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There's something strange going on there. If I try and crawl any of your pages with Screaming Frog, all I get is one page with a length of 44 and with the H1 set to "Ooops!".

Have you tried the "fetch as googlebot" from Webmaster tools? It's under the Crawl menu. It might help show you what google is seeing.

Just to add to Moosa's reply, as well as monitoring your links for bad/spammy links one of the best ways to protect yourself is to promote your own website in an authentic/natural way and earn great editorially given from relevant, authoritative sites in your market/niche.

Another option would be to set-up a redirect based on the referrer and point any traffic from their site to a specific page stating that there is no commercial relationship between the two businesses. Probably not worth the effort. I'd just document it and get on building my own business.

Can't  see this being a good idea any more. We're not in an "every link helps" world any more and I can't see what's in it for the customer when you just ask them to give you a link.

I think you'd be better off using the space to either try and build the relationship with the customer and/or up sell other products or services.

That said, apart from quickly checking the details of the order confirmation I'm not sure how much attention people pay to the "boiler plate" content.

The overall objective of any SEO is to deliver relevant high quality traffic. Referral traffic can be better quality traffic that much of the search traffic you get.

From which page are they going to give you think link from? What is the best page for visitors from the brand's website to arrive on? What are they going to expect to see when they follow the link?

If they are looking to buy the brands products, then you're better off getting a link to the page on which you sell those products (especially if the link is something along the lines of "you can buy from these sellers..."

How well does your brand page differentiate your service and communicate your USP. Why should people looking to buy this brands products buy from you rather than your competition.

My best guess would be to see if you can get the link to your brand page.

(Besides, you'd brand page has a link to your home page right?)

So much depends on how you've implemented tags on your site and who your audience is.

It can be tempting to implement tags to try and make up for a broken categorisation and it's tempting to add tags to a page because they mention a topic rather than because it's actually relevant to that tag.

It worth taking a look at your analytics to see if (and how) your visitors are using your tag pages. I've see many sites where visitors just don't use the tags (there too many, they're meaning less, or even they are not obviously links!) and a lot of this depends on just how many tags your using, how meaningful these tags are to people and the relevance and quality of the articles you have associated with each tag.

Have you got internal search set up on your site and are you capturing the search data in your analytics? This can provide some great insights in what people are struggling to find on your site and what they expect to find. It can also highlight areas where your IA isn't working.

(As James mentioned) If your tag pages are indexed, and getting inbound search traffic then segment your non-paid search traffic and look at the bounce rate and other engagement metrics. How valuable is this traffic to you, and how relevant are they finding your tag pages as the answer to their query?

Absolutely agree with you Grumpy Carl! I can see that this change is just going to increase the need to check rankings in order to find out which page is ranking.

Why we can't get this link in the google webmaster tools data I just don't know (but I know it's nothing to do with privacy!). I just want to know which pages the keywords are sending traffic to... grr

I just get a feeling that it's all going to get messy and I'm going to be spending a lot more time in front of spreadsheets.

I don't think you'll see any quick or significant impact linking from your long-tail ranking pages to your individual product (the beauty of the long tail is that you don't need to be so competitive in order to rank) so there's not so much

That's not to say that you shouldn't do it but think about what's best for the visitor.

Consider where the visitor is in the buying cycle and provide content that supports them at the stage/awareness they're at. Do they know what the solution to their problem or need is? Do they understand the benefits of your offerings. Why should they buy from you.

Make sure each of your pages offer an obvious next step. This can be finding out more about your products or is can be a link to buy a particular recommended product.

Don't forget your category pages either. Make sure they have some great unique content too - as well as making it easy for people to find what they're looking for.

Retargeting is a great idea from Christopher, but I'd also say remember the other downloadable assets like buyers guides case-studies, product data sheets (not just the manufacturers produced stuff) - make sure that any such assets are clearly branded, have your website address and active links back to your site.

Again, a lot depends on the kind of products you're selling.

Lots of things to consider here as not all directories are created equal!

• How important is the directory in your niche?
• Do your customers use the directory and would they expect to find you listed there?
• Do your competition have listings too?
• If you weren't concerned about the seo impact, would you still want a link?
• Does the directory exist to provide more than just a link to people who are prepared to pay?
• Do you get any referral traffic from the directory?
• How is the directory performing in the search results itself?
• What does the directory's backlink profile look like?
• What's the barrier to entry, what quality control do they have on listings?

I've only had a quick glance at Thomasnet, but my initial, gut-reaction is that it's not something I would worry too much about. It looks like a reputable site to me with a real purpose. While your links are followed so are everyone else's. With so many categories, and so many outbound links on each page the individual value of these links is going to be low.

Looking at SEMRush, Thomasnet are ranking highly for a shed-load of keywords... if they're getting the traffic you're interested in, then you'd want to be in their directory wouldn't you?

As Dennis said, as long as you've got a diverse link profile then I don't think that being listed on this directory would be a problem.

The real value a good directory should provide is good qualified leads!

Hi Shabbir

As you've encountered, as you rise up through the rankings it becomes harder and harder to displace those ahead of you.It's a bit like running a marathon starting at the back of the field. You can get to a point where no matter how hard you run, you're never going to catch the guys who started before you.

Ranking for product pages can be insanely tough - even with unique product descriptions...

Brute force link building can only take you so far and increasingly you've got to watch out that your backlink profile isn't going to come back to bite you.

Without knowing what niche you're in it's hard to provide specific advice, but here are some thoughts:

1. You're getting traffic, but how much of these are new visitors and how many are returning visitors? What can you do to get more of those visitors to engage and take action. How can you turn these visitors into loyal returning customers? This can be difficult if you're selling a commodity on price alone.

