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Yes its coming because for Exact Domain and there are no more searches for this keyword.

What about links that aren't going to the home page but to other pages on my old site  Can those also be redirected after the old site is taken down? The hostgator plan that I have puts the first site as the main domain and subsequent sites that I create and/ or host with them are subdomains. I read somewhere that for seo purposes it makes no difference. Paul

Lots of questions here. I wouldn't assume that your #1 position is secure. So rather than ask why, I would be working to shore up its position by establishing more quality signals, such as earning some links from high-authority sites and setting up Google authorship on the site.

Hi Paul, You ask interesting questions, the answers of which are all subjective really. Yes, a wide variety of anchor text is a good thing. As your site gains history, it will also naturally gain a link profile. Every site's link profile is a little different. Some sites, like "Apple" for instance, probably have much heaviier percentage of branded anchor text than your local family-owned computer store. If you are chugging along and all of a sudden something drastically changes your link profile, this might or might not cause problems with rankings in the SERPs. Some wild fluctuations, even in smaller businesses, can be quite normal, particularly if there was a big news event surrounding their business (perhaps they were acquired by a much larger company) or something of that sort. You are correct in how you are defining briand names (IMHO). Yes, it absolutely could end up being your name. In fact, I encourage everyone who works and writes online to consider themselves, personally, a "brand" in addition to whatever other businesses they are involved with. This is one thing that makes Google+ so perplexing to me because it totally confuses personal and professional brands (hopefully they'll sort that out soon). Yes, you absolutely could turn your name into a brand name. It doesn't even take putting it on your site anywhere. I an an in-house SEO for several websites, and one of them, one I built, has "Dana Tan" as it's next most often used anchor text next to its brand "Celebrate Communion." The site is young and tiny, so I assume this will change over time. This came about as a results of my blog commenting where I actually sign with my real name instead of trying to stuff in keywords and be all spammy That being said, when I'm analyzing reports, I do not consider "Dana Tan" to be a "branded search term" for the site "Celebrate Communion." I do however consider it a branded search term for my SEO blog. All that being said, yes, it's a very good thing to have branded search. That traffic converts at a higher rate and a much lower cost per conversion (if you are using any paid campaigns) than other traffic because they are predisposed to you. In most cases, branded terms will be the majority of your anchor text, with, hopefully, a wide range of other terms filling in the rest. Hope that helps, and I apologize for the spacing issues in my response. My Mac doesn't like to double space in SEOMoz. Dana

Does anyone have any ideas? You can do the most important research yourself. You lost traffic. So ask yourself.... What traffic sources are lower now?  What rankings are lower? What specific information can you get yourself from analytics and watching your rankings? We can only guess because we have no information about the history of your site nor do we have access to your data.

Backlinks are the foundation of the original algorithm.  Check out the first paragraph in "Design Goals" section 1.3.1 in Brin's and Page's original paper on google: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html  The last couple of lines point to how backlinks are what guide's google to figure out relevance to a significant degree. However, as people have both witnessed and experienced, google's punishing specific types of links like blog networks right now and also probably taking into consideration notions like what Geoff Kenyon wrote back at the end of January before a lot of the sh*t hit the fan: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/anchor-text-distribution-avoiding-over-optimization I think the key is to keep the ratio more heavily weighted towards the brand and the urls of the original website and definitely not having too much of one specific anchor text.  However, some companies still seem to be "under google's radar" like this one I noticed recently: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.autson.com.  I guess if you "make it appear natural", you can still make it under their radar.  At the same time, I would HIGHLY encourage a larger proportion being more naturally built links despite the pain and time it takes. Google's going to constantly disrupt the business though...how else can they keep their stock price going up by pumping it with all the adwords spends?  

Actually my question (should have made it clearer) is why is my site ranking so much better in the past few months even though all the important analytics numbers have simultaneously been changing for the worse? It would appear that the various pundies were wrong about how Panda really works. Paul

I looked at the links Interestingly someone said that Wordpress sites have been hit particularlyhard. I know that wordpress sites do tend to have problems with duplicate content due to the categories and tags, etc., so that might have something to do with it. Also someone else said that even if your site is not hurt if the sites linking to you are, that this would hurt your traffic. This might be my situation as my decline in traffic is more moderate than what others have reported whose own sites were bitten by Panda. Does anyone else have any ideas?

Hi Paul, Great answers from Ryan and EGOL. The other thing to keep in mind is that traffic doesn't automatically equal business. While it may seem attractive to be "free from Google" and other search engines, there is an important consideration that must not be forgotten. If the Lion's share of your traffic is perhaps from RSS subscribers or referrals from more general sites, how many of those visits are actually delivering you people who need a lawyer? When I need a lawyer for myself or a family member (when my need is immediate and I am ready to contact the one that seems best able to help me), what am I going to do? Will I: Look for a blog to subscribe to? Surf around and read other websites looking for links to lawyers that might help me? Go to my favorite search engine and search on a term that will take me straight to a list of local law firms in that practice area? While diversity of traffic sources is important, the reality is that if they were not the most useful means of finding what you want on the web, search engines would not still hold the place they do. I have a number of clients who are lawyers and would agree that the approach Ryan has described for you is the best way to go. In addition to that I would say that the key in developing content for them has always been remembering the mindset of the client. A person who needs a lawyer is a person who needs help. The practice area and seriousness of the situation will dictate what type of help. Hope that helps, Sha

Great question and Dan already provided a superb answer I would just like to add my 2 cents. It is valid to assume that posting topical content can gain you links but the truth of the matter is we can't know for certain what will float . We've created content that we thought was top notch only to see it wither and die by the wayside and some times we'd just throw something together and that gets picked up and generates decent links . So build links with the intent to generate some visibility,traction and traffic and if the content is good organic links should naturally follow . Content and links in this game are kinda like Batman and Robin , pretty good on their own but awesome together. Definitely link to relevant content from your blog posts . Relevant links pass juice be they external or internal . As far as blog posts being cut and dry , write more and try different slants, market with panache . Lawyers get paid by the minute to offer their thoughts and your readers should be lucky to be served this free. Hope this helps ..

