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Run far, run fast. Paid for links and pyramids are never a good plan. Your link profile needs to be natural and linked to QUALITY pages with QUALITY content.

More and more, each Penguin update urges SEOs to understand that it isn't the QUANTITY of your links, but the QUALITY. One of my competitors has over 1,000,000 links and I outrank them with 4800. I have quality content and a strong, quality link profile.

I cannot stress the importance of working on a natural link profile. The mantra for this strategy is "easy come, easy go". It is not a permanent solution, nor is it best practice. Please don't waste your money on something like this.

My company gets a ton more traffic from Bing than Google. I have found (could be a coincidence) that I get far more conversions and technical support questions from Bing as well. I have lost some rankings in Bing because of the changes I have made to my site to keep up with best practice for Google. However strange it might sound, I haven't suffered any traffic or conversions from the loss of rankings in Bing.

Do you ever use your Bing Webmaster Tools? They are a little less insightful than GWT, but BWT does offer some insight to help your rankings. I would start there first.

Good Luck!

Moz updated their API as well, so I think a lot of companies saw a change in DA over the past week. Check out the Mozscape info. The last two updates have affected rankings over the past few weeks. Keep an out for messages in GWT and your search impressions. Hang tight while things settle down in the algo world.

I believe that for Facebook and Twitter you can only block profanity. I agree, it is a terrible thing to have to fight negativity on SM. Some people would say try to fight the negative reviews by offering free stuff or simply publicly apologizing. I would say remove the negative comments if possible. I don't think you can remove the reviews though.

The example I kind of live by is the BBB. No matter how many negative complaints you get, you can keep a good reputation and rating by resolving the problems. If the in house customer service team can't fix the issues, and they don't make it to the boss except through Social Media, maybe this will be the eye opener to get things progressing.

What kind of local optimization are you doing on your site? Is you address posted on your site, maybe in the footer so it is on every page? Do you have any content on your site that optimizes your location?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tz7Eexwp_A

This is video by Matt Cutts that gives some great advice. My goal is always to redirect them, even if it is back to the main article category page or even the home page. I hate the thought of losing a potential customer to a 404 error. This has to be your decision though.

Errors are not good, no matter what kind of error they are. Best practice is to remove any error you can. When your bounce rate increases you lose ranking power. When you have broken links, you lose searchers. That is the simplest way to put it.

Fix them, redirect them back to a relevant page and then mark them as fixed in GWT.

404's can reduce your ability to rank highly for keywords when they effect your bounce rate and lower your impressions. Consider it giving your website a bad reputation. Again, it takes a lot of them to do this.

I would log in to GWT and look at your 404 errors under crawl errors. In there you will see where the links are still linked from. If they are pointing at external sites, I would redirect them. I don't know what platform you are using, but you should be able to do this in the admin section of your platform.

If they aren't linked externally, you should probably still redirect them. I know the Google says that 404 errors are harmless, but if you have dead links on your site and someone clicks on it, it most likely results in a lost searcher.

Hope that helps!

Nope, This seems kind of normal. Organic traffic can be coming from Bing and Yahoo also. I think you are fine.

I noticed a jump in rankings also. That is why you want to make sure you don't drop below your lowest average, if you do then you might see a dramatic decrease in your rankings when everything settles down.

I would make sure when you do those searches that you are logged out of everything, using IE (I know, that is ridiculous, but trust me on that one) and have deleted all of your browsing history. You can change your search settings to not display local results, or you can change your location in your search settings if you wanted more local results.

What your saying does make sense. I have no idea if a tool like this exists, I really don't think it does unfortunately. It is so hard to predict a SERP that I don't know how someone would create a program to do it.

Sorry I couldn't be more helpful. Good Luck!

I believe that the preferred method is in the HTAccess file. When we reformatted the URLs on our site this was the most efficient, cleanest way to do it. This kind of Dynamic Redirect protects you from 404 pages and losing your page values. I didn't see any negative effects using this method of restructure. I had about 6000 pages that each had to change URL, it was a nightmare. We migrated to a completely new platform and file server, so we had to change URLs.

I hope that is helpful. I don't see one method benefiting your engines more than the other. I would suggest doing whatever will be the least amount of work, will be the cleanest way to do it and will in the long run keep your URLs clean and without erroneous information.

Sometimes if you search for something in the AdWords preview tool you can pickup your organic listing. I am extremely OCD about Meta descriptions so I manually research them in Google. I look for my keyword + my company name to make sure I find my exact page and then I see what is there. However, if you don't know what your users are typing in for their searches it is really hard to predict what they will see. For example, Generators in Illinois gets a different meta description than Illinois Generators. Google shows snippets they think is relevant.

