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I had a very similar problem with my own site disappearing from the SERPS, but showing as it should on any other PCs (that I hadn't previously used.)

The problem then related to Google's personalised search. Essentially, I had accidentally deleted my site and prevented it showing up in personalised search - though it still worked in any other browser that wasn't displaying my personalised results. ( See this article: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-test-lets-users-vote-add-and-delete-sites-in-serps/6031/ )

To remove personalised search take a look at: http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=54048

This sounds to be a likely suspect for the issue you are having.

Personalised Search can also provide false results as you are seeing personalised results, based on your search history, activity and preferences, rather than the non-personalised results as they actually appear without personalised bias in the SERPS.

You can see your web history settings here: https://www.google.com/history/

Hope that helps!

Hi,

PM sent. If you contact Moz, you can schedule a free walkthrough of the Moz tools, having given them an outline of what your are looking for from the site. This would be a good opportunity to go over issues like this. They have a UK based representative, Steve Dunn, who is really helpful.

I'd recommend contacting Moz via the blue chat icon for details.

Hi,As far as I can determine, the limitation for Small Businesses is based on the number of physical locations rather than the number of employees. When I follow this link to their help section: https://mapsconnect.apple.com/ui/help I see:"Small businesses"For businesses with less than 20 locationsWhich expands to show:"We currently only accept businesses whose customers visit them and where we can confirm a physical presence. Businesses that may not be approved include: businesses operating from residential homes, businesses with temporary locations (including real-estate for sale) or without a physical address, mobile businesses, or businesses that have not yet opened for business. Please create only one profile per physical location having a distinct purpose. Departments with clearly separate purposes may have a separate profile. You may create a profile for public-facing individuals if they have contact information that's different than their business."

Is is possible that your business would qualify based on those parameters?

I would avoid displaying the dynamic URL and re-write to create Search Engine Friendly URLs - so www.aspecialgift.com/subcat.php?PageName=GiftPage&ProductID=ABCDE becomes www.aspecialgift.com/category-name/product-name-1.html or similar

You want the URL to the product to remain constant too. Dynamic URLS usually appear when you use search and sort functions on your site and these results will be considered duplicates anyway - so you are best to exclude them from the index.

Depending on your ecommerce solution there is likely to be a SEF URL solution for it.

Dynamic URLS are also not very Human Readable either - another good reason to avoid them (have you tried reading one over the phone???

A readable URL also helps customers  as it is an additional signal to customers that this page relates to the product they are looking for.

use the rel=canonical on the main page/s to show that they are the original/source/master page of the content.

See this helpful guide:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not

Don't forget you can also tell Googlebot to ignore certain URL parameters to prevent them being indexed and treated as duplicate content.

"If your site uses URL parameters, some of the parameters may be unnecessary for page navigation. Asking Google to ignore these parameters can reduce duplicate content in Google's index and make the site more crawlable."

This is done through Google.com/Webmasters - Your Domain - Dashboard - Settings - Parameter Handling.

Yes, of course. You can book a second, twenty minute session (though I'm sure you can have longer if needed) using the book a session email link you received previously. I've used this twice, before and Steve was really keen to help.

So you want to deliver PPC traffic to a unique landing page within Wordpress?

Would it not be simpler to create a unique landing page for this purpose, set it to noindex (so it doesn't get picked up in SERPS) and not link to it internally (so users via other sources don't see it)? Then just add that URL to your Adwords/PPC campaign. This should create a doorway to a landing page on your site that is only reachable via PPC. Your PPC visitor would still be able to travel away from that page, using the nav elements - unless you configure the landing page so that it has nothing other than a contact form - or learn more button, for example.

Adding plugins unnecessarily will just clog up your WP site.

I hope that helps.

http://www.kingofcopy.com/sitemap.xml - references only 3 files (with the index and sitemap/xml link making it up to 5)

However the other sections of the site are installed into sub folders or are disconnected from the content referenced from your root www.kingofcopy.com

take a look at this sitemap further into the site from one of your subfolders http://www.kingofcopy.com/products/sitemap.xml and you will see what looks to be the 1000+ pages you refer to.

However, there is no connection between the root directory and these other pages and sub folders.

It appears that your main page is http://www.kingofcopy.com/main.html

Ordinarily you would want to bring them into one common, connected framework - with all accessible pages linked to in a structured and logical way - and if you have other exclusive squeeeze pages/landing pages that you do not want to show up in search results - and just direct users to them using mail shots etc then you can prevent them getting indexed - for example - you may want to prevent a pure sqeeze page like http://www.kingofcopy.com/max/maxoutsideusa.html from appearing in the SERPS.

