Welcome to the Q&A Forum

It's actually not the wrong position. Someone, for some reason, saw it at that spot. It could be that you have a few Google+ connections or the keywords are hyperlocal and thus someone who's VERY close to the target location could find it? Whatever it is, I always see these type of confusing scenarios in my reports. I once had searches for "facebook" coming to me but it ended up my 1000 Google+ fans were seeing it after I wrote a post about Facebook advertising and linked it. I was ranking #2 (on their computer) for the word Facebook. lol

I think this depends on how much different the focus KWs are.  For a wedding & portrait photographer, I would target the harder KW (wedding) to the homepage and "portrait" to a "services" page (along with a backup "wedding" page - that was optimised differently.  Having both on one site would be fine since they're related.

However, if you sell tents and do tours of Africa, well ... I'd probably have two sites for that.  If you sell tents and you're a personal trainer, two sites for sure.

Hope that helps!

If the site you're looking to move out of the top results is a big site (newspaper, etc.) you likely won't be able to do it.

Unfortunately, we've found that Google seems to use some sort of sentiment analysis to keep a mix of good & bad on page 1 if good & bad both exist.  We've spent a LOT of time (and money) trying to figure out a way around this but the fact is, if there's good AND bad, you're likely going to see both.

If the site is less difficult to move, what you're going to start with is some profiles, web 2.0, etc. just to see what takes.

I would try searching your site like site:yourdomain.com in Google to make sure you're indexed. Check your robots.txt and your meta robots tag to ensure you aren't blocking the page for some reason. Then check that it's linked to that page in your site via links that are not nofollow.

After that it would mainly depend on competitiveness, depth of the competitor sites and link building, title & onsite SEO. I can take a look if you post the URL or if it's private, PM me.

You're asking a slightly different question than what was answered but let me clear it up 100% for you:

Yes, you're on a subdomain.  Yes, that's not generally ideal if you're trying to rank company.com and you also want blog.company.com   You would instead want company.com/blog (in most cases.)

However, you're on a fresh subdomain, as your main URL. That will work just fine.

In fact, the last time I downloaded the Majestic Million there were over 170,000 of the top 1M on subdomains.

Some famous subdomains you may know:

• maps.google.com
• itunes.apple.com
• get.adobe.com
• online.wsj.com
• news.yahoo.com
• abcnews.go.com
• money.cnn.com

Hope that helps!  I wouldn't worry much about it if you're happy with the uk.com address.

I got back to your message about adult SEO & marketing adult products before but never heard back from you. SEO is possible in this space and works fairly well. You should also be focused on growing a couple email lists from content-rich sites. Remarketing from people who see your web of properties during their searches works very similarly to other industries.

As far as link building, you're going to want to hire someone with experience in adult SEO. People who haven't done it are basically just starting from scratch. If you haven't ranked an adult product it can be VERY difficult.

Your target market is also pretty easy to pinpoint for paid ads (avoid social media) and you should be able to see results for your campaign.

(Just a sidenote: I get a LOT of inquiries from this answer. If you need adult SEO help please use this site.)

These type of scenarios are very hard to diagnose without specific details such as the text of the penalty and what the site is but let me give you a few reasons:

1. Anchor text way over done for the brand or for a main keyphrase. This can result in lowered rankings on that keyphrase while maintaining authority on others.

2. Specific penalty addressing these anchors, particular links that have now been devalued totally, etc. If you had a lot of links to "keyphrase 1" anchors and then Google devalued & penalised those links, you'd rank for other terms but not those.

If the brand name is fairly generic, overcooked anchors would be my first guess - but again, it's just a guess. There are probably 6-10 different potential causes of this.

There are a number of different penalties so without specifics this can be hard to answer but by far the most common we see is a partial link penalty.  Basically, you built some "crap" so Google chooses to ignore it and not give you the value. Usually results in what looks like a full page, 2 page or 5+ page drop.  (Keywords that were page 1 drop to 2 or 3, keywords on 2 drop to page 5, etc.)

You would need a link clean up, maybe disavow & reconsideration request if you have this (or the full link based manual penalty.)  If you don't have a message in Webmasters Tools, you may also be talking about Penguin - an "algorithmic penalty" (not a true penalty.)  If this is what you mean, similar steps will be taken.  In either case you will also need to find a way to continue gaining authority.  Disavow / recon without authority building won't get you very far.

Cardinal Path, a leading Adwords educator & (I believe) educational partner of Google suggested about 15 different tools here.

I'm very fond of Spyfu but also check out Wordstream, Keyword Spy & SEMRush.

I haven't checked the pricing for all of these but all are paid tools at some level. Keyword Competitor does have a 30 day free trial and a few have limited free trials as well.

