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Hi Erick, I did a quick search and came across this article: http://searchengineland.com/too-many-ads-above-the-fold-now-penalized-by-googles-page-layout-algo-108613 So, if you weren't previously penalized, then the new update may have caught you. If you consider that Google's mission is (other than world domination) to deliver quality content to it's users then this type of penalty makes sense. I'd say it was a good idea to move some of your ads down, and maybe even remove a few of them all together if you have too many on the page.

No problem, it looks like you have a pretty involved project ahead of you. I would do a page level audit in GWT, Majestic and aHrefs. Be very careful which pages you 301. If you want to be surgical - you can try getting good links changed to the new domain. That will be incredibly time consuming. Regarding GWT reporting, I had a client that bought a link farm and did a blanket redirect... right smack into their root domain. Ouch. Luckily they had administrative control of said link farm - when the sitewide footer links were removed - it took about a month for GWT to remove them from link reports. Mileage may vary. Part of it depends on Google knowing it's not there - at least for the purposes of GWT reporting. They had about 2,000,000+ backlinks. A lot of them were sitewides, another portion was article spam and blog spam. Some of it was just scraped. I wanted to remove at least 500,000 (just to be cautious) they only allowed 30K. But I got the link farm out of there. The site stabilized - but it was clear they needed to remove more. Such is life. It would have been a great recovery story.

Hey Erick Did the old URLs/Pages get new URLs? If they are clean from a link perspective on the old site they all need to be individually redirected to the matching new pages. Also, check to be sure all the new pages/content is indexed and cached with some site searches etc. It might be a matter of getting that to happen completely first as well. -Dan

Hello Erick, According to this article on S.E.W. it is best practice to optimize the product description in your PLA feed, but they do not provide any "proof" of the efficacy of this practice. This CPC Strategy post says the same thing, and this YouMoz post has a comments section with several experienced marketers corroborating the best practice: "However after looking at the descriptions in the feed, the max CPC pricing and the keywords that triggered the ads I started to understand that PLAs require as much SEO attention as a regular organic page does to work well." "We tend to make sure all product titles and descriptions are keyword optimised in the first place but you are right, this is very often overlooked." Unfortunately I do not have, nor can I find, any "proof" that Google uses the product description play a large factor in the ranking of product listing ads. I will leave this open as a discussion in hopes that someone else can update if it is ever proved. Until then, I recommend writing product description text that uses your top keywords - typically the product name/model - while focusing on how it is going to entice the shopper to click on your result.

might be best to use a professional mailing company. that could also help if you get any actual mail there. most mail forwarding companies will do additional services like mail scanning too. we recommend- US GLobal Mail- www.usglobalmail.com

Yeah, I've general heard positive things where it's a clear issue of content syndication and you control the content. If they're honored that way, they should pass link equity. The major newspapers use it. I'd only warn that Google can process cross-domain canonicals at their discretion, so it's not guaranteed. Worst case, they just ignore them, and you may have to reconsider, but I think it's safe to attempt it.

Hi Searchpl, So glad you asked this question before going forward. Having businesses share the same address in Google+ Local is a big taboo. Don't do it! The dangers are merged and duplicate listings and an inability to rank. Instead, if you are running 3 totally distinct entities from the same building (let's say a chiropractor's office, a yoga studio and an e-commerce site selling neck support pillows), you could take this approach: 1. Get a unique suite number for the yoga studio and another for the chiropractor's office, to which mail can be delivered at the building. 2. Get a unique local phone number for the yoga studio and another for the chiro office. Do not use either of these numbers for the online store. 3. Do not publish the physical address or phone numbers of either the chiropractor's office or the yoga studio on the e-commerce website. You must have a third phone number (could be a toll free one) for the e-commerce store, but must have local numbers for the other two businesses. 4. Set up a unique Places listing/Google+ Local page for the yoga studio, and another for the chiro office, but do not do this for the e-commerce store as it is not a true local business (no in-person transactions with customers). The above method is the only way I would recommend moving into the local space. Any other approach puts the business at risk for a mess of trouble in the SERPs. Hope this helps! P.S. All of the above advice presupposes that each of the 3 businesses has a unique name. In other words, Dr. Jones Chiropractor, New Life Yoga Studio, and Neck Pillows Central.

You did explicitly state "any thoughts welcome". I took that at face value. However, if you feel my post has been overly disruptive, you can always post again. I promise not to bother you.

awesome thanks, now lets take this down lest everyone else figure it out and Google change it... lol jk

definitely let them 404 and create new URL and make them much better, don't use any of the same content.

Hi Erick, This sounds like an interesting conundrum - but I'm sure you'll be able to find ways of making it work. Echoing some of the previous two comments, I agree that it would be ideal if you can unite the staff and the product in some way - be that sending staff to a warehouse/studio somewhere or just doing "test" videos going forward when you try out a new product. However, if this is not logistically possible, you have a couple of options: Chroma Key the staff onto a studio image of the product This is essentially like doing a weather video for your product - getting a nice image of the Product in the warehouse against a white background, recording the staff member against a greenscreen and then removing the green in post production in order to lay them over the product image. There are tons of tutorials online to help with this - but it will require some level of production skill to get it set-up right and look believable. Mix footage/image slide-shows of the product with footage of staff reviews Here you could instead just intersperse quality images of the product with VO and footage of the staff member talking http://library.creativecow.net/articles/kramer_andrew/slideshows.php this is a great little tutorial which explains how you can get a slideshow looking nice an professional with Aftereffects - but you can do similar with Motion and other editing programs. I would ensure you always have some visual appearance of the staff members in this video type - otherwise it may appear like you have just hired an actor to do VO and you won't be displaying the personality and product knowledge that is required to make a decent product video. You'll also need to ensure the images you use are unique and in a similar style, using any stock product photography to build out the video will look unprofessional and make it appear like you are pure affiliates without any product expertise. While both these options will allow you to mask and get around the physical distance between product and the staff experts, but only if you retain some level of production style and quality between the two bits of footage. This means with either suggestion, you will need a photographer/cameraman to get to the warehouse somehow. If this isn't possible - then I think you are in a bit of a tricky situation. You could just do talking head videos with a short introductory sting featuring a standard product image - but this would ultimately result in a sub-par product video. This doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't create anything, especially if you are creating the videos mostly for the opportunity to get rich snippets, but you should be aware that bad product videos can lower conversion rates as much as good videos can increase them. Hope that's useful. Cheers, Phil.

Have you considered trying to build up some inbound links more geographically located to the UK?  Sites hosted in the UK with .co.uk domains would be a good place to start IMO.  What was the timing of the drop off in traffic?