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The title and description look good to me, if i was going to modify is myself, i would add some of this Flatiron loft for rent | West 21st Street to the description tag and also add more of a location in the title and description such as: NYC or New York City, ya know?

Hi Alan, Handling a Google penalty is a delicate issue as there are a lot of factors that need to be considered to assess the penalty on the site accurately. It is not a black and white issue where there is one right answer and doing that will fix the issues and lift the penalty. The whole process includes an in depth analysis of the site including the on page and off page factors. I would really suggest you to consider hiring an expert on this subject and have them do a thorough evaluation and provide recommendations. I've included links to some resources below that you might find helpful. Recover from a Panda Penalty - QuickSprout SEW Article Cheers, SEO5..

Using the noindex,follow combination is a form of advanced page sculpting, which is not truly an SEO best practice. Here's why: If you deem a page not worthy of being in the Google index, attempting to say "it's not worthy of indexing, but the links on it are worthy" is a mixed message. Links to those other pages should already exist from pages you do want indexed. By doing noindex,follow, you increase the internal link counts in artificial ways.

Hi Niners: I have run a Xenu link report and there are no broken links or anything out of the ordinary. Could having additional pages indexed by Google devalue a site in Google's eyes? The additional pages co-incide with a decline in ranking. Thanks, Alan

After going through free trials on over a dozen SEO/SEM tools we've settled on the following: Moz: Backlinks, Keyword Tracking Swydo:Client PPC Reporting SEM Rush: Keyword Keywordtool.io: Google Auto-Complete keyword data (and it's Free!) And we're tempted by SpyFu premium, but rely on the free version right

Were the 300 listing pages ever receiving traffic?  If the answer to this question is no or if a significant number of them weren't ever receiving any traffic it might change what I would think you should do.  Poor title tags will hurt your visibility in lots of ways.  I would not personally tie the title tag strategy to Panda.  Panda is a content algo.  It seems to look for duplicate, near duplicate, thin content, poor quality content and then make sure that sites with those criteria are not ranking.  If you think more broadly about it you might ask why Google would want to take the whole site down in the rankings for thin content on a few or many pages with potentially low or no traffic.  I think the reason they are penalizing the whole site is because they don't want webmasters producing this type of content.  If they can get content creators to think twice before creating another 20 urls about x topic then over the long haul their job will become much easier.  They can fight off spam more easily because it won't work.  I was very angry when Panda 4 rolled out and some sites I own got hit.  However, I feel empowered now to correct the issue.  My suggestion for you is to compare the urls with their links and traffic.  There should be some clear cut low quality stuff that you can noindex.  On the pages that drive traffic I would make sure you are providing deep, helpful content.  Hard to discuss all the things you may need to do over email but I think you are probably getting the idea.  PM me if you want to chat more.

Hi Kingalan - definitely a frustrating experience. Let me see if I can provide some thoughts on each of your questions: #1 - Yes, it's certainly possible that links from bad sources could have propping up your rankings, and by disavowing these, you've lost rankings/traffic in the short term. However, I'd agree with your SEO consultants that pain now from this action is better than the potential penalty/banning you might experience in the future. Google has been very aggressive with penalties, but they haven't been wholly consistent. This makes bad links something that can provide short-term opportunity and long-term cataclysms. If removing these links is what hurt you, I'd argue it was the right choice to make, and getting some new, editorial, high-quality link sources is the next step. #2 - My guess would be that extra indexation of a few hundred pages has nothing to do with the rankings/traffic changes. I've seen Google index thousands or even tens of thousands of extra pages without much problem - a few hundred are very unlikely to be the cause of the problem. That said, I'm not sure removal would be my first step - I might think about how to canonicalize these back to pages you do want indexed (if you do want that content discoverable). If you really don't want the content findable in Google, then meta robots noindex might be worthwhile. #3 - It is possible that thin content is to blame here. I agree it's hard to scale quality content, but keeping a few hundred pages up to date and incredibly useful for visitors/searchers is exactly what Google wants to see. I'd be constantly asking the question - is my page the most valuable one in the search results? Does it provide a better, more useful experience than anything else in the top 10? If the answer is no, then you don't really deserve to rank (don't worry, many sites don't), and extra effort here may go a long way. One way to do this might be to ask those who submit listings to give you more content (or to get agents/interns/writers/contractors to bolster each listing). p.s. You may wish to check out http://moz.com/blog/why-you-might-be-losing-rankings-to-pages-with-fewer-links-worse-targeting-and-poor-content Wish you all the best, Rand

What questions do clients and potential clients have about offices? If they called your company, would you be able to tell them more than 400 words over the phone? Try putting some of that information on your page.

