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Hi Keri, Thanks for the advice. lol excuse my ignorance I didn't know PA and DA was moz only lol What would it be in google terms?

Hi Richard, Thanks for the advice. Yes I just got the hand of using OSE   I just didn't understand if this is something I need to watch.  I have just launched our new platform and basically I have an SEO company on board but don't seem to be producing the goods, I find I get alot more from Moz. I haven't been hit with a penalty, but I know our competitor of ours has, and it seems to be from spammy backlinks as noted by someone at moz.  I'm just curious to know if this should happen to me, I would rather try to avoid the same situation from happening to us.  Any advice around how to go about avoiding this, or how we can eliminate the potential would be much appreciated. Cheers

Hi Nakul, Thank you for your feedback, I read the beginners guide to link building, and a few articles around directory submissions that also suggested the same thing. Cheers

Thanks Keszi for your great advice, I will take on board what you have considered and look at starting there.  I have been told good quality content will produce its own backlinks eventually....

Hi Alec, There are various tools that you can use, but when it comes to the real "deal" I usually go for Screaming Frog + Excel. Back, when I had a Moz Pro account, I remember their crawls provided quite a good data to start with. This is how I usually do it (doesn't mean that there are no good tools for SEO). The most important IMO is to collect data, as much data as possible. Understand it. Prioritize it. Then take action accordingly. (I think Moz Pro is a perfect tool that can help). I hope it has helped. Gr., Keszi

Thanks Michael!

Hi EGOL Thanks for your response lol I had a giggle at old fart I looked into crazy egg I will give it ago and sounds like a good plan with SiteTurners I will take a stab at them as well Cheers for that!

Hello Alec, I would say that what EGOL said is right, you are battling against a strong encampment and can't expect to have a strong showing unless you are taking a unique approach. The key is to determine if the 1 month PPC results are good in your mind. Personally that kind of turn around looks very promising based on the numbers but only you would know based on your ROI. If you can justify it then run PPC for now while working on the endgame of the SEO and increasing your site visibility and visitor numbers. A good strategy that I have found is to do some market research and take your survey data and write some interesting articles that you can use as blog posts and maybe a press release. If you can read the data in unique ways then it is likely to be picked up by a wider user base.

It looks like your robots.txt is missing.  If you upload one and Google can read it, they will crawl your site. As the message says, further crawls of your site are "postponed" until Google can read a robots.txt file (which is odd, I've never had this on sites without robots.txt before.) I would suggest uploading & checking your robots file and then requesting a recrawl through WMT.

Hi Samuel Scott Thank you for your response.  I am still having trouble understanding all of this.  Are you able to check through our site to see if we have everything in order for the rel=canonical?I went through the guidelines provided by Moz.  I will be making some updates to the content so they are more localised.  Unfortunately due to our merchant services, we can only accept NZ Currency which is a bummer, it would of been great to advertise USD and AUD on all the relevant sites.  I have also updated the countries in google web masters as well. The only thing I wasn't so sure about is the rel-alternate-hreflang you mentioned, and funny enough I saw that my competitor had this, which caught my attention hence this post, and I can only see that the language tags are the only thing set on our site. I have talked to my developer about this, and he doesn't understand what needs to be set accordingly. Thanks for your help.

I personally would start by using the Panguin tool which gives an overlay of your Google Analytics - make sure you set your date back enough to cover the time prior to when you got hit in order to see if you have been hurt by any of the updates. I have been using this tool for several years and would definitely recommend it - I have done in several other Moz Q&As previously. Samuel Scott's response mentions the post by Alan Bleweiss and he mentions this tool in it. Depending on what your analysis uncovers you may find this an interesting read - http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal Hope this helps!

How are your rankings in Google? Usually a site well optimized and ranking well in Google also does well in Bing. Do you have a Bing Webmaster Tools account? Sometimes Bing rejects sitemaps, you would get a message in your Webmaster Tools account.

With Screaming Frog you would need to crawl, generate, and submit the sitemap (or upload it to your server) whenever it changes (you add/remove a page).

thanks Ray, the site is lifereader. co.nz and the another good one would be california psychics.  the industry is quiet competitive so not sure they would join the discussion to tell us there tricks, although that would be great lol

Thanks Dana! I have gone through screaming Frog what a great tool! Has mad life a lot easier and more structured for me Thank you again!

awesome thanks so much great info!

I'm glad it's proved useful for you! Like you, if I find a service/product beneficial I will say so! We definitely find Session Cam incredibly helpful.

Yes! That definitely answers my question, and my thinking re- below the fold line is exactly what I was thinking! Thanks again Ray-pp!

Thanks Marie!

I appreciate it if people tell me when I am on the wrong path.