Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Kevin

Go to any maps listing -> click the red marker -> click more -> click edit details or report a problem.

See image in this example: http://screencast.com/t/klEscqfQB

-Dan

Hi

I had the same issue with a client (except he had FOUR duplicate listings - yikes!)

Anyway, are these are duplicate listings, where there should only be one listing? OR, do they have two locations and thus two listings are needed?

If its a duplicate, YES delete one.  I'm not sure where the trouble is with that (maybe if its under review you can't make changes?  Someone else know about this?)  I caught my clients when they were "pending review".  If you are signed into their places account, you should be about to delete by either completely deleting the listing, or disassociating with the account.   I would completely delete it if its a straight duplicate.

Can you say what you have done to try and delete the listing?

As for the older companies, you might be able to put in a request to Google places by going straight to that places listing and suggesting a correction.  Or can you receive mail at the old address?  You could claim the listing, get it in an account, and then delete it.  Just don't claim it with the same Google account as the other listings.

-Dan

Brant

This might be your issue...

Do this site search in Google: site:www.petmedicalcenter.vetsuite.com

Google still has about 112 pages in its index from your old site, all with "Pet Medical Center of Las Vegas" in the title tag, and an address in the description.  Maybe of these still pages from the old site are still in the cache.  AND there are no 301 redirects at all pointing to your new site.

So there lies the issue I think. You may want to see if it is possible to 301 redirect all the old pages to their corresponding new pages.  If this is not possible technically, you need to do a domain forward to the new domain.

-Dan

Hi

This is a substantial question, which can have many possible answers.  First, bear in mind there are no "one fits all" solutions - there's no replacement for having a good look at your specific situation.  For e-commerce a >50% bounce rate may be bad, while for a news or blog site (especially when landing on a full article deep within the site) a 50% bounce rate may be pretty good.  So it does vary with the niche.

But to actually answer the question, you'll probably want to experiment with on page things, like design, usability, content quality - and especially take a look at the book "Don't Make Me Think" if you haven't.

But you should also make sure the right people are finding the right pages in your site.  For example, I had a site that was ranking very well for a certain term, and getting some good traffic.  But it turns out that key-phrase, and the intention behind the search was not aligned with what the site actually had to offer.  So we re-targeted to a more appropriate key-phrase which cut the bounce rate in half!

Also, if you have an e-commerce site, be sure the terms you're getting traffic for are transactional in intent (intent to purchase something) vs. informational.  If someone is looking for information but lands on an e-commernce site: higher bounce rate.

Lastly, a good benchmark I find is: how do you perform in brand searches?  This is where you want bounce rate to be lowest, time on site to be highest etc.  Someone is specifically looking for your brand, which should get the best metrics.  If these are not where they should be, then you know your on page can be improved.

Lots here I know, but hope it helps

-Dan

Hi

From what I have seen, if the NEW structure is done well (good architecture, good on-page optimization, better navigation, better keyword optimization in the new urls - its all an improvement from the old navigation) and you 301 everything corectly - you should see an improvement in rankings.  Although this can take a week or two.

And of course submit a new xml sitemap.  I also block the old pages/directories in robots.txt (this may be a little overkill but I do it anyway).

One extra tip is to just do a site:www.mydomain.com search in google to uncover any pages in their index you may not know about, or have overlooked and be sure to 301 those to the most relevant pages as well.

-Dan

HI

I would not worry about PR too much.  Check your traffic, rankings and other key metrics over the next week or so.  If they hold steady, I wouldn't worry about it.  Just keep doing everything with the best practices possible.

A 10 second look at your site and nothing "panda-like" jumps out at me.

-Dan

Hi Benj

I would wait until they update the page cache - that usually brings the most significant ranking change due to on-page changes.  They may crawl the page, but updating the cache is what you want to look for - you can of course click on "cached" in the search result or do a cache search - cache:www.mydomain.com/mypage.html

There's no telling how long it will take, but it sounds like your site is well trafficked, you can see the cache update in just a few days.

You can try changing one thing at a time - but usually the only two things I personally see that make a big difference is title tag and url.  The other thing to keep in mind, is how the whole page works together - title->url->description->heading->content->images - can sometimes have a bigger impact when you bring all of those elements into harmony.

-Dan

True, I am hearing you there

Just curious, what's your take on tags in that situation of a large site with hundreds of posts per month?

Hi

EGOL's answer makes sense.

I'd like to add also - you don't necessarily need to write the posts just before the time of publishing them.  You could have several posts scheduled to publish at certain dates, as long as they were not time sensitive.

Also, you could take what would have been one post and break it into two parts, if there is enough content and it makes sense.