It is just like optimizely. A modal is that new kind of pop up that covers a web page like when you visit here, http://www.allmodern.com/  they have one for their mailing list. Webengage has a pretty good offering, they have exit intent targeting, that can show a pop up when someone is trying to leave and a few other things such as that. There are several services like them that can help conversions if done correctly.

Yep, Bingo.

Hi Marie: Thanks for your quite detailed response to my question. Some of the possibilities you mention probably don't apply for the following reasons: 1. None of the URLs' changed, so it cannot be that. 2. Page titles did not change, so it's not that. 3. As for unnatural links, these have existed for several years. In fact we succeeded in getting 28 our of 100 removed and made a disavow request for Google for the other 80 toxic links. While the link profile is weak it is not worse than what it was before. When the upgrade was launched in early June Wordpress was upgraded to the latest version. I wonder if at that time some issue did not develop with robot txt or no-index. I find it very curious if that a removal request was made for the 175 URLs on June then the number of indexed pages went down for a few days and now they are back to 851. My developer may be a little bit shy about accepting responsibility about this issue. Is there any source, a Guru or sorts that could check the Wordpress installation to see if that is the source of the 175 appearing on Google that should not be there? Someone way to eliminate any doubt about what is causing this issue? Thanks, Alan

Hello Alan, Jane got a lot of good answers for you below. I do agree with her ... Google is going to discover links at different times as many different sites get crawled. Your website ranking can be improved at all times as Google discovers the new links you build or acquire. We see clients site rankings go up consistantly all year long ... Not just 1 or 2 times per year during an update. Like Jane said, that's where penalties are being discovered and given out. Your website will benefit from new links anytime they are discovered. Regarding building links ... Social media shares and likes are not to replace link building but in addition to that work. ( Bit.ly is fine ) If you have time and know what to do, you could certainly get those links yourself. My clients just don't have time and are unsure how or where to get links. If you hire a good company, they should be able to make a big impact on a site with a relatively low DA / PA within a few months for sure.The higher your scores the more work it tkaes to improve them. It's easier to go from a PA of 15 to 25 than to go from a PA of 35 to 45. Of course high quality content is the first step, next step is to get that content out to readers and followers so they can share the content they like. I would share your content on your social media platforms you use and work on buiding subscribers and an email list. You could send out market analysis of sales in your area by price range, average days on market till sold. Put something usefull together ... you could also ask questions to your clients, sort of verbal survey to find out what kind of info they would like to see. Then put an optin offer, sign up with your email here and get our FREE market report... Real estate mistakes to avoid ! Give out some valuable info, help them out and build a loyal following. You should do some research on your top ranking competitors and see where their highest PA backlinks are coming from ... and go after these links first ... that should get you some faster results ... of course research those links and make sure they are quality before you add them to your website. For Twitter how about you use a more specific term like #nycofficespace All the best, Joe

Is there a risk to no-indexing the listing pages? Thanks, Alan

This! Excluding external factors, such as hosting problems or plugin interaction issues and assuming you are just adding it to every single page you technically should install GTM on a wordpress site in about 5 minutes. This is obviously excluding configuration as well. To take 36 hours it would have to have had some massive issues and I feel like if it's taking that long he should have brought it up beforehand instead of just billing for 36 hours after the fact.

Hi Samuel: Thanks so much for taking the time to respond to my post!! You make an excellent point about the necessity to create content useful for humans rather than search engines, a position my SEO firm has also taken. My site has received no manual penalty from Google. Besides launching an upgraded version that made mostly cosmetic changes, not much has changed on the site since February. But I should mention that in late April a link removal requests were made to about 100 toxic domains. About 30 web masters voluntarily removed their links. In mid May we filed a disavow request with Google for the other 70 domains. Could the removal of these links and the disavowal request have something to do with the fall in ranking and traffic? Please note the site only had about 280 domains linking to it in March and now there are even less. The quality of the incoming domains was pretty poor. Good suggestion regarding adding no-follows to the poorly performing building and listing pages. But we have a bit of a challenge with listing pages. They get rented quickly and it becomes unfeasible to add them to the site, and they are absolutely essential, if we need to add 300-400 words of content and write title and description tags. So how would you suggest we manage listings if we should not "no-index" them? Regarding our potentially spammy domain, we have used it for the site since 2006.  An alternative domain (www.metro-manhattan.com) exists that redirects to our primary domain (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). Do you think it would be better to redirect the site to the www.metro-manhattan.com domain? It better matches the brand "Metro Manhattan Office Space". But I have heard domain changes can be dangerous nightmares. You point out a potential issue with dashed in our domain. Do you think the single dash in Metro-Manhattan.com would also appear spammy?  Incidentally, I don't think the content on our site looks spammy at all, maybe there is some thin content but not spammy. Thanks for your assistance!!! Alan

