Questions
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Making unresponsive site responsive, should I expect any ranking penalties?
I'd recommend you run some A/B tests. In our experience with site revamps, it's best to ensure your visitors are happy first, whcih you can measure using conversion rates. If you notice a big dip in conversions, something may be broken which could then have a knock-on effect with your rankings. From a massive revamp we recently did to make things responsive (1.5M pges) we noticed an increase in most of our rankings. But just remember - treat google as a mobile user, so if you start simple and progressively add more content via ajax as the screen size increases, remember google may not pick these up, it will see your 'simplest' page, so make sure you don't remove any important on-page factors.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benseb0 -
Different rankings for same keyword in different geo locations
Hi Israr, Since your site is properly targeted to Pakistan in Webmaster Tools, don't worry about having a .com domain as opposed to .com.pk. The WMT configuration does that job perfectly. I would be tempted to guess that one of a number of things is happening: It could very well be that the US results are being affected by recent updates and those updates haven't rolled out to the rest of the world yet (the US usually sees updates first; in the first Panda roll-out, it took Google a long time to extend the roll-out past the US. I remember being at a search conference in Poland over a month after Panda was released in the US and people kept bugging the Google rep about when it would come to Europe!). In this case, you might be in for a good ranking improvement in Pakistan soon. It also might be the case that there is more competition for the term you want to rank for in Pakistan than there is in the US. If the query pertains especially to Pakistani audiences (mentions location, is about a product or service only available in Pakistan, etc.) then other competitors might have fared better in providing adequate localised signals, whereas your site might be appealing to a more general audience (as far as the signals it gives Google are concerned). Is your website hosted in Pakistan? The location of a website's hosting should not be a major factor at all, but it can make a small difference if Google has trouble figuring out what the intended target country is. Your WMT geo-location should have taken care of this though, even if the site is hosted in the US or elsewhere. Also, do you have a good number of links from other Pakistani websites, whether they be .com.pk domains, sites hosted in Pakistan, and sites with a lot of Pakistani links themselves? Again, not a massive ranking factor, but if most of your links come from the US or other foreign countries, this isn't as good of a location signal as if you have a lot of links from other local websites. To be honest, I think that the first scenario is more likely and that a movement upwards in the US results is a good sign...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaneCopland0