriously, it can take a while for the pages to get removed. One week is not going to see the bot recrawl all those pages, most likely 1-2 months. I would resubmit the entire site using fetch as google, and resubmit all linking URLs. Go through your top level menus and resubmit them as well.

I agree with taking a unique stance, and offering content that other sites aren't. Another thing that may be useful to you is video reviews of products, and press releases. These can allow your content to get picked up by a lot of sources, for wider distribution. Make sure you share things that are actually newsworthy, and don't create a release just for the sake of doing it.

The video review option will provide a good fit for your site, as a large amount of consumers search for reviews of apps and Android devices before they buy. Having rich content and videos will increase on site time, and if it's helpful, can influence uses to do your sharing and marketing for you.

Best of luck with your new site!

A few questions:

How many pages back in a site search do you see these? Meaning if you do a site:www.yourdomain.com how many pages back do you see these appear? If it's like page 10 or more, I doubt a user would ever see the URL's at all.

Second, I am curious as to why you have an image sitemap, and went to that length to include images in your submissions, but didn't name the images in an SEO-friendly format? For example:

http://www.elefant-tours.com//gallery/keys-hotel/07_img_0949triesx.jpg

...is a young woman sitting at a table, getting served a drink. I would think that the image could be named "hotel food dining" or something of that nature. Just an idea, probably not a huge deal, but every bit counts. You have no idea what a user might type in to get to a site. Someone might skip web results altogether, and go straight to Google images to find what they are looking for, especially in the hotel industry. They will be looking for what appears to be the most relaxing, and luxurious experience.

You could always disable the plugin, and make one big image sitemap. The sitemap URL you listed shows the image son that particular page. In a "all-in-one" image sitemap, you would list out the images and image location (URL) individually. Might work out better for you, as Google would get the big picture (pun intended) all at once.

Hope this helps!

Agreed. if you do not use the proper formatting when adding the text, you could wind up with strange characters showing up when Google/Search engines index those descriptions. We have used them many times in the past, without any issues.

Personally, I'd leave them in place. I don't think it does any harm to have the bread crumbs in place. Now if it was creating additional URL's I would say you may have an issue but I don't think you have anything to worry about. If anything it could provide a benefit

If you use cpanel for hosting, it is super easy.

http://docs.cpanel.net/twiki/bin/view/AllDocumentation/CpanelDocs/ReDirects

If not, the same basic principle applies. If you want to send me the new url where you want it to go to, I can code you a redirect function that will work.

With having such a limited amount of characters that Google will show in your title, I don't think it makes sense to have the brand name in each one of the page titles (unless the brand name is a large factor in searches, and you are trying to ensure your site gets credit for being the official representation of that brand). Instead, utilize that space for adding additional or secondary keywords phrases that can help bring in additional traffic.

"A specific article would be "How to paint using oil painting | Maleribasen.dk"

This type of format can work well if you are trying to optimize for one major keyword phrase, and your whole focus (on-page and off) is around that phrase.