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Personally, I'd say your best bet is to build relevant, high-quality links to that page. That'll be a stronger signal than simply focusing on on-page keyword usage, anyway.

Thanks! Was hoping to recover a month ago but if google is still having these old urls cached, then they very well think we have them still, so hopefully once the urls are gone in google's brain we should see some improvement. Thanks for clearing that up, hope this helps others in the same boat or somewhat close.

It's pretty hard, even from a creative standpoint ( of which I have experience in as an artist / maker ) After: content marketing scholarships ( only a few, were not rich ) projects on manufacturers sites proper directories that people still use sending our resource links to service oriented sites for their customers Local businesses in form of local directory The backlink grab bag grows smaller and smaller for this niche, gotta remember that our niche is so small and particular that mobile and tablet traffic isn't big at all, since our most popular customer type is a male in their 40s - 50s working either as a contractor or a small biz owner. There aren't many sites that even talk about our niche, let alone people actively interested in it, unless they need them. I've been struggling for the past 6 months on backlinks, and previous SEO companies have as well before me. It's bad enough that when I do competitor backlink audits, I see the same directories, spam comments, article spins, unrelated content like article spinning and lots of sister sites being created just to link back and forth to. Any suggestions in the creative backlink field would be honored at this point. As it is now, I send out about 10 to 15 emails daily to sites I feel would benefit from our large amount of help content I've created over the last 6 months, something our niche competitors have slacked bad on, while our customer's have called and complimented us on it, other sites could care less, even more so when I ask to link back in some " clever or even outright " fashion.

Matt Cutts on Sitewide Backlins That pretty much will tell you everything you want to know. As far as the domains being spammy, really that's going to have to be a personal decision. Just because the word directory is in the name, it isn't a spam site. Just because there is a hyphen, doesn't make it spam. Google is progressively becoming more and more powerful, and more and more capable at telling what is real, and what isn't. Visit those websites, do they look like spam to you? Do they look like a directory listing site do you? If you worked at google, and had to do a site audit, would you ding someone for linking those sites? Really for all intensive purposes wikipedia was a directory, and then it started getting powerful, and gaining traction, and then it was being abused. Anyway, I guess to answer your question, you will have to look at the websites to actually know the answer. Is the website functioning as merely a place to gather links? Then yes, it is probably spam. EDIT: Also, at first I thought this was a competitor analysis, but considering that you are mentioning disavow, I will presume this is for you. The disavow tool is VERY powerful, and I would use it very sparingly. Do what you can to organically remove the links before disavowing them. Not only that but if you still have links from these sources, you are still getting some sort of juice, so build a bridge before burning a bridge. Replace those links with new ones, from legit sources. Write some press releases, post some solid social media, reach out to bloggers etc.

Google is absolutely smart enough to understand the difference between uppercase and lowercase and ferret out user intent. I'd wager that a lot of people don't bother with capitalization when typing a query, so it would be incredibly important to get that right. I've never seen a difference. Hypothetically speaking, it could be a factor if/when capitalization changes the meaning. Off the top of my head: spring vs Spring fall vs Fall split vs Split But I would imagine that in cases like these, the way you're using it in the query is also providing important contextual clues.

Thank you both of you for the replies. I try to report as I find them, but will be even more vigilant now about it. As for Rebecca's questions: It's a algorithmic bad ranking penalty, still call it a penalty since it's penalizing us and reason I think it's penguin is the site in question has traffic patterns that best fit a site suffering from panda and penguin issues. Panda is part of the core algo and hasn't recovered from a single keyword and it's synonyms ranking better than page 5. Penguin is the only algo left that corresponds to the traffic being lost as far back as April 2012. Other reason I say it's penguin is the client's backlink profile is horrid, over 20% follow links are that keyword or synonym anchor text to crap sites, if that's not the trigger for the penguin issue then I'm getting results from doing the wrong things. Both our redesign and link cleanup have directly increased keyword ranking however every increase that happens isn't passed page 5, I've seen it one page 4 before but only for a day, nothing longer. So it seems to be able to rank higher but is kicked back almost right away faster than it increased. Really seems like it's being " adjusted " after going passed page 5.

Hello Robert, Hope you're doing well, Seems I just didn't include all the info I needed, making posts as if you all have access to the data I have in my head is a mistake What I meant is I have 500 urls, after doing a full link audit, 153 of those urls are trashy directory or comment spam backlinks with very spammy site templates, also they often times not had anchor text with main keywords of ours. Now yes, 153 out of 500 urls isn't that bad, however the 153 urls are more than 3 years old, and our total backlinks has grown from 160 ( a year ago ) to 500 ( today ) meaning at one point in time, we did have a majority of backlinks that were from trashy directories and comment spam, in fact last year ( 160 - 153 left us with 7 possibly ok backlinks )  was the most recent, so it's a very high possibility these urls were the reason we got hit by penguin ( have data that suggest this as well ). It's easy to get fixated on one SEO keypoint or another, but when you do, just remember to follow the data trail and make sure to see the other SEO footprints as well during that search, you can find a good bit. Even answering questions from others here helps me find further keypoints to highlight and go through.