To prevent all robots from indexing a page on your site, place the following meta tag into the section of your page:

Personally, I would consider a restructure to bring this content into the root directory - noindexing the squeeze pages as required - but this would need to be carefully planned and well executed with 301 redirects in place where content has moved from one directory to another

However, you could always shuffle around the first few pages - renaming main.html to index html and having the copy you currently have at www.kingofcopy.com in a lightbox/popup or similar over the top of the main page ?

I think the problem with the main.html page not being found as your default root/home page and the lack of connections between certain pages is the cause for a lot of the issues with your campaign crawling so few of the pages.

Incidentally, if you did restructure consider using Wordpress as would be a great fit with what you have produced already (and there are plently of wordpress squeeze page/product promotion themes available.

Yoast works well alongside Genesis - as StudioPress were gracious enough to allow a dedicated SEO plugin take over from their built in offering.

Host in your own country where possible (and practical) as server response time and server location are SEO factors - though not hugely weighted.

However, as .Coms are considered global hosting the US AND UK site on the same US server wouldn't be of huge detriment (in terms of server response time again.) -  if you only want to run one site and split the visitors between /US and /UK subfolders. Remember, you can use Google Webmaster Tools to create Geographic targeting for each sub folder (One for the US sub folder/sub directory and one for the UK for example.)

In a perfect world however I would want to see the sites hosted in the appropriate country as this does help to indicate your target audience (and the obvious server response times I keep mentioning.) Google does allow for those that host out of their own country, hence the geographic targeting option in google webmaster tools.

I think UK users do like to see .Co.Uk at the end of the domain - because they know that generally means they will sell (and ship) to UK users - but we also use global .com stores if re-directed to them (Ebuyer.com for instance.)

• You can always use a .co.uk domain (if you have that too) for marketing only and redirect all traffic to your xyzdomain.com/UK sub folder.

In terms of the ecommerce software, I would (and did) opt for another ecommerce solution altogether:

Interspire Shopping Cart is very good in terms of SEO (The URL structure, H1 tags, meta title, meta description etc are dealt with very well.  We rank number one for a variety of terms using this as the ecommerce solution. (Note this is self hosting) There is a hosted version that interspire are beginning to favour - see www.Bigcommerce.com

Hope that helps!

Yep. Spot on advice from John. I always like to keep in mind how your page content would sound if you read it out loud. If you're not sure, do exactly that, preferably to a friend and get them to tell you when it sounds like you're labouring the point.

Always, ALWAYS make the user experience your primary focus. If you can clearly explain to the user what it is you're offering - without repeating yourself endlessly- then the search engines will be smart enough to pick this up. Now there's no harm in using your keyphrase (and synonyms) a couple of times throughout your content but only when it's needed for clarity.

I understand how Yoast's SEO plugin can give you green light fever, but as is often the case, less is more.

Hey Bill,

Can you tell us what campaign type you initially setup: Sub domain, Root domain or Sub folder?

I believe you are going to struggle setting up your campaign to monitor all of these pages due to the current configuration - based on the link architecture/navigation.

Would it be fair to say that you are actually only concerned about monitoring the performance of the  visible Sqeeze pages in the SERPS - because if every other page should only be visible when you opt in then it stands to reason that you would be better to have all of this content hidden using noindex, to preserve the value of the content within those pages - to give potential customers every reason to opt in?

If we had a better idea of what your end goal was it might help us better assist you.

Blimey! How tight are her purse strings ;o)

As you could get away with next to no space for this if you are happy to redirect using just a .htaccess file you are going to need a very small hosting package if you chose that method.

I think I would specifically request it by email and explain why it is required and the detriment of NOT having it and ask her in the email if she can approve the purchase - essentially make her say 'YES, not problem' (and get the problem sorted quickly) or 'NO, not happening' (and leave the ball in her court - when people kick off in the top offices!)

If you are tasked to do a job (and expected to do it well!) then you can't be denied the tools you need to carry out the task - without someone else putting their neck on the block (in writing!)

Okay. Interesting (and rather encouraging). Does all look okay under Sitemap Index Report?

See this article from a few months back reporting same issue:

http://searchengineland.com/google-says-google-index-status-search-console-report-broken-257111

This and the fact that Google is fetching them (and we can see that in the real world) suggests there's no cause for concern.

Hi Jack, I wouldn't be so fixated on ranking for such a broad and highly competitive keyword like "web design". Unless you are in a position to offer your services (and service clients) on a national level. I would first focus on getting all the business I could on your doorstep.

One really easy way to do this is to get yourself a more specific, regionally targeted,  exact match domain and build up a separate web presence with this. i.e. rather than investing all of your energy in trying to rank for a keyword  "Web Design" and fight for visibility amongst the biggest web design companies out there, get high visibility for "Web Design [Town Name]" - which will be much less competitive (so less time spent on SEO for yourself), much more likely to convert into business and also seen as more relevant to your potential customers - seeing the name of their town/city in the domain offers some reassurance as they are generally likely to have positive associations with the place they live/work.)

