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One of the quickest ways to diagnose many sudden ranking changes is to check the Google Algorithm Change history that Dr Pete maintains here: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

If there have been not recent changes to the site and no external factors (big shifts in link patterns for instance) then a change in the algo is the likeliest cause of sudden change.  These can be spotted by the dates when changes occur.  Look at your traffic stats (or ranking reports if you check frequently) and try to pin down the date of the change.  Compare that with the change history page and you have a good idea of whether it was an algo change impacting you.

Doing this also gives you some good insights in to how to then deal with the traffic change. With each algorithm update we get clues as to what is going on.   Learn what you can about the update that impacted you and take lessons from that.

That is pretty high. However don't assume that all bounces are bad.  A bounce can actually be an indication that your site has done it's job well - it's down to the intent of the user.

I prefer to look at bounce rates either by page or by term.  If people are bouncing on terms that are likely to have commercial intent then that isn't great. However for informational searches it might mean that the site is answering their query.  That strong content might be the cause - you're becoming a reference site.  Not necessarily bad.

However, bounces rarely pay bills...  Try separating out searches with commercial and informational intent and compare both the volume and bounce rate.  That might give some indication as to how best to tackle the issue (and what issue you are tackling).

If you have a high bounce rate on terms with commercial intent then look at the quality of your product information, pricing, issues around trust etc.  If you can get outside opinion on it, even a small sample, that can help.

Conversely, if the problem is that you have an overly large proportion of research only terms then if could be that you need to look at how to increase visibility on the more commercial terms, or possibly look at ways to turn those information seekers in to customers (check loyaly and visits to purchase... they might be already, but just taking their time).

Pretty big topic actually.

_ but could you confirm thatbuilding long term acquisition of higher quality links will be back my ranking soon_

I think it is your best bet.  I can't promise that it will work and neither can I promise that it will work quickly. However, without auditing your site, I would say that it very likely what you need.

I'd change the priorities a bit from "My goal is to increase traffic, thereby sales" to "My goal is to increase sales". It's a semantic change but helps you avoid one of the big SEO traps and helps keep you focused.

So, with that new goal in mind what will people who are going to buy your product search for? Those are the terms I would hit first. Forget traffic only terms, brand building, product awareness and the rest for now unless you have a big budget and focus on the terms that are going to make the till ring!

Even if those phrases are not the ones you are ranking best for those high converting phrases are gong to be your bread and butter in money terms so the sooner you start focusing on them the better.

When researching those terms be careful to think of the intent of someone using them. For instanc, if you were selling tents the obviousl choice might be "camping", but the intention of someone doing that search could be almost anything. "3 berth tents" might be a much lower volume term, but might be used by people much closer to making that till ring!

Targeted traffic terms have an important part to play. However I tend to lean towards the money terms at the outset and start justifying my fees.

Where are these being flagged as duplicate? Just here in SEOmoz tools?

If so, I'd raise a ticket about that. domain/ and domain shouldn't flag as duplicate. Certainly Google doesn't treat those as separate resources otherwise everyone would have a problem.

Why do you say that the self hosting of video is better for SEO?  I'd disagree.

I'd much rather host it with a specialised service that ensures fast streaming, widespread CDNs etc. Hosting elsewhere doesn't have to mean letting them compete against you with your own video like youtube.  Vimeo is a good and affordable solution for video hosting that doesn't self publish all the videos.

Most importantly, both domains are still serving the content. In fact they appear to be serving it with and without the www. as well, which isn't ideal.

You need to make sure that the old domain does a 301 redirect to the new one.  Your webmaster can probably sort this out for you in minutes by editing the .htaccess file.

That will make sure that people are always redirected to the correct domain. It will also ensure that google is always redirected to the correct domain. Additionally, the equity passed from links pointing to the old domain will also be passed to the new one.

It's a very easy fix and will probably sort out the issue for you and bring a few additional benefits very quickly.

If that is the sort of thing you are looking for then you will enjoy the following list of lists:

http://www.peterattia.com/a-list-of-link-building-lists/

Spotted that on twitter a few days ago, it's quite a list.  There are social bookmarking sites on there, but all sorts of other things as well: Review sites, local listings, social profiles etc. One stop shop for easy low quality stuff

Yes and No!    (that was helpful, wasn't i??!)

Google is smarter than seomoz crawler when it comes to dealing with this issue.  semoz seems to flag up home page variants quite often, but I haven't seen this cause a problem for a major search engine in years.  Generally  then it's pretty safe.

However - you do have some similar problems. To check the above I did a couple of searches for phrases that appear on your home page, limiting the results to pages off your domain.  Whilst the domain.com vs domain.com/index issue doesn't seem to be a problem, you do have something weird going on with your home page.

The following pages do appear to be duplicates of your home page, and these ARE appearing in the index:

https://www.monteverdetours.com/~desafio/

https://www.monteverdetours.com/index.html?iframe=true&width=95%25&height=95%25

And your home page isn't being listed properly.

What you need to do ASAP:

1. Consistently link to your home page: Where you have the home link up next to the sitemap link that to the home page throughout the site. Just to the www.domain.com version
2. Log in to google webmaster tools and tell it so ignore the following url parameters:
   • iframe
   • width
   • height
3. Look at getting a canonical tag added throughout your site to ensure that the correct URL is always indexed

I hope that is helpful.

The only thing I can think of is related to facebook not twitter. Posts made by 3rd party apps were beleived to have inherently lower edgerank. I don't think that was officially confirmed though.