There are plenty of very large sites doing this--it's natural for them to link to the sites that they own. It all really comes down to the sites' link profiles, and if their link profile is diversified enough. If those links are the only links (or a large portion of) the links that they have, there might be an issue. But if the parent site is trusted enough, has a high enough Domain Authority, then most likely the site won't be penalized for the parent site linking to them.

I know I'm a little late to the game but one suggestion I would recommend reading your post is to take the synonym out of your page title on your home page. For example, I work with a lot of attorneys and if I create separate pages for "lawyer" and "attorney", I never get the respective targeted traffic ... google just ranks the more optimized, higher PA page for both terms.

And we worked it out! In case anyone else has a similar question: When you pair a keyword to a page in the Page Grader tool—such as the page /laptop-bag/leather-shoulder/ paired with the keyword "leather shoulder laptop bag"—the tool will scan the page for exact instances of the phrase. So, even though the words "laptop," "bag," "leather," and "shoulder" are in the URL, the tool doesn't recognize the phrase "leather shoulder laptop bag," and so suggests adding it to the URL. If the URL is /laptop-bags/leather-shoulder-laptop-bags/, though, the tool _does _see the exact term, so it bumps up the score and removes the suggestion. In this case, though, Deacyde is totally right—/laptop-bags/leather-shoulder-laptop-bags/ is, well, kind of terrible. The thing to keep in mind is that a score of 100 in the tool means that the keyword for which it's evaluating the page is in _absolutely every _keyword optimization position. That doesn't always make sense, especially for a longer-tail term like "leather shoulder laptop bag." So in this instance, 95 is better than 99.

The url without a slash seems to be the default now, while url with a slash redirects to one without, only for homepage. all other subpages have slashes as preferred and no matter what result in trailing slash, which is a major thing I wanted. Thank you, am looking into things further via a Bigcommerce post on their forums, however I'm not holding my breath as some responses can take a good bit, since there is a ocean of users seeking responses as well.

Sounds like you've got a solid plan! Good luck, and make sure to let your boss and coworkers know that you will almost definitely see a temporary decrease in organic traffic through this process. It doesn't mean that you've ruined it, just that Google needs to adjust. Good luck!

Yes I have run a full report, but thank you very much for the resource, I'm sure others will find it very helpful. From the report I've seen that our backlink profile seems to be our biggest issue of ranking, especially since we lost one of our biggest. And for a niche industry eCommerce site, it's very difficult to find backlink opportunities. Hoping that after this site redesign we will of increased out DA and PA some, but won't see that change for a few more months at best. Again thank you for the resource and response everyone!

Certainly and thanks! They chose Bigcommerce so they wouldn't need to worry about security and cart features along with updates that may be needed in the future and not implemented quick enough that it causes a site issue. It's not a huge company so time is better spent on customer quotes since that seems to be what generates leads along side providing the proper information to answer all issues that a user has as redundantly as possible. ( even then it's hit or miss it seems ) They have used magento, opencart, and I believe a few others but have been happiest with BG. But from a SEO and backend developer standpoint, it's kinda a giant waste of time, since logs out after weird idle times, has a limited backend use mainly css and html, minor room for js use without overloading pagespeed since bg uses a good bit of js themselves. And no ability to use custom php anywhere...( pouts ) But looking at it for what they need, it's pretty much the whole package, They didn't want to worry about servers or the security, updating and basically everything a web admin would be handling anyways.

Thank you!

I'd make the breadcrumbs Home > Running Shoes > Purple Pumas and the title "Purple Puma Running Shoes". You have to think about what the customer needs when they land there. What if they have a screen reader? How do customers look at breadcrumbs? They're going to be looking to the title for information about what the product is when they come in from a search. Most of the time, brand names are only going to get you so far in customer's recognizing what something means with that brand.

Thanks for that important answer. Honestly, without a face-to-face interaction, this really takes this out of the realm of local optimization to be a purely organic context. If the products are the same for customers in each of the 3 cities in 5 states, are you confident that you have the strength on your team to find 15 really awesome topics for these pages that will make them not just filler but something amazing for your customers? This might depend on your product, if its application in one city would be somehow quite different from its application in another city ... I can't think of a ready example. Without knowing what the product is, it's hard to evaluate whether the approach you're considering has a good-sense foundation or could end up being a waste of your resources. It may be that you'd be better off sticking with PPC so that you're getting in front of your customers in various cities, as the true local component seems like it may be missing from this scenario. Hard to say without really knowing a lot about your business, the talent on your team and your customers' needs. Hope that makes sense.

No problem! And yes, nowadays SEO is a lot about user experience.

Hello Deacyde, As you've probably guessed, this is a difficult question to answer without actually seeing the site and the content in question. However - generally speaking - it is best to consolidate your efforts on fewer pages. Related to that, even though there aren't any other "synonyms" that produce much traffic, making sure you are writing about the topic in a natural way, using related words, synonyms, co-occurrence words... should help. Links are often the big factor in cases like this, all other things being equal. I assume these pages have content that would entice people to link to them?

Can you please make a concrete example of a key-word for that you do not rank nicely. Please also specify the thing which in your opinion need to appear nicely inside the serch and the object for the blog of nextgenapk .