You can also take guest posts, which obviously eliminates the need for you to write them - good networking too.  And maybe you'd discover video or screencasts are a comfortable medium.  You may be able to generate a 3-5 minute video and get it posted in far less time than a written post.

You could also record audio of yourself or an interview with someone in the industry and get it transcribed for some fast quality content.

-Dan

Hi Garry

At quick glance - I would come up with your 5 or so categories, get them on the top navigation bar. Make sure you have a category for every possible post you might do in the future.  The ones you have down on the right sidebar look like a good start.

Then utilize your tags as a way to add real specific words and phrases to each post.  These can be generated as you go, you can have dozens or hundreds of tags over time, and several on just one post.  Then put a tag cloud maybe in the footer.

So you'll have maybe 5 broad categories that always stay the same and sit on the top navigation, and you'll have lots of tags over time that are more specific.

-Dan

Hi Garry

The advise I have heard, and follow, is to keep categories more general, and to only have a handful - say 5-10 categories.

But you want to have lots of tags. Tags can be very specific and unique to each individual post.  You can have several tags for one post.  I have a lot of pages that get picked up by tag pages, which tend to also make great long-tail URLs.

So let me give an example.  Website about cars.  Categories might just be: Sports Cars, SUVs, Pick Up Trucks, Station Wagons.  Tags however would be very specific: 2 door honda, fastest sports cars, driving and safety - etc etc etc.

And I've also heard to be sure not to have a tag with the same name as a category.

I'm sure you'll see lots of examples that go against this format, but it seems pretty intuitive and has worked for me thus far.

-Dan

Hi

First check to see if the pages are indexed in Google by doing site:www.mydomain.com as a search.  If they are not, you have nothing to worry about (as long as you block them in robots.txt soon)  Your developer should be able to edit your robots.txt file extremely easily.  Its just a file that sits in the root directory of the website.

If the 25 pages are indexed though, it could have a negative impact to have 25 duplicate title tags.  As to how much impact, that may depend on how large the site is, how deep into the site they are, etc.

-Dan

Do you mean to say that you do not want these pages indexed at all?  You say "there is no information on these pages and they do not need to be optimized".  If in fact, you don't want them indexed, you would add them to your robots.txt file as such:

Disallow: /filename.html

Disallow: /folder/filname.html

etc.

However, what EGOL and Bryce have suggested would be the most work, but make the most sense overall.  If you can find a way to re-structure the 25 downloads / add content etc to capture the additional traffic that would seem to be the best choice.

Hi

The high bounce rate is due to a low number of pages per visit.  When a user visits one page, even if they are on it for 10 minutes, if they don't go to any other page, it still gives you a bounce.  So you're seeing pages per visit as 1.2, 1.1 etc - this means lots of one page visits, thus the high bounce rate.

See if the high bounce correlates to new visits vs return or landing on the homepage vs inner pages.  Check all your landing pages, and see if people are landing on one page (an inner article etc) and leaving.  Maybe they're coming in all on long tail searches right to a specific article.

-Dan

Steve

Do you mean 404 errors?  Google webmaster tools may have that info.

-Dan

Just adding my agreement with both EGOL and Oversteer

Do you have a history of;

1. Rankings

2. Impressions and CTR (Google Webmaster Tools)

Diane

I think this post by rand is exactly what you're looking for.

-Dan

Hi!

I would be very careful about guessing what caused the drop in traffic to begin with, before you go adding noindexes everywhere.

Try to find a correlation to the drop in traffic. Did rankings drop? CTR? Amount of brand searches? What type of organic traffic dropped, long-tail or head terms?  Also, you may want to compare the amount of unique visitors compared to the past and check the amount of new visits compared to the past.

I'd investigate a little more before taking action.

-Dan

Diane

1. Change the title tage to -

<title>Gastric Band Hypnotherapy expert 
offers Full Guaranteetitle>

2\. Change your URL from: 
www.clairehegarty.co.uk/virtual-gastric-band-with-hypnotherapy
to
www.clairehegarty.co.uk/gastric-band-hypnotherapy

and make sure to 301 redirect the old URL to the new one.
You would do this in your .htaccess file.

Those two things would help a lot.

Bear in mind this is simply a band-aid over deeper
issues. I suggest reviewing the [beginners guide to seo](http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo), 
trying out a tool like [this one](http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new) and checking out some posts
in the [on-site optimization category.](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/2)

I understand your issue, and that it is not fun to see
your page below a competitors, but you don't want to get
too overly focused on the ranking, for a huge variety of 
factors.  Focus on making your page as optimized and user
friendly as possible. This means aligning the major page
elements as suggested (title, url, header) and writing
good text, based upon what's most easily digestible for
the reader.

-Dan