Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Great response from Tim.

To add a few further pointers:

1. There are some great lists of citations around so take a look  and get a list together

2. Total volume of citations matters and more is generally better (there are diminishing returns obviously) and you wan to make sure you have all of the important ones your competitors have. You can easily dig in and see you local competitors citations with some Google-Fu:

“Competitor biz name” AND “Competitor zip” -site:http://www.competitorssite.co.uk

This will show you a good batch of citations for your competitors (look at the top 3) and you can create a hit list.

3. Quality of citations - beyond getting the NAP 100% consistent and dialled in make sure you look at each one of the citations as a potential advertisement for your business. Build in your keywords and the service areas into the description as well to work on that co-occurance of keywords and improve the ability for your site to rank for these sub areas.

4. Reviews - 5 reviews will generally give you a bit of a boost (around 2 places). 10 reviews will give you a quality score in your listings again which can influence clicks and more importantly persuade customers to get in touch. Create a policy to drive positive reviews. Don't cheat, but ask clients you know who are happy if they would not mind reviewing. If you can figure out a way to get them to work in your keywords and location into the review as well then that will only help (again, don't cheat, don't build dodgy reviews, they will know and it will hurt the other good work - do this properly).

5. Make sure your on page optimisation is dialled in 100% - no excuses on that one

**6. **As with the citations make sure your Google+ listing is as good as it can be. Images, video, a great description. Don't just copy and paste the same description, write it out each time so it is a little different. Take your time. Do it properly.

7. Local links are also important so if there are local business organisations or sites then look to get links (and possibly citations) from those sources as well.

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Local is deep and complex when competitive but in most cases, in the UK at least where we operate, it is easy to get up there with some simple strategies as listed above and small businesses can get found by local customers without having to do some of the bigger player strategies that are sometimes out of reach.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Penguin can and often does have page specific problems. In fact, most often it seems the homepages of many sites are most affected and seemingly Penguin 2.0 does a better job of targeting inner pages.

I have worked with several companies who are still struggling to rank their homepage after Penguin yet can generate traffic to their inner pages.

Firstly, I would not jump to assume there are lots of problems with the site, perform an audit if you are unsure but don't make this as an assumption. Use known penalty dates to review traffic and anoint the analytics so you can get a clear picture of which updates caused the traffic drops for a quick and easy way to get more intel.

More often than not I am now advising people to just start over on a new domain and redirecting the old (not with a 301) to the new. This is painful, and many folks are holding onto domains but if clean up is not working and is not practical to continue down this route then a clean domain gives you a fresh start.

I have just had a quick look at the backlink profile in OSE and it does not look like your standard penguinised site though. Are you sure about the cause of the loss of traffic? Do the drops coincide with known penguin dates?

Really, the analytics should be your first port of call here and tools like this will help you easily map algorithm change dates to traffic changes: http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/

Then, investigate further from there on in. If links do seem to be an issue link detox is a quick and easy way to get a good grasp on what kind of links your client has.

Ultimately, it needs investigation but start with analytics, form your hypothesis and try to prove it and then feed back here.

Hope that helps

Marcus

Hey Romaine

The campaign tool is making a general recommendation based on the best practice advice of only having 100 links tops on a page. That is all fine and dandy but the reality is that this has to be thought about in the context of your site and your users.

What this ultimately means is that you are spreading the internal page rank between those 115 pages fairly evenly. Now, if those 115 pages are all of equal importance then great, but if not, if some of them are just blog categories or the like then you are missing an opportunity to promote the most important pages in your internal hierarchy.

To decide what to do try asking yourself these questions:

• What are my most important pages?
• Can I restructure my site so the less important pages are linked to from elsewhere?

What you will probably find is that you can rethink your navigation and lose the side bar or make that a navigation element on a sub page. This focusses the internal page rank on the important pages and still allows you to provide navigation where needed.

It's hard to give a general answer on any of this stuff as there are so many moving parts and it all depends on what is right for your site and your users. This is a good read by the ever readable and reliable Dr. Pete on the subject:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

Hope that helps and certainly fire over a link and I will take a look and feedback.