Think about how you search for servies online yourself. If you are looking for a plumber for example, do you type in "plumber" into google, or "plumber [my town]"? I suspect the latter and this is certainly the case with the vast majority of people searching for a service in their area.

FYI in my experience far more people type the SERVICE before the AREA in their searches, that is - What they want,  where they are, rather than the other way around - though I would also secure the reverse if available. I suspect that this is because the Service is the most urgent/front of mind part of their query.

Incidentally, the .co.uk and .com variants of the obvious exact match domains are as yet unregistered. I have messaged you with their details (not that it would take Hercule Poirot to deduce what they may be ;o)

I would suggest you obtain these urgently (if for no other reason than to deny then to a competitor on your area)

You should know that I battled for some considerable time to rank for a very similar keyword in my area and was frustrated to discover that the exact matches in .co.uk and .com were being held hostage by a domain leasing company - who wanted silly money to hold me over a barrel, so I bought the .net and now rank #1 for my service town with that - Jog On Domain Leasers!!!

Hope that helps. Now hurry up and buy those domains before I do and lease them to you ;o)

You need to bear in mind that this the figures given are a guideline only. If your pages have been constructed with the user in mind (rather than just the search engines) and the keywords present are there because they add clarity then I'd be reluctant to start stripping them out solely in an attempt to tick a box.

That said, if you have gone a bit overboard with your references to a specific keyword/phrase then it would be sensible to rework the copy to include synonyms (different words that mean the same, or very similar, thing). Current best practice is to build content around a theme, rather than a single keyword, position your core keyword prominently (but not excessively) within the page and use related phrases around it to establish your theme. This practice will pay dividends with the rise or Google's RankBrain (https://moz.com/blog/rankbrain-unleashed).

Before you rush off and rework your copy, we should first look at improving the situation your facing now, and the above can be  something to consider when you are next producing content.

Can you share a breakdown of the keyword distribution with us?

Better still, share the page and we'll gladly give you some feedback.

Here's an example of mine (from a product page - the product ranks top 5 with almost no inbound links (it's a new site) in a moderately competitive niche. Moz grades this page as a A.

We found this keyword used 26 times.

Title 1, URL 1, Meta Description 1, H1 1, Body 10, IMG ALT 12

The alt tags are around one per product image - this could be trimmed back a little and we could stand to drop one of two from the body but, in truth, the page reads naturally, and isn't stuffed with keywords unnaturally. (some of the instances of the body in the copy are on labels, sub-section headings and brochures etc).I always recommend reading the page out loud as a may of gauging if it is over-filled with repetitive keywords - reading it to someone else helps (insist on honest feedback). If they start grimacing every time you use the keyword you may want to adjust the copy. In your case, if your page copy contains exactly the necessary amount of keywords (and your still keen to reduce your count) start stripping them from the Alt tags of less prominent images. If you're using WordPress (you might want to try Yoast's SEO plugin as it will assist you with monitoring this for you. However, keep in mind the Moz tool, Yoast's SEO plugin etc. are only guidelines. Don't let them get in the way of you producing great content. Create content for your potential customers, if, when you've done that, the copy also ticks these boxes then so much the better.If you haven't read this already, I'd suggest you take a look at this: https://moz.com/blog/visual-guide-to-keyword-targeting-onpage-optimizationGood luck.

For Wordpress try : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/canonical/

also look at Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin referenced on that page - I love it!

and for the duplicate content caused by the dymanic content on the pinnacle cart you can use the Google Webmasters tool to tell the Google to ignore certain parameters - go to Site configuration - Settings - Parameter handling and add the variables you wish to ignore to this list.

To answer your question about translations, here's what Google say:

Duplicate Content and International Sites

Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this might not always be possible. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines on rel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers.

(Source: <a>https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en)</a>

Generally the .xml.gz format is the one stated in examples there are a few references to this here : http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php#index

Most sitemap generators that create both compressed and uncompressed sitemap files name them sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz respectively. It also makes it clearer what the content of the zipped file is. I don't believe it is essential however, as you will direct tools such as google.com/webmasters to your xml sitemap - rather than expect it to find it of its own accord.

I always use the .xml.gz format when compressing. I would argue that (if both formats work) neither one is 'BETTER' than the other, rather one is more ACCEPTED than the other.

If you are concerned about duplicate keywords, download the Adwords Editor and follow Google's guidelines on identifying and removing them, here: https://support.google.com/adwords/editor/answer/47633

QS aside, my concern with duplicate keywords would be the cost implication as you'll end up bidding against yourself in the auction. As Alick300 has mentioned, keywords with different match types are not considered duplicates. Be aware that broad match keywords with the same words in different order, etc would be considered duplicates.

I hope that helps you.