Welcome to the Q&A Forum

try this! http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

my two cents. I think it very well could lose some linkjuice, but certainly not much.

is it worth testing? how much effort will you need to put in for potentially a minor improvement in rankings?

if its a lot of effort I personally wouldn't bother.

thats very helpful, I forgot about the hidden whois thingy!

I once tried putting the mispelled variants in the keyword meta tag but that did nothing. Maybe you should try it? But I wouldn't expect much.

Another way is to put it into your content, but letting the reader know you mispelled it on purpose. Maybe something like "we offer clases de inglés (or clases de ingles if you can't find the accent button!)".

That way they know you mispelled it on purpose, and google still finds the word on the page.

A client has a competitor who is ranking above them for a highly competitive term they shouldn't really be able to rank for.

I think I know how the site got there, and I think I can replicate it myself with a quick test, but it's definitely grey hat if not black hat to do so.

I do not want my own sites and company to be damamged by the test, but i'd like to let the client know for sure, and also i'd love to know myself.

The test should take about a week to run, there is no hacking involved or password stealing or anything damaging to another.

How would you do such a test? I'm dubious about using my own server / site for it, but would a week really matter?

Tom

it may still go back up, my sites occasionally drop for a few days and then go back to normal. never sure why. so I wouldn't panic yet.

your backlink profile could do with some links from real quality sites.

for my own and my client sites nothing has been affected.

in terms of scalability and maintenance, I would think they'd need to be on subdomains. it would require a lot more resource and cost if each franchise had its own url.

I think facebook should be the first call for a local franchise. that instant interaction you get with your customers really gets the word out and is hard to match any other way. a competition or giveway or in the case of my local burrito company an 'all you can eat challenge' and everyones talking about you!

hi peter, if its relevant and isn't just a re-hash of content then do it. I dont think you need to ever worry about different IPs and all that unless you are doing something you REALLY want to hide!

ezine et al are much less effective nowadays. its all about going for articles on quality sites that aren't easy to get on. ANYONE can get an article on ezine and similar sites.

It would be a shame if the footer was the problem, because from a user point of view I get to the bottom of your page after browsing the products and then I see other pages I might want to visit. to me thats useful.

how is your site looking in google webmaster tools? did you buy any links? link buying has been punished heavily recently.

ive not checked your link profile but do you have many links with 'henstuff.com', 'henstuff' and so on as the anchor? perhaps you are over-optimising like aron mentioned, and could do with a more natural link profile.

have you considered whether this could be a separate issue? maybe your site was hit by the Google penguin update for example.

Depending on the query, Google very occasionally decides to override the meta description to make the SERPS snippet more relevant. As far as I know there is no way to tell Google to always use the meta description. How relevant is the contact form text to the query?