In the meanwhile, this is not optimal, but it's not the end of the world either so don't blow a gasket!

Hope that helpsMarcus

Hey Axial

As far as I am aware there is no option to target regions like Europe and to do this in webmaster tools you will need to create a folder for each country you are looking to target within Europe.

Obviously, there are lots of different languages across Europe so in an ideal world, you will want a version geotargeted to each country in the correct language. If you want to be really fancy you will want a version with english and the relevant countries language.

So, for spain as an example, targeting Spanish and English the hreflang would be set as "ES-es" and "ES-en" (Spain-Spanish and Spain-English). Directories could be matched /es-es & /es-en.

Not an answer as such but as far as I am aware, Europe is not targetable in a single folder via webmaster tools so you are going to have to work with what's available.

Hope that helps

Marcus

Hey Mike

It's not so much a case of the titles not 'being indexed' or read but more to do with how they display in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

If your page is long, then the title is going to be cut off. Also, the general goal is to have your keywords at the beginning of the title to get the most bang for your buck.

Specifics depend on the site but it is nice to have the page title like the title of a book and consider your site as the author. Have it short, punchy but descriptive and also state the author so:

Small Business SEO Packages | BowlerHat.co.uk

is better than

Do better in the search engines with small business SEO packag..

Your title has one job to do:

describe the page in a way that search engines and users can understand. So, if the description of the page is done by Yahoo in a sub optimal way then yeah, it will hurt your ranking and it will negatively affect the amount of people that click on the link when it is displayed.

Lose - Lose | YourSite.co.uk

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey Tim

I just stumbled over this post so it's a late answer, however, maybe worth throwing in my tuppence / five cents here.

I think we are pretty much at the point with all of this that if a small business client comes to you and asks for links then they likely have a bigger problem than actually just needing a bit of a boost for a few keywords.

If your client is thinking about buying links to simply do better in search then rather than just pointing them towards someone who may (or may not) do a good job the better advice would be pointing them towards a consultant who help them devise a real strategy. Buying links is not a strategy.

If I think about all of the clients I have worked with this year I don't think I have thought a single time - well, what you need is just a few more links. And, often, even when someone may come to us asking for us to build links, we more often than not try to look at ways to do something bigger and better.

I guess the point I am trying to make here is to ask the question - why? Why do you want links? What is the real goal? No business thinks we will make it this year if we can just get some more links so what is the real need here.

It's just too much of a can of worms to look at possibles but in many cases a well placed guest post on a highly visible site may generate more exposure and qualified click through traffic than the benefit that ten links may bring.

Some, stealthy placement on high ranking industry directories may help raise the profile and get more click through traffic again.

Some well placed citations and local SEO may be more than enough for many a small business or local business.

The possibilities are kind of endless but usually, links are not the entire answer and in many cases are not the biggest part of it.

Obviously, it all depends, but the point I am making is often, if they are asking for links, and you really want to give them some help, first ask them why and then try to direct them towards someone who can help them devise a real strategy that will drive exposure, referral traffic and likely a few bang-up links as part of the process.

Obviously, on the dawn of Penguin 2.0 (4.0?) having a strategy that is not built around getting more links is even more important than ever.

Not an answer as such, but hopefully food for thought! 
Marcus

In my experience, if you have this message again, you still have links they don't like. 35% of linking domains is not a great deal and as Stephen said, whilst Link Detox gives you a good starting place you really do have to audit these links in a brutal fashion.

You have 15000 external links from 2000 sites - that's a hell of a lot of links for a semi popular blog let alone a site that does not really publish any content that would attract links.

If you are holding onto links as you think they are 'ok' or because they 'don't look too bad' then you may need to get a whole lot more aggressive with what you remove.

Also, just because you remove the manual penalty, don't expect things to be amazing afterwards.

An alternative approach to finding the bad links and getting them removed is to identify the good ones and consider getting them repointed to a new URL and starting again with a rebrand / new URL. It can be easier to get a response from the good sites than it can be getting a response from the bad ones.

Failing that get a whole lot more aggressive with what you remove.

