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If you're using the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin (which is the best for SEO, in my opinion), and you go under Permalinks within the SEO menu, the first item on the list is the option to "Strip the category base (usually /category/) from the category URL."

If you do this, I would of course first compile a list of your current category URLs and all the URLs that live under them, and drop them into whatever you use for 301 redirects (I use a plugin called Redirection, which is great) and redirect everything on that list to the version of that URL without the /category/.

You should be very happy that you're taking up more real estate in the SERP for a given keyword. They are of course "competing" - in the sense that every page in Google's index is being weighed to determine which is the best result for that query - but they aren't directly hindering each other.

The last thing you should do is remove a well-ranking page. If you would much prefer one page to rank higher than the other, then I would find ways to pass a little relevance from page B to page A, such is with an internal link or additional optimization. Otherwise, remember that total clicks to 2 pages ranking lower on the page may very well be equal to or even exceed clicks to a single page that ranks higher.

To start with, I'll ask are you looking at google.com or google.co.uk? At first, I just assumed it was google.com, which shows me local results for Worcester, Massachusetts. However, I then saw that your site is hosted in the UK, and I needed to go over to google.co.uk to generate local results for Worcester, England.

Since others have commented on the off-page elements, I'll point out a few things I noticed related to on-page optimization:

1.) The primary keyword you mentioned of course makes your domain an exact match domain, and the influence that those have in search rankings has of course fluctuated quite a bit over time (see http://mozcast.com/metrics, click on "EMD Influence") but on the whole, has diminished and doesn't nearly serve the advantage it used to.

2.) Looking at the pages currently ranking for [driving lessons worcester], they all appear to be very locally relevant companies based in Worcester (applies both to Massachusetts and England). The first page even has map results. Your site doesn't appear to have any locally relevant information, or a local address, phone number, etc. It appears that Google made up it's mind that local businesses should get the upper hand on this query. If you are in fact based in Worcester, I would highly recommend adding your name, address and phone number to the footer and a contact page, adding local schema markup, gathering locally relevant links, etc.

3.) Only your homepage seems to be optimized and it is only for that one keyword. The rest of the pages appear to pull in "Driving Lessons Worcester" as a default ending to the title tag, which just results in every page having that keyword make up the majority of the title tags. If you flip through the site search results for your site, you can quickly see why Google might devalue your site for that keyword. I would go through and optimize other pages of your site for longtail variations and other keywords, and get rid of that default title tag ending. In short, Google probably sees your entire site as trying wayyy to hard to rank for a single keyword, which may have raised a flag.

I hope that helps!

Thanks everyone, you've helped solidify my position on this. Link building is extremely difficult and there are fewer and fewer "safe" activities, and unfortunately we don't have an active blog on this particular domain, but ideally I would rather they wrote 1 high quality article for our own site than 4 low quality articles for syndication.

Chris - I definitely agree that even if these articles don't hurt us in the short-run, they won't help us much in the long run, so I think I'll push back and get them to come up with some more ideas.

It is the average monthly exact match search volume. If you're using the tool, hover over the question mark beside "Avg. monthly searches" in the table and you'll see the full description of the data:

The average number of times people have searched for this exact keyword based on the targeting settings that you've selected.

About the number: We calculate the 12-month average of the number of searches for this exact keyword based on the location and Search Network targeting settings that you've selected (not including your language setting).

How to use it: See how popular this keyword is. This information can give you an idea if adding the keyword to your campaign will help you reach your advertising goals.

Note: If we don't have enough data, you'll see a dash (-). Average monthly searches don't take into account the keyword match types you've selected. To see the traffic for different match types, look at your click and cost estimates on the review page.

Hello,

We have an SEO agency pushing to implement article syndication as a method of link building. They claim to only target industry-relevant, high authority sources. I am very skeptical of this tactic but they are a fairly reputable agency and claim this is safe and works for their other clients.

They sent a broadly written (but not trash) article, as well as a short list of places they would syndicate the article on, such as issuu.com and scribd.com. These are high authority sites and I don't believe I've heard of any algo updates targeting them.

Regarding linking, they said they usually put them in article descriptions and company bylines, using branded exact and partial matches; so the anchor text contains exact or partial keywords but also contains our brand name. Lately, I have been under the impression that the only "safe" links that have been manually built, such as these, should be either branded or simply your site's URL.

Does anyone still use article syndication as a form of link building with success? Do you see any red flags here?

Thanks!

You should be very happy that you're taking up more real estate in the SERP for a given keyword. They are of course "competing" - in the sense that every page in Google's index is being weighed to determine which is the best result for that query - but they aren't directly hindering each other.

The last thing you should do is remove a well-ranking page. If you would much prefer one page to rank higher than the other, then I would find ways to pass a little relevance from page B to page A, such is with an internal link or additional optimization. Otherwise, remember that total clicks to 2 pages ranking lower on the page may very well be equal to or even exceed clicks to a single page that ranks higher.

If you're using the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin (which is the best for SEO, in my opinion), and you go under Permalinks within the SEO menu, the first item on the list is the option to "Strip the category base (usually /category/) from the category URL."

If you do this, I would of course first compile a list of your current category URLs and all the URLs that live under them, and drop them into whatever you use for 301 redirects (I use a plugin called Redirection, which is great) and redirect everything on that list to the version of that URL without the /category/.

To start with, I'll ask are you looking at google.com or google.co.uk? At first, I just assumed it was google.com, which shows me local results for Worcester, Massachusetts. However, I then saw that your site is hosted in the UK, and I needed to go over to google.co.uk to generate local results for Worcester, England.

Since others have commented on the off-page elements, I'll point out a few things I noticed related to on-page optimization:

1.) The primary keyword you mentioned of course makes your domain an exact match domain, and the influence that those have in search rankings has of course fluctuated quite a bit over time (see http://mozcast.com/metrics, click on "EMD Influence") but on the whole, has diminished and doesn't nearly serve the advantage it used to.

2.) Looking at the pages currently ranking for [driving lessons worcester], they all appear to be very locally relevant companies based in Worcester (applies both to Massachusetts and England). The first page even has map results. Your site doesn't appear to have any locally relevant information, or a local address, phone number, etc. It appears that Google made up it's mind that local businesses should get the upper hand on this query. If you are in fact based in Worcester, I would highly recommend adding your name, address and phone number to the footer and a contact page, adding local schema markup, gathering locally relevant links, etc.

3.) Only your homepage seems to be optimized and it is only for that one keyword. The rest of the pages appear to pull in "Driving Lessons Worcester" as a default ending to the title tag, which just results in every page having that keyword make up the majority of the title tags. If you flip through the site search results for your site, you can quickly see why Google might devalue your site for that keyword. I would go through and optimize other pages of your site for longtail variations and other keywords, and get rid of that default title tag ending. In short, Google probably sees your entire site as trying wayyy to hard to rank for a single keyword, which may have raised a flag.

I hope that helps!

It is the average monthly exact match search volume. If you're using the tool, hover over the question mark beside "Avg. monthly searches" in the table and you'll see the full description of the data:

The average number of times people have searched for this exact keyword based on the targeting settings that you've selected.

About the number: We calculate the 12-month average of the number of searches for this exact keyword based on the location and Search Network targeting settings that you've selected (not including your language setting).

How to use it: See how popular this keyword is. This information can give you an idea if adding the keyword to your campaign will help you reach your advertising goals.

Note: If we don't have enough data, you'll see a dash (-). Average monthly searches don't take into account the keyword match types you've selected. To see the traffic for different match types, look at your click and cost estimates on the review page.