2. Go broad and think of your long-tail. Instead of focusing on the head-terms that become increasingly difficult to improve, think about growing your long tail by adding content to your site. This can for example, take the form of Frequently asked questions, how-to guides, tips etc or other more creative ideas. It's the richness and depth of thiscontent that'll earn you traffic from queries you would never target individually.

Just remember that these pages still have to work hard to move your visitors towards your site's goal and becoming customers.

Your long tail can deliver more traffic than your head-terms combined. The downside is that the commercial intent may not be as strong for some of this traffic so you'll need to work hard to convert this traffic into customers.

3. Instead of targeting those people who are looking for your products, write content for people who are trying to find answers to the problems that your products solve.

4. Guest blogging just for links doesn't really help you establish your site as an authority and you're missing a trick if your not getting your content in front of your potential customers. Where do your customers hang-out? Can you write guest articles that will attract traffic to your site rather than "just a link". You've got to understand what you're audience is interested in and resist the urge just to tell them what you want to tell them!

Hope this helps,

Tried to crawl your site with Screaming Frog and noticed that your http response header contains a  x-robots-tag which is being set to noindex, nofollow.

You can check your http headers on this site: http://web-sniffer.net/

I agree with Takeshi, but would add the following point:

If you've got the time, it can be well worth reaching out to those websites linking to you and asking them to update their links to link directly to your new content. Not just because of the link, but because it's also a great opportunity to make contact and build awareness and build relationships with those other sites.

Obviously you can do this once you've got the new domain launched and the redirects in place.

I'm not sure what number you're referring to, but would suggest that you need to be a little cautious in these post-penguin days.

I'll answer the simpler part of your question first. You asked if external backlinks were responsible for 75% of your SERP.

I'd suggest taking a look at the following Whiteboard Friday with Rand on the latest Ranking Factors survey:

http://moz.com/blog/weighting-the-clusters-of-ranking-factors-in-google-analytics-whiteboard-friday

Domain + Page level link features account for just under 40% according to the survey which suggests that while they are still the dominant factors, their influence is diminishing.

You really should resist the temptation to see link building as a numbers game. The days of being able to throw a whole bunch of cheap links at a page and watch it rank have gone - at least where you want a sustainable ranking.

Try to think about quality, over quantity, and think about the context and relevance of the linking site to your own. Try to think of it as building relationships rather than just links for the sake of links.

Keep your target audience in mind when you look for link opportunities and find those links that are likely to provide you with relevant traffic.

Hundreds of links with exact match anchor text from loads of rubbish sites are unlikely to do you any favours.

Looking at the page, you've got a link in the footer to a news item with the following anchor text "Fire Warden Training at Elms Nursing".

I suspect that this is triggering the warning as you're pointing a link to another page with your keywords in the URL.

I wouldn't be overly worried about this, but it might be worth pointing a link back from the news page to your Fire Warden Training offering page so people could find out more about what you do, and increase the authoritativeness of your service page.

If the news item is no longer relevant, or getting visits, do you still need it?

Yes, I've been through this too. My gut feeling here is to focus on your audience and think about how they will consume and share this information.

For example, how can you make it easy for Dave to walk into his boss and tell his boss exactly why he should hire you!

There's absolutely no reason why you can't put the case-study on-line to allow people to read, or at least scan through the document on-line. AND allow them to download the PDF so that it's easy for them to print, read off-line or share around their team/colleagues.

Having the content on a web page also gives you more opportunities to engage your audience (social sharing, even comments etc)

Where PDFs can really come into their own is where you have complicated graphs, drawings that you just can't scale well to fit on a screen, provide enough context and stay legible!

Oh, and make sure that you've got links in your case-study PDF documents to take you to relevant/useful pages on your website.

If you do decide to go down the PDF only route - please do your visitors a favour and provide a really good extract so that they know what they're going to get. I've downloaded too many case-studies that turned out to be rubbish, irrelevant or just blatant marketing bumpf! (Thinking about your audience first can also change the way your approach case-studies and whitepapers!)

The only time I've ever used keywords recently was when a competitor kindly laid out all of the keywords they're targeting in their meta keywords tag!

As the others have said, meta keywords just isn't worth the worry, it's not going to affect how search engines interpret your page* and you're better off spending the time on setting up authorship, open-graph etc.

(*Bing have even said that in some cases they may use the keywords meta tag as an indicator of a spammy site.)

Remember that the title isn't just there to get your keyword in front of the search engines. In conjunction with the meta description it also has to persuade people to click-through from the SERPS and visit your site.

As long as you keep it short, natural and make sure people feel that they'll find what they're searching for when they click on your site it should be ok.

You might also want to think about how your can differentiate yourself from the competition. In the example above "best" is pretty generic.

For a recent project I found optimising for "my keyword + year" got me a chunkier slice of a competitive keyword than if I'd just gone for the keyword alone.

Yes you need to get your important keywords in there, but you've also got to think broadly when you cover the topic on your page and think about the human visitors.

Trust and credibility are important factors and poor copy - especially when it's bordering on spammy, over-stuffed or irrelevant to the searchers intent, is a great way to undermine your website - and that can start in the SERPS!

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the question, but I notice that the page at https://roadtrippers.com/ has the following meta tag in the header:

Ah, e-commerce product pages - that makes more sense!

Google have made some changes mid August so that you can only submit a reconsideration for Manual actions.

From Search Engine Roundtable: "reconsideration requests only work for manual actions, not for algorithmic actions. So it makes sense that Google only allow you to submit a reconsideration request, which they are now calling "request review," under the manual actions. It will lead to less reconsideration requests for Googlers to review and the requests submitted should be more on target."

See: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-request-review-reconsideration-17214.html