Hope that helps!

Marcus

Cool, never came across that tool, will give it a whirl.

First thing you want to do here is do some research.

1. Keyword Research - find the keywords you are interested in (obviously)

2. Do these keywords generate local results blended in with the main results?

3. If so - research the current ranking sites.

• How are they categorised
• what citations do they have?
• what do the citations look like?
• How is the actual site optimised for these terms?
• What is their organic ranking for these terms?
• What is their backlink profile look like?

A good way to dig into the competitors is to simply google their name, postcode and then remove their site from the results. This will get you started:

"Competitor" AND "Post Code" -site:http://www.competitor.co.uk

4. Think reviews - get reviews on your Google listing and also on any other relevant sites (looking at the local listings you should see external review sources mentioned if there are any worth considering).

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Ultimately, you are going to want to do some local SEO - citations, local backlinks etc but you first want to make sure you have all the basics in place and the site and google maps listings are all correctly categorised. Then, get busy on those citations and get creative - anything can be a citation so think

• Press releases
• Q&A Sites
• Videos and Image descriptions
• Social profiles
• forum profiles & sigs
• Guest post bios
• article bios

Obviously, go after the directories where you can get listed. Look for any local directories or sites for citations and for industry specific directories.

Also, make sure you get the basics right. Get the name, address and postcode on every page of the site and make sure it is consistent with the Google listings. If you already have some citations, audit them and make sure everything is consistent there as well.

That should be enough to but in a nutshell dig in, research, find out what the successful people are doing and do more of it.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey,

Few things going on here.

If they are PR4 and not in use, there is likely a reason for that and they are probably somewhat tainted. You could likely get this overthrown if you are buying them for genuine purposes by putting in a reconsideration request in.

That said, there was a recent Matt Cutts video where he advised against this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=lGUw9oS5csI

I would at the very least do your homework.

1. Find out what used to be on the domain (wayback machine)

2. Search for backlinks to the domain

3. Look at citations and the history

At the very least, as Matt says in his video, do some research and don't be the sucker that buys a spammy domain!

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey,

The obvious points seem to have been covered already:

• no correlation with traffic drops on known algorithm change dates

• no manual penalty

Can you provide a little more info so we can dig into this?

• A link to your site
• An example of a page (or pages) that won't rank for a given term

There are a lot of moving parts here and you could be the victim of sites that linked to you being deindexed or penalised, of some kind of phrase specific drop but without more data we are simply guessing here.

I would do the following:

1. Dig into your analytics and take a look at the drop date. Compare this to the algorithm dates here on SEOMoz or use the super cool panguintool.com to see all updates and algorithm changes overlaid over your anlaytics.

2. Taking anything gleaned from the above review the traffic drop in your analytics. Look at the period two weeks before and after the drop (you indicated it was sudden?) - look at the landing pages, the keywords, what are the big changes? This again gives you more intel to further your investigation. Is the entire drop tied into a couple of keywords that are now performing more poorly.

3. Audit your site - how is the accessibility? How well is it indexed? Is there duplication? Other technical problems? There is a good self audit post on here that will get you started: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-perform-the-worlds-greatest-seo-audit

4. Audit your back links - where have they come from? What are they like? Editorial? Directories? Are the linking sites indexed or do they appear to have been penalised? Use some of the tools out there like Link Detective and Link Detox from Link Research Tools to give you some more intel.

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There will a reason for this but without a link it is impossible to give anything other than general advice. If the link is sensitive fire me a PM. I will still feedback here in the public forum for all to benefit but I will maintain your anonymity if that's important.

If you can drop a link, you will benefit from several SEO super sleuths taking a look so I would always recommend that.

Anyhow, I hope that helps!

Marcus

Keep an eye on the cached version of the page - once it is updated you may see something straight away but I would tend to give it a couple of weeks after the page is crawled.

Hard to say but it smells like algorithmic filtering of sorts - they were picked up for some reason and are now downgraded.

My approach would be to do an experiment, pick one page, totally rewrite it, track it's progress against the other pages.

