Be sure you fill in all 3 fields. Sometimes you have to give it a key-stroke or whatever.. I just use "g" but that is irrelevant if you're making it your default.

• Go into Options
• Click "Manage Search Engines"
• Add a new Engine. Call it Google De-Personalized. The Search string is:

http://www.google.com/search?&q=%s&pws=0

• Copy and Paste that into the field.
• Make it your default browser.
• You should now be able to search de-personalized in your url field anytime.

Voila!

Well a few things could be happening here, but I'd say the most likely one is that you aren't de-personalizing your SERPs.

Add &pws=0 to your search string and see what happens. for example, if your search is for "moz ranking" your google URL should read:

https://www.google.com/search?q=moz+ranking&pws=0

You can and should set your chrome/firefox to do exactly this all the time.

THIS! This is exactly what I would recommend. You should be excited; this is an opportunity to grab some new readers. Find some interesting dirt and figure out a way to tie it into what you do. Take a different angle on it and get it out there!

This is incredibly interesting because I wanted to come here this morning and talk about pretty much this exact topic. So I'm going to try and piggyback on your thread so as not to have 2 separate threads about the same thing but please tell me to leave if it seems more like a hijack.

As I said I am facing the exact same situation. A bit more detail:

We have a primary targeted keyword, let's call it "main keyword" that is a service. This particular page had a ton of black hat work done for it in the past. So there were thousands of poison links pointing to the page "main-keyword.html" and what I did was after spending as much time as I could manually removing links, I finally gave up and changed the URL so that these links would 404. So now the page's URL is "main-keyword-services.html"

This seemed to work great at first. We hit page 2 of the SERPs about 10 days later and all of those poison links were no longer listed in GWT. That felt really good. But then the carousel kept a-swingin' and the main-keyword-services.html page dropped way out of the SERPs.

Now this is where it gets interesting: We also have a page on our blog featuring an infographic dedicated to these services. That URL is "main-keyword-infographic.html"

This page is ranking on page 2 of the SERPs and that's with very little link-building efforts. Of course these two pages are connected internally, so it'd be nice if both would rank. (I built this through EGOL's advice way back of trying to get multiple pages to rank for one keyword as my competitors were doing.) But right now I really don't want the infographic page to beat out the main services page.

All I can think to do is continue my link building efforts, and that's what I would have come here to tell you mr. bigbadwolf. However I feel like there's something I'm missing.

So I'm dying to see any input from the rest of the community. Sorry my post wasn't very helpful to you, TC, but perhaps together we will find what we're looking for. Unfortunately (or heck, maybe fortunately) I'm pretty sure all it means is we need to kick-up our SEM efforts.

It's frustrating for me because our competitors are outranking us with nothing but black hat tactics. Links from hip hop forums, fake tumblr and weebly accounts and stupid hair-removal blogs. It's a link service they are purchasing and they have been for some time, and it works for all of them. I refuse to stoop to that level but I can feel my boss getting close to saying "no, it works for them we're going back to buying links." I mean they've been ranking for like 8 months with these tactics. WTH!?

Okay thanks all

Yes this does make more sense but now I have to tell you how anti-PDF I am.

I absolutely hate PDFs. Sorry. Not trying to be rude and I'm sure you have your reasons, but is there anyway you can make this a webpage instead? What are the reasons, if you don't mind me asking.

Optimizing a PDF is not something I can advise you on but I can tell you that they don't work with things like H1 tags and hypertext markup...

if the html tag is style="heading1" and it's adding something in there like that ( that wouldn't do anything, but as an example) then no. The tag needs to read

for google to register it as an h1 tag.

Honestly this would all be resolved if you weren't using Word. Why are you using Word?

3% of your visits are coming off a misspelled brand name? That's nothing. I wouldn't worry about it.

Especially if the misspelling is still leading them to your site first and foremost.

I think most brands deal with this. Between spelling confusion and typos, Google has a rich history of trying to decipher what people are looking for and getting them to the right site. I'd say 3% is a good number and move on.

Choose a domain and stick with it, then build pages out from there. Redirect the non-www to the www (if this is what you choose to go with) and forget about the rest... redirect site-wide.

Admittedly I'm simplifying it for two reasons: 1.) I'm not quite sure I get it, this is rather confusing and 2.) it is that simple.

You want a domain and then you want pages and subdirectories targeting your keywords. That's it that's all. I would not build links for the non-www if you are going to redirect for the www. Build links for the domain you settle on.

I'm not sure I'm helping but hope so!