I would take a few, maybe 10 keywords and search for them in several different variations to get an idea of what might be showing. Using your landing pages report might be able to help you too. You will see what pages people are landing on, take a look at the content and descriptions on those pages to see if there can give you some insight.

No problem, Good Luck!

The one I was looking at on the bottom of the page was the H1 tag.

You don't want to over optimize your home page. My suggestion is to make those h2 tags h1 tags on the category pages they belong to.

For example, take the h2 tag off of Garden Tools on the home page, and make it the h1 tag on the Garden Tools page.

The links on the home page are just convenience for the user. It isn't really what the home page is about, so I would leave the h2 tags off completely. You can make your h2 tag simpler on your home page by using a secondary keyword selection instead. Your h1 is "National Tool Hire" So maybe make your one h2 tag something like "Convenient DIY Tools Available Now"

Your h3 and h4 tags appear to be in good places. Getting rid of some of the h2 tags, I think you will be ok leaving the h1 tag on the bottom of the page. With stuff being so far down on the page it could be possible that it gets missed on a crawl or 2, especially if you have a lot of coding behind that page.

The Panda/Penguin updates have shaken up the rankings quite consistently over the past couple of weeks. I noticed that my company, and my competitors have dropped a couple of points as well. I don't think that drop in DA is something to freak out about right now. If you have not received any notices from Google, it could just be that things are still trying settle down after the topsy turvy couple of weeks the engines have seen.

As far as search impressions go, there are a few things that could be happening. If you changed your URLs when you redesigned your website then you can start to see reduced impressions as your new pages become indexed and start moving up in the searches. Something to be careful of is if you see your impressions dip below your lowest average before the Penguin update. I have a few SEO friends who saw huge surges in impressions as Penguin was rolling out, and then a decline that they haven't been able to recover from. As long as you are staying above that lowest day of impressions you should be fine.

It could also just be a lack of searches on those days. It is something to keep an eye on, but probably too soon to start worrying about. After updates, you kind of have to wait and see for a couple of weeks. The results are all messed up and usually don't start to even out for awhile. As far as I know, the Penguin update still isn't complete, so that could still cause some trouble for your impressions.

Have you checked your landing pages report to see where your organic searches are coming from? How about your keyword rankings? Have you noticed any changes out of the ordinary?

My thought would be to swap the H2 tag at the top of the page with the "National Tool Hire" graphic you have at the bottom of the page. Doing this flip flop would help you a little.

Generally, I don't believe the positioning of the H tags makes a huge difference. However, you are using a lot of h2 tags on this page. I think that is going to get a little confusing. I would move that h1 up to the top if you can't decrease the amount of h2 tags you have on this page. I have seen other sites use links for their h tags, especially if the link goes to a form, a calculator or some other tool. I really suggest dropping some of the h2 tags, adding some h3 and h4 tags. I think no more than 2 h2 tags should be used. That is kind of the best practice I have learned over the years.

Not a problem! Good luck!

I think that is an awesome idea. It is a very user friendly idea. Back in the day, the first mortgage company to add a mortgage interest rate calculator to their site experienced a tremendous increase in organic traffic and page rank. Tools like this are so helpful, therefore the engines like them. What is good for the seacher is good for the search engine.

To address your concerns -

• I don't believe you need to worry about a weakened link profile. There are two reasons for that, the first being these are going to be local businesses and that is never a bad thing to have. Secondly, even low quality links serve purposes. As long as these links generate traffic for your sight they are doing their job and you have nothing to worry about.

To address your positives-

• This is something I myself would use. You are right, unless you already know where the dwindling arcade is located, you can hardly find places like this.

• Getting local businesses to take part in this opportunity could significantly increase your traffic, which inevitably will increase your rankings. More impressions, more clicks, more traffic, = better rankings. The link juice passed from these other sites will help boost your authority. Sounds like you have a really great idea here. You will have to tell me when the app is ready, and if it will be available in the US

We added a generator sizing calculator to our site in September. We have several manufacturers who link to it and sometimes direct people to go to our site to use it. We have seen a 15% increase in organic traffic since. Apps, calculators, widgits, all great SEO tools.

Good Luck!

Do you actively work on your link profile? Is there a company you have hired to build links? What were your total links at the time of your last index?

Definitely investigate your site in GWT. If you have more than a 10% increase in links that is truly a crisis as you put it. Definitely look into it further. It could be that they have been there and were just recently discovered because of the updates that took place in October.