This is one of the biggest issues I see with ecommerce sites these days. Automatic feeds of data, titles, descriptions, product info, etc. right into the store. It never ranks all that well without massive authority.

To be honest, the more you can change pre-import the better. Add something to the titles, change them up manually with an intern - whatever it takes to create unique value. For a while I was outranking Polyvore, David Jones & Amazon for the word "skirt" just because my product and category descriptions were massively different than anything on Google at the time (longer, more detailed, more useful.)

In this type of situation, don't be afraid to experiment. You're not going to outrank eBay, Amazon or the OEM for most products individually but if you try mixing things up you may find weaknesses that are easy enough to exploit. Whenever I imported, I'd alter the CSV files directly and then import. Made life so much better (and drastically improves rankings on long tail searches.)

(A small, small e-tailer won't do this but a mid size to large one always should be.)

Your username 'admin' is also still active. I would suggest this is likely how they got into your site in the first place.  Suggest changing the username admin as soon as possible.

I believe most of Aleyda Solis' epic international SEO checklist is still valid.

You'll also want to check a couple of updated & interesting articles here and here.

If you do end up using hreflang tags you can test them with the Flang tool. This ensures the tags you've setup are done correctly.

With hreflang you won't need alt languages but hreflang handles both language & location (region specific). So en-au and en-us are same language, different countries. Take a look through the documentation for it and see if you have further questions.

Yes, the move to HTTPS takes a while sometimes to fully swap over to your new versions. In the meantime, you may see some dips in ranking even though Google swears this doesn't happen. We have verified several times that it does.

In the meantime, check your website in Google using site: and you'll see that there's a mix of https and non-https.

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=site:www.thepresentfinder.co.uk/&gws_rd=ssl

Fetch your site in Search Console, check your sitemap for https links and then resubmit sitemap in Search Console. Then it's just a waiting game on Google's end.

To be honest, I don't know. I don't think anyone "knows" the answer to this.

You should be 'allowed' to post your link on a forum that allows you to post your link. Google does try to make pretty much all links irrelevant but in our experience, they aren't yet. Links still matter (a lot.)  I think niche links in your own industry on relevant forums where you're active?  Those are at least in the top 50% of all links you could possibly see online. If they're no good, what is?

(Yes, Google wants "links you don't control." I get that and it makes sense. But they're built so infrequently that it's very difficult to judge billions of sites based on a few uncontrolled links from a few major brands. (We had a client get a sitewide link from ebay.com.au against our advice. It penalised the client's site ... so even a link from Ebay itself can hurt you if it's the wrong link.)

I would leave these links. You can always disavow later but it's harder to get them back if you disavow now.

SEO Book has a keyword density tool ... maybe not the same but worth a quick peek?

http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/

Majestic keeps the best, most & oldest backlinks. They're also the best for disavows and bad links as Moz focuses more on the best links you have and Ahrefs focuses on a really big group - but a lot of domain duplication.

So I have Ahrefs & Majestic & Moz (OSE) for link tools but mainly focus on Majestic.

Ahrefs has the best content-related tool (by far at the moment) and Moz has the best single-site tracking (of the 3.)

I love Spyfu but don't use it enough to justify having so I let it go.

I think you may also need to look into what Rand said here: http://moz.com/community/q/have-questions-about-the-jan-27th-mozscape-index-update-get-answers-here

According to Rand, Moz is indexing a bit of different stuff lately. This means that DA & PA will change depending on the link comp of your site.

I would start there - and not worry much about it. PA & DA are guides but don't determine your rankings.

Go here:

https://www.seomoz.org/users/settings

Select Edit

Check "I'd like to receive New Private Message email notifications."

Update settings.

I see 260ish links for the old site in Ahrefs and 12 for the new. The old site had plenty of decent backlinks (lauflaw, askthepalawyer, goinglegal, etc.) and a few that definitely needed to go (londover, the India spam, poeticdictionary etc.)

The links on the new one are good - but there aren't many.

I would highly recommend a disavow on the old domain and then a page by page 301 to the most relevant page. By passing some of that good juice on the old site you can quickly jumpstart the rankings for the new one but starting by cleaning up his profile and doing things right going forward.

260 links isn't much to go through for a disavow. You can quickly get a win here with this plan.

There are two reasons you see fewer than 10,000 results.

1) The LSAPI has a max requests of 10,000 but your actual number of results will be the "Total Links" number when you first run your OSE search.   So that part is "Max" 10,000 not necessarily what you're getting.  Let's say your total results are 2500.  Assuming unique domains, you'll get an export of 2500.

2. On the other hand, you see 2500 in the search but only get 450 but when you export.: OSE only reports the top 25 results from each external domain so if you have 500 from one domain, you're going to "lose" 475 results when you export.  Do that for a few domains and 2500 quickly becomes 500, etc.

Make sense on both parts?