Always try to apply scientific rigour, change one variable, measure the results, use that information to steer further decisions or inspire further tests and experiments.

Hey, not to say there are not other issues, but that is an obvious line of investigation and worth pursuing if only to tick it off the list - a real audit would dig a lot deeper!

As Dr. Marie said, it's an odd one to be Bing specific - that's what piqued my interest!

Good luck! 
Marcus

SEO Audit Checklist:

1. Does homepage load?

Seriously though, given the seeming instability of the site my first port of call would be Google and Bing webmaster tools as the site, or homepage oddly enough is currently unavailable.

Beyond that, your site seemingly has 776,000 indexed pages (site: search so  approx) so a penalty audit is no five second job.

What makes you suspect a penalty? Can you provide any more info?

Marcus

Hey, ahrefs is a little better for this. Hope that helps. Marcus

Okay, quick look at three pages that have dropped from Bing.

If I take a chunk of text from the homepage and google it in double quotes I often find 50 or more pages with the same content. Not a good start but at least your page comes up first indicating that you are at least the owner / originator of the content.

If we do the same in Bing, I am finding your pages, but only after several others with the same content AND bing ranks other sites above your site indicating a problem.

What to do? Well, it depends. How did this content get onto all these other sites? Has it been pinched from your site? If so, you need a content audit and to find any other sites using your content and to ask them to take it down.

You could try some DMCA takedown requests but often, if this is an old site and you have been wildscale plundered I have found rewriting the content is often easier on your site.

As an example, I have a client I have worked with for 10 years or more. We set them up and they have been pretty much ruling the roost in their little niche for years and were the first site to really set up doing what they do we believe.

Well, long before panda or penguin they suddenly dropped out of search and I had a panicked phone call. A bit of digging found literally hundreds of sites all over the world that had copied content, also, some pretty much out and copies of the website (with not all links replaced as well so still pointing to some pages on the source site).

We tried to contact all these folks but in the end just used it as an excuse to freshen up the content and do a rewrite and it bounced back.

Now, not saying you don't have other problems, it was the quickest of quick looks but certainly, this is the direction I would go in.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hmm, interesting, so are these new pages that rank well and then drop out of search? Again, near impossible to provide any more feedback without a link but feel free to fire me a PM or email and I will feedback here (keeping your anonymity intact)

Hey

We specialise in SEO Audits which can cover a range or problems (including penalty analysis) but it can also be something that you can do on your own. Certainly, there is a lot of moving parts and it depends on the complexity of the site, the history and a number of other variables.

So, for starters, can you provide a URL for some feedback? Additionally, can you provide any other details?

• History
• Platform (CMS : WordPress, Magento etc)
• Problems including dates and any additional information

As a starting point that should enable you to get some feedback from the community and the problem may be quite apparent and tied to known dates with algorithm updates.

First up take a look at your analytics and then compare any obvious drops to this:
http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

Then, if you find a date that tallies up, take a look at your traffic for two weesk before and after the drop. Check out search terms, landing pages and anything else important to see what was most effected and build a list of terms and pages to start your further analysis.

Then, with http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ you can examine these individual pages and anchor text terms and look for obvious patterns and problems with external elements.

If, it is more of a panda type penalty then you can use services like copyscape to get an idea of what is going on from a duplicate content perspective.

Ultimately, there are so many permutations and possibilities that without a URL and some more info it's near impossible for anyone to give you any more targeted feedback.

Certainly though, if you would like someone to take a look, give me a shout and I can at least give you some quick feedback. Other folks of note from this forum are Ryan from Vitopian and Dr. Marie who are both well versed with penalties and good, honest folks.

Hope that helps

Marcus

Hey Gianluca

The site is going to be on an .es domain and it is for a small local business that serves Spanish and English speakers (ex pats).

This is really useful though:

"Hence, if you are only interested in Spain for whatever reason, than the hreflang should be set es "ES-es" and "ES-en" (Spain-Spanish and Spain-English)."

Thanks again for the input, I actually read one of your posts on here when I was gearing up to figure out the best way to do this - for anyone else interested this is a great read:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust

Thanks for the input all.

Marcus