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I think it largely depends on the industry you are in. The important thing to remember is that SEO is a long term strategy and therefore a long term commitment.

Google is always looking to refine its searches and it will get to all industries and those who are spamming will eventually get penalised. As Penguin 2.0 has only just been released, give it a few days and you will see the true effect of it. Keep the faith (even though its hard to sometimes!)

Are you using PR websites to spread news or build links? If its the latter then don't waste your time. If its the former then you're better off finding bloggers that regularly talk about your company's services and send the PR to them (and tailor to their audience if necessary). Read this post http://www.seroundtable.com/google-press-release-links-16136.html which should tell you all you need to know about PR's.

I agree with Simon, GA is perfect for showing data. Just create a login for the client on the account so they can see their stats.

This is where Google gets it wrong in my opinion. The video that Matt Cutts did a few weeks ago said they were going to target key industries that are typically spammed like Payday loans but even companies on there seemed to have been missed. Also, EMD's should have been devalued but here is another example of companies dodging this.

I think the only thing to do when you operate in industries like this is to concentrate on your own website and make sure you are creating quality content to engage with customers online.

Screaming Frog is quite good I seem to remember, it will crawl all your URL's then create the sitemap for you. You may need to change the "priority" of the pages but the hard work is pretty much done for you.

Hi Rafiqul,

Your links look very spammy which is a sure fire way of getting your website penalised. I didn't look at all of them but the ones you have on blogspot are footer links and they are really bad. I suggest going through every link to your website and be really honest about which links look out of place and which are natural.

How have your other rankings been since last night? If they have all dropped then you may have been penalised and you need to act quickly. Check your Webmaster Tools account to see if you have had any warnings, start fixing the links ASAP though.

One place to start is to see whether the suppliers of your products have "where to buy" section on their website as they are relevant links and are an easy place to start.

As Elias said, it is more about getting links on somewhere your potential customers will see it and be encouraged to visit your website and to buy your products. One good idea is to run some surveys or competitions that you will be able to use the results to create some some unique, interesting content.

Hi Jonathan,

Have you looked at the links to the page you want to rank compared to the links to the other 2 pages? it may be that the other 2 pages just have better quality links to them. If that is the case then get in touch with the webmasters and ask them to change the link.

Alternatively, if you have been building heavily to the page you want to rank, the page may have received a penalty from Google (not accusing you of doing so by the way, just a possibility!). As Mark said, if you can supply us with the URL of the 3 pages then we can have a look into it for you.

a no-follow tag just means that the link won't pass any link juice, if you don't want Google/SEOmoz to crawl then you'll have to no-index the pages or disallow the URL's in Webmaster Tools

Why have you decided on this structure? In terms of usability, it could be a bit confusing. The Co-op Electrical website used to have a similar structure but they changed it a while ago to just the top navigation bar.

You can't have URL's with spaces in so Google would see them as 2 different URL's. If you have a space Google sees it as %20. I would avoid having this as your URL structure, try using test-page or test_page.

Just to add...it is really important that you match your new urls with your old ones so that you aren't just redirecting every page on the old website to the home page of the new one. I use Xenu to find all the old URL's and then match them to the new urls. That way all the link juice will be passed to the new pages.

Ok, thanks Peter, really appreciate the advice! Ill give that a go and see if that brings down the errors on the website.

Yeah, So would you recommend using either of those options over the rel=next/prev?

Thanks Peter, it's stumped me somewhat this. The site has JavaScript that loads the new pages so the user doesn't see it in the URL but the pages load in the back end and this is causing thousands of duplicate title and content issues. We don't have a view all page to canonical to and the page load speed is what had my worried that it wouldn't fix the problems

the website is www.thegreatgiftcompany.com - I'd be hugely grateful if you could have a look and let me know what you'd do. Really appreciate your time on this.

There is some SEO benefit to be gained from citations and mentions, especially if they are from reputable sources. Obviously, if they aren't then there will be minimal benefit.

Here is a resource on best practises which you might find interesting to read through...<cite>www.seomoz.org/q/creating-citations-best-practices</cite>‎

it depends on which keywords you are tracking, if it is those that you have in your title tags then you could run a software like Xenu to get all your titles into a CSV then separate them and copy and paste them into SEOmoz

Google often puts new websites high up at first and then your rankings will fluctuate whilst it figures out where to place you. You should start to see some stability soon then you can put a long term strategy together.

Start to build some high quality, relevant links back to your website and this should help you stabilise your rankings.

Hi Laura,

Just to add to what David said...if the company above you has a spammy backlink profile then there is a good chance that the Penguin refresh that is coming "in the next few weeks" will hit them hard and your client will be back to number 1! Keep building these high quality links and you will be fine.

Good luck!

GWT updates every 2/3 weeks so if you FOR DEFINITE that you don't have any then you're fine. SEOmoz crawls your websites more often so they are more likely to be right but I'd just check to be 100% sure.