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Thanks Leat, I know its odd. I think I've been penalized for spam like behaviour when I changed the title. I'm a little concerned as America is the main source of traffic.

Can i ask you where you are based?

Ahh no I'm not after that. I know the rank has dropped and I have had this confirmed in multiple places including webmaster tools and google analytics.

So the rank has dropped.

I need to increase the position for those keywords.

Adam

SEOMoz with Google US as the preferred search engine. Not too bothered about the others for now, as I'm hoping they'll fall in to place.... hopefully....

Hey Guys,

I've got a keyword set that is really annoying me. You see on the 19th July I changed my page title for the home page to what I thought would be something more competitive and instead of climbing from rank 9/10 I dropped out of the top 50. So I waited 2 weeks to see if it changed and it just stayed out of the top 50.

After two weeks I changed it back again and I've been out of the top 50 ever since. I havnt made any real significant changes to the site as I've held off waiting for the keyword ranking to return but I dont think it will.

I was trying to improve the keyword phrase "bahamas all inclusive" for the website www.smallhope.com. I'd managed to get on to page 1 rank 9/10 depending.

I changed the title;

from "Bahamas All Inclusive - Andros Bahamas Hotel - Bahamas Vacation - Small Hope Bay Lodge All-Inclusive"

to "Bahamas All Inclusive Vacation - Small Hope Bay Lodge All-Inclusive"

This is really bad for us and I'm not sure what to do.

I had a whole plan in place starting with the Title and moving on to the H1 tags, but now I'm not so sure. I've put everything on hold. If this was you what would you do to get back to page 1?

Thanks,

Adam

Its a book based on a high profile situation in Iraq, so I think it could but I'm not a judge of writing quality so I have no idea.

Those ideas are food for thought though, I wonder if I do something with free chapters on the most interesting parts and see how if that works. Seed it in various locations and see what happens..

But you're right, I think I need to go get the Pope to be the official sponsor, know any cheap deals to Italy??

Arrggh I'm so sorry for such a late response guys. I'm in the Bahamas and my internet went down. Lightning and a truck hitting a pole not a good combination.

Thanks so much for the replies. I think I will print them off and give them to him

He's a nice guy but he's latched on to this word and I think he thinks if you use the internet you are a magician...

I think I'm going to have a proper conversation with him and find out better what he wants without using the word viral.

Would you recommend a marketing agency?

Thanks again,

Adam

Hi Guys,

I hope I'm not breaking any rules here by requesting commercial services, but a client of mine has asked to have a book they are doing to be taken viral.

I've not done any viral campaigns myself, and I think he has just heard the word and grasped hold of it without any real meaning to himself, but could anyone offer any companies that would be willing to attempt it or some similar marketing?

Thanks,

Adam

Superb, I thought so but I'd recently heard otherwise but I thought I'd double check.

Thanks for the quick reply!

Adam

Hi,

My new site design for small hope went live about 3 months ago and I changed the URL structure. I'm kind of new to the SEO game, but I've done quite a bit of research, successfully implemented all the 301s I need and tested them and everything is working fine.

But I'm having a little trouble with this propagating through Google et al. Most of the advice is to sit tight and wait but I want to be a little more proactive.

So even though the 301s are in place, can I ALSO send emails to our partners and request link changes?

Would Google find this suspicious behaviour and penalise us?

Thanks,

Adam

Hi Guys,

Sorry for late reply was away yesterday. There's a little more to the problem really. I did a complete site redesign and increased the number of internal links per page. So gone from say 20 to 80, so I'm guessing after what you've just said Pete that the internal links are diluting the page rank.

I know what you mean tfbpa about not paying too much to non-google numbers, Steve Webb's was saying a similar thing the other day in his awesome SEO audit post (pure gold for someone like me). The problem is I am also getting the same info in Google Webmaster Tools. In Google webmaster tools I get 27,000 impressions the day the site goes live and one week later I get 6,500 impressions, stabilising around the 3,500-4,000 mark.

I've asked about this before but been advised that it will take time to settle, but 3 months later and it does very much seem to have settled, but at a substantially lower amount.

That said overall my organic SEO is at the same level as this time last year but I've dropped on some keywords to 25% of last year. So I think what is happening is that I have diluted my page rank for internal pages causing a drop in SEO for those keywords, but I've improved the structure of the new site and caused an increase in page ranking for home page targetted keywords.

So I was looking to see how I could maximise the transfer of page rank info (Google, SeoMoz or any other metric) by doing anything and everything before moving on to a new SEO strategy for building that rank back up or increasing it over and above what it was.

Can you think of anything else I can do, apart from decreasing the internal links?

Thanks for the great responses to btw, I really appreciate the support.

Adam

I changed it 2 1/2 months ago. Are we talking something like 6 months?

That's what I thought, have you got any ideas as to why I'm only passing 22 of the 46 potential page authority points?

p.s.

also double checking the page authoruty and open site still says 22?

Am I missing something?

Hey Mark,

Thanks for the quick reply. I have nearly 100 redirects in place at the moment.

I have smallhope.com pointing to www.smallhope.com using

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^smallhope.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.smallhope.com$
RewriteRule ^SHBHome.html$ "http://www.smallhope.com/" [R=301,L]

and the diving page using this

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^smallhope.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.smallhope.com$
RewriteRule ^Diving.html$ "http://www.smallhope.com/activities/diving.html" [R=301,L]

I thought that all the 301s would imply a follow, is this not the case?

Can I be doing more?

Adam

Hi,

I have recently change my url architecture with site redesign and was just doing some analysis of the old and new pages.

I seem to be losing a little bit of Organic Search because of it. As an example this old diving page in open site explorer shows a Page Authority of 46 whilst the new diving page shows a Page Authority of 22.

I have a 301 redirect going from the old page to the new, but that seems to be quite a drop in Page Authority. Is there anything else I can be doing to improve upon it?

Thanks,

Adam

Hi,

I'm running Joomla 1.7 with SEF on and I'm trying to do a htaccess redirect which fails.

I have approximately 100 in effect so far and all working fine, but I have one snag. Index.php is not working as I need it to when it's redirected to www.myurl.com/

If I turn on index.php redirect to root using this code

#index.php to root
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^myurl.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.myurl.com$
RewriteRule ^index.php$ "http://www.myurl.com/" [R=301,L]

And then go to www.myurl.com/test.html I'm redirected to the homepage. I think this is because all pages are index.php in joomla. SEOMOZ and Google both think that index.php and root are duplicate pages.

Does anyone have any advice for overcoming this?

Thanks,

Adam