Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi, I took a look at your site, and I ran a report in OpenSiteExplorer on your backlinks. It doesn't look at all like Penguin, like others suggested below. My suggestions: 1. Take a look and see what your competitors are doing. If this is recent, we've definitely see fresh/newly updated content be pushed to the front of SERPs temporarily and then die back down to lower numbers. 2. Make sure your content is getting updated. 3. Your content looked pretty thin. While in the past ranking competitively for this term was pretty easy, when I did a search (granted even incognito, I'm in the US), I got many results from UK government sites and wikipedia ranked pretty highly. Without solid, uniquely interesting content and strong, relevant links, it'll be very hard to beat these sites.

Interesting. I didn't know position was an SEO factor for content but can see it makes sense. Thanks again for sharing!

Cheers Dennis, I see so it may see the changes in the short future rather than the long run.

Thanks for letting me know others are experiencing the same. If I find anything interesting I will be sure to let you know on this thread - Likewise if you notice anything interesting would be appreciated if you could come back and share also.

Hi! Even if it's true that Google determines the importance to give to content - especially internal and external links - depending in what section of a web page it is (header, sidebars, footer, main body), it is quite a myth thinking that "additional" content explaining, for instance, the league table, should be put before for obtaining a better impact. Moreover: is it the table the most important element of your content, the one your users are interested the most? Then burying it under a "text" explaining it would be offering your users a poor experience. Topic modeling should be not perverted into a something needed just because so "Google" will make the page rank better. The consequences will inevitably be horrible, as creating "SEO texts" with almost no value for the user, and even dangerous, because Google could start applying spam filters as keyword stuffing et al. Write naturally, as if you were describing something to someone speaking. If during the description make sense using synonyms and/or introducing related concepts (i.e.: electric guitars in a page about acoustic ones), then go for it. If it doesn't make sense, then don't it. Finally, if with topic modeling you mean "LSI"... then know that LSI is another myth.

Let's look at one of the pages ranking higher than yours: http://resources.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/customs/bankholidays.html This site has a DA of 74 as compared to yours with a DA of 18. I would look at the on page and the off page optimization efforts for all the non .gov sites as they are the best ones you have a chance of beating in the rankings. Hope this helps.

Ive added your idea of links inside table to body content so thanks for that. Those social buttons are using the addthis service, just styled against the theme of the site. But I see what you mean, im thinking of dropping it altogether and using the sharedcount.com API in a format similar to mashable. It aggregates all social shares into one number and cuts down the button clutter. Thanks for your help on this, I think the 'true' aim for me is to make my landing pages better than any other I find - I think if I achieve this ill be heading in the right direction. Ill give it 3 months and share where im at in another post.

One easy way that I've found to help with pagespeed is with cloudflare's free subscription. It does a lot to speed up your site, such as auto minifying, css, html and javascript. It also caches your pages and greatly reduces server response times. It also does some other stuff and offers security features which is another benefit.

Google reps have said that the data from GA isn't used for ranking, and have specifically called out bounce rate as a very noisy metric. There are several good references in this Search Engine Roundtable post at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-bounce-rate-attacks-16203.html.

Hello, Irving had some good advice for me on this topic - see my question from last week. http://moz.com/community/q/new-domain-name-for-an-old-site Good luck

What's your bounce rate like? Is it high? If so, maybe you do need to make some changes. How about time on page/site? I'm believing more and more that google uses user engagement metrics to help rank sites. I don't know if this is part of Panda or not though. As others have said, I wouldn't change anything until the dust has settled. Implementing a few tables here and there is not a difficult task (I wouldn't have thought) and maybe is just what you need to make the content you have more readable. I would have thought a table is just the tool to display bank holidays! Though, of course, now that the second May bank holiday has passed us, there aren't many left (BOOOOO). Good luck, and make sure you wait for the dust to settle before you do anything. Amelia

Hi there, Links do pass PageRank, but they don't drain a page of the PageRank it already has. If you link out from a page 100 times, it doesn't make that page 100 times weaker. Think of PageRank as coming in two forms: that which you accumulate via being linked to, and that which you can pass on because of your accumulated authority. The only way in which adding more links to a page can be seen to be "damaging" is that if you link out 100 times from a page, each linked-to page receives roughly 1/100th of the passable strength from that page (links in footers or similar won't receive as much). However, if you link out 1000 times, each linked-to page receives 1/1000th of the passable link strength. Therefore, if you want a page to rank better, you need to consider whether you're diluting the amount of PageRank it receives due to the high number of links on other pages, not on the page itself. Is this clearer? Sorry it's hard to explain, but we basically believe that PageRank comes in two forms: one which a page accumulates and one which it can pass on, and passing PR on doesn't weaken the page itself.

"The guest blogging I did was through the MyBlogGuest system so 99% of the time links are do-follow. Roughly 15 guest posts have been put up, the anchor text was split from 'UK Bank Holidays 2013' to 'Bank Holidays 2013' so roughly 8 each." I made an assumption regarding the links you built as being manipulative, and based on your feedback so far it is likely I am correct. Can you post a link to one of the blog articles you wrote? Regarding your traffic / ranking drop, it could have happened due to the changes you made or your links being devalued as manipulative or other factors. The links are my largest concern at this point.