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Hey Bernadette - thanks for the feedback. Site is back in the index now, looks like the canonicals were the culprit but the owners are keen for no future issues so I will dig in and take a look at these points. Cheers!

Hey folks

24 hours after we identified and fixed the canonical issue the site is now indexed again so it does look like it was indeed a canonical conundrum. Both the HTTP and HTTPS sites were claiming to be the canonical version so in some respects creating a conflict. We removed this conflict and it is now indexed.

Thanks for the extra eyes folks - appreciated and if anyone ever needs another pair of eyes to look a problem give me a shout.

Cheers
Marcus

Hey Krzysztof

Yeah, the page has little textual content but... neither does the amazon homepage. Ultimately the page is a jump in point for all the products and the content suits that. Certainly, I could understand Google not liking the page but would that not result in a reduced rank rather than a complete removal like this?

On the dodgy links front they have never done anything on that front - so anything there would be surprising (or just incidental cruft that is out there on scraper sites and the like).

Super odd.

Yep - super odd. 15 years or so in this game and never seen anything quite like this. Transient drops but usually it boiled down to some simple technical error or more often user error cough no index / robots.txt cough

Hey - the real issue here is the page is just not indexed. It's not there. Not that another page is a more suitable or preferential result. Ultimately that was the best page for a user to jump in at... The page is not even returned in a brand search so... can't see how any other page could be more suitable for that kind of search.

Hey folks

Hoping to get some more eyes on a specific problem I am seeing with a clients site.

Site: http:www.ukjuicers.com 

We have checked everything we can think of and the usual suspects here are not present:

• Canonical URL is in place
• Site is shown as indexed in search console
• No Crawl, DNS, Connectivity or server errors
• No robots.txt blocking - verified in search console
• No robots meta tags or directives
• Fetch as Google works
• Fetch & render works
• site command returns all other pages
• info command does not return the homepage
• homepage is cached and cache has been updated since this issue started: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ukjuicers.com
• homepage is indexed in yahoo and Bing
• all variations redirect to the www.ukjuicers.com domain (.co.uk, .com, www, sans www etc)

The only issue I found after some extensive digging was some issues with the HTTP and HTTPS versions of the site both being available and both specifying the canonical version as themselves. So, http site used canonicals with http and https site used canonicals with https. So, a conflict there with the canonical exacerbating the problem it is there to solve.

The HTTPS site is not indexed though and we have set this up in webmaster tools and now the web developer has set redirects to ensure all versions even the https now 301 redirect to the http://www.ukjuicers.com page so these canonical issues have been ironed out.

But... it's still not indexing the homepage.

The practical implications of this are quite scary - the site used to be somewhere between 1st and 4th for keywords like 'juicers', 'juicer' etc. Now they are bottom of page 1 or top of page 2 with an internal page. They were jostling with the big boys (amazon, argos, john lewis etc) but now they are right at the bottom of the second page.

It's a strange one - i have seen all manor of technical problems over the years but this one seems to defy sensible explanation. The next step is to do a full technical SEO audit of the site but I am always of the opinion that with many eyes all bugs are shallow so if anyone has any input or experience with odd indexation problems like this would love to get your input.

Cheers
Marcus

Hey Ronell

We are over in the UK and work with a bunch of folks who have cleaned up their act and are hoping to improve. We also monitor several sectors where there is competition who are not exactly playing it by the book and we expected to fall.

Recoveries

We are seeing some good movement on the recovery front. Folks who were just decimated by Penguin seeing some solid improvements - not back to where they were on the house of cards they built but certainly feels like they are back in the race again. We are seeing one major UK player we work with who is seeing a recovery but not for the homepage. The major keywords are doing much better (like 50 to 20 sort of region) but it is inner pages. Thinking this could be the granular elements we are seeing.

Penalties

The other side of the coin is the penalties and we are seeing very little on that front yet. Certain sites we monitored and expected to see a big fall for have as of yet seen much of a difference. It's like the recovery side of things has rolled out but true impact of 'real time' crawling of URLs from a devaluation perspective is yet to be revealed. Either that are this is the spammers penguin!

Cheers
Marcus

Hey

It depends on a few factors here:

1. What is the desired geographic target for each of these? I am assuming the .au and .co.uk are for Oz and UK so geo target them (auto) in webmaster tools and sign those off

2. The .com is a generic so could be competing - ensure you geo target this to the US if that is the desired geography.

This ensures they are not competing with each other and there will be no duplication issues but is based on the US, Australia and UK assumption.