Hi Alan, First, a few things to consider: Did your site actually get hit with a penalty? You talk about removing unnatural links. Was that just to be safe, or something else? If your 1st site revision changed site urls and generated a lot of 404s, without proper redirection, you'd get the exact result you're describing. Did you get new copy written for your 1st site revision? If so, and you didn't write it, take a few sentences from different pages and search for them, in quotes, on Google. Make sure they weren't plagiarized, because that would explain a drop in traffic, too. All of that said, here's what I'd do: **Definitely **work to improve engagement. Engagement is good for your business anyway, so even if it had zero effect on visits, you'd make existing visitors happier. And, Google at least rewards you because of the secondary effects of a great UX: More attention and citation, more positive reviews, fewer bounce backs, etc. And yes, there's some evidence Google rewards great UX, whether deliberately or as a side effect. Look for lost links and repair them. Use OpenSiteExplorer and get the Top Pages report. Look for all pages that respond with a 404. Put those pages back (if you had that page before), build a page at that location (if you never had that page) or do a 301 redirect from the page URL to a 'real' page (the easiest fix). Check site performance. Did site load speed take a huge hit with the new design? Look at your log files. Go all the way back to before the 1st site relaunch. Compare Googlebot activity on your site from that period to now. What's changed? Is Googlebot getting trapped somewhere? Has crawl traffic dropped? Finally, I wouldn't engage in old-fashioned link building. It's a terrible idea for a site with a low DA. If you want to acquire citations, you're going to have to do it by making customers really happy, offering great information and content, and generally offering a great experience. I hope this helps. There's no easy answer here. You're going to need to take a very strategic approach, rather than focus on a single tactic, if you're going to make this work. Ian

We have been having some issues this weekend that have resulted in some outages; a couple of things went wrong at the same time. We'll have updates and more information tomorrow when everyone is back in the office. So sorry about this!

Hey Alan, Not sure if your issue was related to the DDoS attack or not, but I was able to replicate it now. Make sure that there is no spacing before the URL when you paste it into the on-page grader. To track rankings for keywords over time you'll have to set up a Campaign which it sounds like you have. Once you've done that you can find the rankings in the Search section of the dashboard. This is also where you can filter by the label you've tagged your keywords with. Alternatively you can set up keywords rankings in the rank tracker https://moz.com/researchtools/rank-tracker but you won't get the tagging or email report functionality. -Mike

Perhaps even pay someone a small amount for a audit that does not come with it the chance of further work for that person. This is a really good idea.  First ask the guys complaining to point out real stuff that needs to be fixed or give you an example of a page with problems.  Then you have specific stuff to get opinions on. My bet is that these complainers are simply picky code monkeys who can't stand work that does not meet their compulsive tidy standards.   It bugs them that they have to "think:" about somebody else's code that is not formatted or written the way they like it. I am very confident that they would not like my code.

Hi Alan, It was the Panda algorithm that updated this week, not Penguin.  Panda is about on page quality and not about links.  (We don't know for sure if links play any part in Panda, but my guess is that they don't.) "So are you saying that despite the new Penguin update, Google will not review our disavow file and that the  only action to take is to ping the links from the low quality domains in order to expedite Google's review of our site?" The disavow file starts working as soon as you file it.  It's complicated though.  If the Penguin algorithm has decided that your site is untrustworthy in regards to links, then Google will still continue to suppress your rankings until Penguin refreshes again. Regarding pinging links to make them get disavowed, that's still up for debate.  The idea is that you get Google to visit the link so that it can recrawl it and apply your disavow. Jim Boykin of Internet Marketing Ninjas asked John Mueller about whether it was possible to use the Google submit url to ping urls to get them recrawled (see video here at about 1hr 4min: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0FC1K25Z3w&feature=c4-overview&list=UUthrUiuJUtFSXBUp48D8bAA).  John said it wouldn't work.  But who knows, perhaps building links to those pages might work. EDIT: That type of thing - building links to bad urls to get them to be recrawled is not something I would recommend that you do.  It's something I might experiment with myself at some point but it's not something I'd recommend the average Penguin hit site does.