There are two quick methods I use to check if a site's ranking has been devalued or penalised; Compare the Page rank of the site in question with MozRank. If MozRank is 1.5+ points different, then the site may have been penalised by google and lost some of it's PR. Pick a sentence from the site of 5-6 words and search for this sentence in google enclosed in quotes. If you find the the site is ranking on the first page, then it probably hasn't been penalised or devalued heavily. I also use gut instinct for a lot of links and usually that's good measure - If a site look spammy, then it probably will to google. As for nolo.com, it looks like a pretty decent site to me, so I would be surprised if it's links have been devalued.

Each website page should ideally be optimized for one keyword or phrase. You can add additional phrases, but each additional dilutes your efforts. If you have a page which has a clear focus (i.e. "diabetes") then the page's URL, title, header should all include that term. When that term is used elsewhere on your site, it is perfectly acceptable and preferable imo to use anchor text linking to the main page which discusses this topic. You asked about studies and I don't have one, but I do have an example: wikipedia. Most every SEO and website owner looks to wikipedia with envy as they are the #7 ranked site in terms of traffic, and overall the highest ranked site for any random topic. They use a consistent text match for internal links. The wiki site does have a diabetes page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetes_mellitus Notice any and every time the term "diabetes melitus" is used throughout the wiki site, the exact same phrase match is used. Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin

I would also recommend you to be active in social media like Facebook and Twitter. The social activity is positive in many ways, 1. Creates a buzz around your business, gives Google positive signals about popularity. 2. You will spread your information to friends, customers and others in your industry, it will help you build the brand.

You are correct. The more links you get from a website, the less important future links become. However, at least the first 3, or 4 links from that site will be worth a lot of links juice. If I were you, I would try to write up to 5 unique articles per site, all with unique anchor text (watch this weeks white board friday video) Point most of the links to your home page, and a couple of them toward important internal pages. I would say that mixing up the landing pages will help a little, but make sure your links go to related and relevant pages. Remember, inbound marketing is all about getting high quality traffic., If your articles are accomplishing that goal, go for it, even if the link value isn't high.

Paul, OSE is no-where near as complex as Google's algorithms and can only rank links in a relatively simplistic manner. Although it's a very good tool for getting an idea of what's going on, there are so many other contributing factors that Google will use that just can't be included in OSE. For example, the directory links may be ranked highly in OSE because it's algorithm looks at all the links going into the directory and determines that it's probably quite a good source. Google however may have penalised the same directory (something OSE can't determine) and so any links from that directory may in-fact be worthless. When using OSE, I tend to use my gut instinct as well as the stats to tell whether a link is worth anything or not. If a link looks particularly spammy then it probably looks the same in Google's eyes. Also - it's worth remembering that OSE's index is much smaller than Google's, therefore although most of the decent links will be in there you may not be able to see some awesome links that your competitor has, simply because they're not in the OSE index yet.

Google will never look down on whatever.com as your anchor text. Nor will they ever have a problem with your page title being used as the anchor text. The two bigger items to be concerned about here are: 1: where are you placing this anchor text. In other words are you putting this link on a trusted domain with high page authority? Or are you placing links on problem sites. 2: what keyword(s) are you focusing on for that specific page - i.e. if you are trying to rank highly for "two month old widgets" but your page title is "six month old widgets from whatever.com" then it doesn't do much good to use your page title as anchor text.

They both have massive numbers of backlinks and domains linking in. What do you think? Looking at the NY site, it has a total of 2300 links from 46 domains. That is not a lot at all. One site wide footer link can offer 10k+ links from a single site. The focus should be on the number of linking domains which is 46 in this case. When I review the links for this site in OSE, they seem quite natural. There are a couple legal directories but nothing unexpected. The anchor text varies nicely and the link profile is what I would expect to find. For OSE I usually apply the following filters: followed+301, only external, on this root domain, group by domain. Take a look for yourself and I think you will agree there doesn't seem to be anything unusual. This NY site is not setting up "mirror" sites, but landing pages. Mirror sites are basically identical sites set up under different domains. Landing pages are pages within a site designed to welcome visitors who locate your site through specific search terms or marketing ads. If this was my SEO client, I would advise them to increase the amount of unique content on their landing pages. I am not comfortable at all with these pages in their current form. With that said, Google apparently is comfortable with them and is indexing these pages. The site's DA is 31, and PA around 30 for these pages. These sites are very easily beatable with proper SEO work. If I were in your position I would be very pleased to compete with these sites. No matter what site you build, you are going to have competition in SERPs. What results are you concerned about? I presume you are searching for the exact phrases in their domain name? These types of sites usually do well in domain name match searches, but otherwise they don't fare well. If you offer a basic site with good content and solid SEO, you will solidly beat these types of sites every day.