Hope that helps
Marcus

Nope. No need for images. They just know about the content and link to it. The cached HTML shows they store a copy (or cache) of the HTML though. I could be wrong about the images but that would exponentially increase their storage needs so it seems unlikely.

Hey

It is not usual for a site to jump from 1st to nowhere. That is for sure. But it could be many things. First up I would check webmaster tools and look for problems there.

• Can Google crawl the site?
• Has the site been consistently available?
• Is the hosting up to spec?
• etc

Beyond that only you know what the link building and 'SEO' looks like. What are you doing to promote this site? Are you playing by the rules?

This is a process of elimination and one that must consider what you did to get this #1 ranking and how that sits with Google guidelines. Certainly though, don't panic, it could be simply that the hosting is dire or some such. Look at the search console diagnostics and report back.

Hope that helps

Marcus

Hey Archie

Google indexes everything. Images. Alt text for images. Images and their alt text. If you take a look at the cached version of a page you can see all HTML content indexed. You can see the cached version of a page by prefixing the URL with info: in a google search (or in the address bar in Chrome).

info:www.example.co.uk

I suspect that is not what you are asking though and rather you want to know whether Google uses the alt text when indexing and ranking a page. Again, I would answer that Google uses (or at least tries to use) everything. They will review the context (the page), the name of the image, the alt text and anything else that may lend context (inbound links, anchors, linking pages etc).

Googles Image Publishing Guidelines page is a good read:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/114016?hl=en

Key takeaways from that page being:

• image name
• alt text
• on page context
• linking page context

Which of course is not to say that all of these attributes are used in all cases. I would suspect they are examined but given the general lack of useful anchors and well named images they are used when possible.

Which of course opens up a great big opportunity for those where images are a useful source of inbound traffic and competitors are using lazy CMS image names like image_z343wd.jpg and default "product image" or blank anchors.

Always difficult to answer a question without context as so many moving parts but certainly hope that helps.

Take care

Marcus

Hey

Highly doubt this is anything other than a coincidence.

Hope that helps.

Marcus

Pleasure. Keep me posted.

Hey

This is tough and the article you link to covers many of the reasons why. Sure, there are penguin recoveries, but for every one of them I would venture there are ten sites still suffering. Many of these sites no longer have any (or many at least) dodgy links and it seems that algorithmic penalty is just lingering around. Will they see resolution when the algorithm updates and refreshes? At this point who knows? I don't think just because site A recovered you can make an assumption that site B will do the same.

In our experience we have seen sites really clean everything up and bounce back. We have seen sites clean everything up and not see resolution around the key pages / search terms all these years later. We have at least three folks we have worked with who don't want to change domain and who are waiting for the this somewhat overdue real time Penguin update.

It does not always seem very fair however we must accept that what is what is and look at solutions around that.

A new domain

We have seen some good results here. Sites that just could not recover using a new domain and bouncing back. We have seen this work with the same content when the other site is left up as a holding page (we have now moved). I don't think it hurts to just generally consider doing a refresh and renovation if you are going to move to a new site so you get all the on site signals 100% dialled in.

Your old site remains indexed. I would let all pages bar the homepage 404 to kill as many non homepage inbound links as possible but just have a good 404 page in place to let the user know what to do. I would likely disavow all the bad links to the old site as well so they are technically not considered.

Your new site will then exist on it's own merit so focus on getting any good links updated and just do good work on that site to make it as good as it can be. If you see keywords that are were previously 50+ jump into the 20s or so then you know you are on the right track.

My advice would be:

• clean up and disavow all links bad links to old site
• 404 all pages bar the homepage for the old site with a helpful 404 page
• add a nice little (unfollowed if you want) link to the new site
• freshen up the content and site so it is not an exact copy
• get any good links that you can updated to point at the new site
• track the old domain for a few terms to see if it does recover over time (so you can consider what to do with it then)

Experiment and report back

Ultimately you have to experiment. Keep that old site indexed. Freshen up the new one. Disavow and clean up the old links + keep an eye on the old one as it may well recover and give you more options (after careful analysis).

Much like the article you quote there is no hard and fast answer here. You have to make the best calls possible and review the results and keep tweaking.

Hope that helps!

Marcus

Hey

Not always easy to answer these questions in general terms.

• Your national keyword indicates how relevant you are for this product / service / widget for non local search queries.
• Your local keywords indicates how relevant you are for this product / service / widget for local search queries.