Question 1:  No! Why not just create the internal page and have it target the specific keyword? Your homepage is your brand, not a product/service page. Those are internal. They will rank for whatever you are targeting (if your SEO campaign is strong). Why are you worried about what your homepage ranks for?

Short answer: No. Make internal product/service pages targeting specific keywords and do not redirect your home page.

Question 2: Huh? Those two examples seemed exactly the same to me. Are you asking why some pages will show a sub directory and some pages will show the html page in the URL? If so, it's all in your structure. It doesn't really matter which way you wanna do it but having multiple directories may give you the opportunity to attach keyword targets such as "example.com/services/stuff-i-do.html" as opposed to "example.com/stuff-i-do.html"

The former example will bring the word "services" into your string.. IF you are trying to get your page to just read "example.com/services" then just create that directory and drop an index page in.

Hope this answers your questions or at least comes close.

I don't know why you'd want your homepage to rank for such a specific keyword like that, but in any case I don't see that keyword (vinyl) used much on there. Here's your H1 tag, for example:

Discount Banner Printing the UK's No1 printing company

Looks to me like you're trying to rank for UK banner printing...

You'll have an easier time (as you've seen) getting internal pages to rank for specific keywords like that for several reasons. I'd say the stickers page is getting the rank because the url has the word "vinyl" and "banner" in it whereas your homepage URL does not. That's part of it anyway.

How long ago did you make these changes?

Sounds good I'd love to hear the follow-up sometime. If you can vary the anchor text or keep it to something like "Click Here" or better yet your brand name that would definitely help avoid penalties.

Also try to keep the possibility of adding a no-follow to those links open with any webmasters you work with. You might even want to pick and choose certain domains to automatically nofollow from.

That's what I would do. Good luck!

I would definitely tend to agree while worrying that there's somewhat of a gray area here.

Reason being that the page might not be as relevant as the domain. So if the privacy policy page is on hip-hop-records.com's signup page, and there are 100s/1000s of these types of links coming in with presumably all the same anchor text (i.e. "Privacy Policy") then that could be dangerous.

If all of the sites you deal with are legal sites and SMBs then fine. But I feel like many sites can generate privacy policies for any type of business/service/product/etc.

Yup either what Mike said or email the webmaster and ask for the link to be removed.

But I mean... does it drive any traffic in?

I agree with Jeff that from a marketing perspective this is a good idea but forget about the link building opportunities. What you really want (using Jeff's example) is other web design companies linking and saying "woah you can get this awesome service for free over at ______." That way it is relevant, natural, and authoritative.

Technically what you're describing slightly violates the Google ToS, but I don't think you would be penalized for it unless you started QUICKLY gaining a ton of links from low DA and non-relevant sites. Nonetheless I think the idea is sound and after promoting it online you might find that it brings in new opportunities for link building in an organic manner.

You'd be surprised. And that's why SEO is now marketing which is now SEO which is marketing.

After glancing through the SERPs I would say it's because there isn't a ton of competition.

Honestly if I were you I'd be excited about this. If the site you're optimizing for is built correctly and the content is fresh and exciting you're going to be ranking high for these terms in no time!

Forget about what they are doing and focus on what you can do. Build a strong SEM campaign and go bury these guys!

Good luck.

No truth to that whatsoever. That's weird paranoia.

If there was some sort of problem WITH the content, maybe. But there would be no penalty for all new content added.

I've done total site overhauls plenty of times and they get indexed quick with no penalties.. (although I will say the speed of this seems to be in flux, but I digress.)

Don't let the client worry about this. Think about any website that initially launches: why would Google penalize that?

Hope this helps. Paranoia is often the toughest challenge when it comes to dealing with clients/site owners.

Oh! Whoops. Apologies, the Moz forums can become a blur when mixed with work and loss of sleep

Try not to focus too much on GWT for things like backlinks and impressions. Yes it should factor in, but it's definitely the most imperfect tool I've ever used.

That said.. give us your domain let's take a look and see if we can spot anything?

edit: sorry my response was to Rachel here and not David. Didn't want this to be misconstrued:

Yeah I don't think this is necessarily accurate. Yes most sites will see their rankings plummet the day of an update, but the update isn't a one-day event. It carries over to every crawl Google does.

Therefore if your site slips through the algorithm, it isn't guaranteed to continue doing so. Perhaps the next time around the algo catches something it didn't before (for lack of a better visual.)

There is never any harm in removing poison links, that much we know for sure. So at least if you can get rid of those we can eliminate that as a possibility, right?