Can't think of anything for twitter.

Guest blogging as an activity isn't frowned on.  Guest building as a way to manipulate link authority (or in fact anything as a way to manipulate link authority) is.  In that video Cutts says this in the first sentance "Guest blogging for links"

Like most things in SEO it is how you do it.  If I write some quality pieces for well respected blogs and these include followed links to my sites (as do many other types of sites / pages of varying types) that is very unlikely to ever cause a problem.  That is very different to having a strategy that involves large amounts of guest posts on sites of questionable value with a high proportion of guest posts and I have little else of more weight to back up my link profile.

I really think the "black hat / white hat" metaphor doesn't help people with SEO.  In truth there is a LOT of grey - it's almost all just shades of grey.  Most methods lose their shiny whiteness if you try to scale them up - particularly if you dumb them down at the same time. Most "frowned on" methods can still be used very effectively if you are selective and intelligent in your link building and keep focused on quality over quantity.

Don't believe me?  Start another question here on moz.com and ask "If the Huffington post (#1 blog in the world according to Technorati) asked you to write an article about something you are passionate about and said you could have a follow link in it, would you use that link?" .    I don't know many professional SEOs that would say no.

Looks like you are in the UK. If that is right I wouldn't be overly concerned. It's certainly better than it being the other way around. Contentious view, so let me elaborate.

Google marketshare in the UK is generally reported as be 90-92%. Whilst it would be nice to pick up more of the remaining 8-10% I think that there are 2 questions to ask yourself before putting much effort in to Bing, Yaho et al:.

1. Are you likely to get a better return from building rank on other search engines, or by working more on your Google results?

2. How much are you willing to risk your google results to rank in other engines?

Now for the good news: The results across engines to correspond more "at the top end". As your site becomes close to the obvious choice for  a search it is more likely to appear across multiple engines.

Tricky this, as it depends on how it is being used.

Plenty of sites include dynamic content that will differ to different users. This can be for a number of legitimate reasons including serving different geographic content. If you are targeting general (non geographic) terms and every version of that page is serving those phrases well there should be no harm.

However, if the aim is to rank for [keyword placename] type searches and use the geographic targeting to do that then that is unlikely to work.  If that were the aim you would probably be better served by having distinct pages for the pages and using the clienlocation API to direct users towards the most relevant one for them.

Hi Pedram. Complex looking questions, but I think that the answers are fairly straight forward.

1. Short version, yes.  As you say, this will allow your blog to benefit from the authority of your main site.  I say short answer, as it is a little dependent on what you want to achieve, but presumably you want to rank the blog posts, so "Yes".

2. I'm not personally a bit wordpress fan. I am also a big fan of bespoke build.  Despite those 2 facts I would struggle to find any justification of bespoke over wordpress other in some very specific circumstances.

Best practice would mostly revolve around updating inbound links and 301ing from the old address.

3. Yes. Possibly even easier, as there are plugins that will set it all up in the right places for you.

Wow - sounds like a fun project! Are people really going to share anything that dull though? Sounds like the content is the issue not the platform.

I'll assume you mean "niche" rather than "dull". If it is interesting to the target audience then you have a chance. If not then you're stuffed whatever platform you use.  So - interesting, but only if you are the right type of geek.

You just need to find where those geeks are hanging out. I tend to find twitter is good for those smaller niche groups, but that is partly because they are easier to find thanks to tools like followerwonk. It is very dependent on the niche though.

The section should be there anyway - even before you link (just without data).   It is now called "publisher" and can be found under behaviour.

There is no penalty as such for having a single hyphen in a domain.  There are some related considerations though:

Is the domain likely to cause any confusion? Depending on how you are marketing the site a hyphenated domain can be a pain. Trust me: The main domain I have used for the last 16 years has a hyphen. I get very bored of spelling it out and having the whole "Dash.. no dash - a hypen. Like a minus sign... no that's an underscore" conversation on the phone.

If the non hypenated version of the same is being used for anything similar that can present bigger issues.

Also, hyphenated domains can look more spammy or "low rent", although that isn't usually a big issue with a single hyphen in the name. However it could potentially have a small impact on click through rates in some sectors.

However, short answer is "not really".

Caffeine was a back-end improvement that Google implemented in 2010. The idea was to provide more up to date results for topical and fast moving stories.

From a user perspective there is nothing to worry about. You search - stuff happens. Whether caffeine impacts on that stuff isn't important.

There is a user level explanation of Caffeine here

From and SEO perspective then if you have been doing stuff that works for the last couple of years then don't worry explicitly about caffeine - you've been dealing with it's impact anyway.  If you are struggling to rank for breaking stories or those that are updated quickly then it is more of a consideration.

If the numbers are at that level I would completely agree with you.

Are they tracking conversions? How many conversions would they have got from those 5000 visits and what is the value?  It might be a simpler argument to say "Here is the cost of new site + maintenance. This is what it earned.   Here is how I could better use that same budget if we focused on one site".  I find that those business cases type arguments are a lot easier to get across sometimes that explaining the SEO rational.

It depends on what you are trying to achieve. I'd agree that a lot of the time people are requesting likes without any real purpose, however they can be very useful too.

A like to your faceboook page is like joining your mailing list. It gives the page owner a way to contacting people with their message (albeit it through the filter of Facebooks edgerank algorythm). Very useful indeed.

A like of your page/site makes that visible to the connections of the person who likes the page (again, some - depending on edgerank). Useful as it gets your site seen.