If you have lots of local competition then you may be stacked behind others that are closer to a given location in the search query (or the user could be closer to the competitor than to you).

Lot of assumptions here. Lot of moving parts as well. Location targeted. Organic or pack results. Location of user conducting the search. Local intent behind these keywords.

Caveat - It is often hard to advise on these issues with all the information but in a very general way like this it is incredibly hard to give truly accurate and insightful guidance.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey

I believe Matt Cutts once said that keywords in a URL help a "little bit" (1). That was like back in 2009 though so whether that is still a direct factor in the algorithm who knows. If so it would only be a 1% thing.

Looking at your three options I would be staggered if there was any ranking difference between the three of them. Personally I like #1 best if you have no specific business section on the site and #2 if you do have a business section with other articles on the site. #3 looks a bit spammy and over long (for SEO's sake only).

Ultimately though this is the wrong way to look at things - you need to look at things the way Google wants us to look at things and do what is best for your user. You want a URL that clearly indicates what the page is about and that would look good pasted into a blog post or forum or some such. You want a URL that looks the part in

You then want to make sure that everything else is helping clearly illustrate what this page is about:

• URL (our entry point)
• Page Title
• Internal Navigation / Anchors
• Breadcrumb if used
• H1 tags
• Page content
• Domain level keyword content
• External links if relevant / possible / quality etc

This is just such a tiny thing overall that I really would not sweat it - do what is right for your users and what makes most sense and the SEO aspects will take care of themselves.

Hope that helps
Marcus

References

1. http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-keywords-in-the-url-16976

Hey

I agree with Michael in that largely, directories are dead. However, the evolution of directories and sites that add value to the listings are alive and kicking. Yelp (not so much in the UK) is one but TripAdvisor is really a a directory of sorts and that provides boatloads of additional value.

In the UK we have several directory types that are alive and well:

• TripAdvisor
• Trade Directories - plumbers, electricians etc
• Care Homes

My father is actually working on a directory at the moment - it is a list of all pubs in the UK that are dog friendly. It will detail everything for dogs, walks in the area etc etc. It will allow for

So in some respects it is the wrong question - Google does not punish wholes categories of sites. Rather they demote sites that have no real value and don't add anything (or that are set up to help other sites rank and for no other reason).

To make this work you have to ideally have a USP and provide a level of value that makes it desirable for folks to look at your site rather than the sites of the businesses in this category and to build up enough traffic so the business owners want to pay to be listed and get a preferential listing etc.

Hope that helps
Marcus

Hey

This is how I would handle it if budget is a concern:

1. find or create a good looking 404 page - there are plenty of HTML templates out there.

2. add a htaccess rule to redirect all 404's to this landing page - instructions here: http://www.htaccessbasics.com/404-custom-error-page/

Hope that helps

Marcus

Hey - it's just so hard to say without a link / some research. Just focus on quality and try to understand where the problems are so you are not SEOing in the dark. You could get an experienced consultant to take a look for a few hours or get a full on SEO audit which again will give you some more intel and a prioritised approach. Certainly though you can likely learn lots from analytics by understanding where there has been a drop in traffic, engagement etc.

Always try to base the work you do on data and analysis where possible so you are not just spinning your wheels!

Hey Rosemary

This is against the guidelines for local businesses so could be problematic

Ref: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en-GB

"If your business rents a temporary, "virtual" office at an address that is different from your primary business, do not create a page for that location unless it is staffed during your normal business hours."

If we take a look at the schema page for a local business we can see that this markup is ideally for a physical business

ref: https://schema.org/LocalBusiness

"A particular physical business or branch of an organization. Examples of LocalBusiness include a restaurant, a particular branch of a restaurant chain, a branch of a bank, a medical practice, a club, a bowling alley, etc."

So - to go back to your question I am not sure it is spam as such but it is incorrect in how you are using the mark up. This is not a 'physical business or branch of an organisation' and as such the schema markup is used incorrectly. I would remove the schema markup in this instance.

However - there is no reason why you would not have a location pages for a service area - none at all and you can do these pages well and they can provide real value to a customer in the targeted location. They won't rank in the local pack but they may well rank in the organic results below (or be used for paid traffic)

I wrote about location landing pages in some depth here:
http://searchengineland.com/local-seo-landing-pages-2-0-222583

Hope that helps clear things up for you.

Cheers
Marcus