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thanks for that

Hi. Thanks for your comments. The migration happened six months ago, and there's no sign of recovery. I've seen quite a few big migrations tank due to mass redirects, and every one I've worked on that kept URLs largely the same has been fine. Our crawl errors are now pretty low, and we keep working through any that come up. It's frustrating work!

Thanks Reuben! Just getting my head around Screaming Frog! Can it be used to flag up duplicate content issues like Moz?

Hi, I just did a check on your site. It is showing that it has W3C validation errors for the HTML/XTML and that the page size is just a tiny bit over the recommended (a very tiny bit). Perhaps those two things are enough to through it to the bottom? Thanks, Christine DeGrafff

First of all, don't make any rash assumptions. Ranking can fluctuate for a while especially following such updates. You don't mention how far you've fallen but I'm currently seeing you ranking at #9 for Turkey Recipes, which given the competition is pretty good! I wouldn't panic just yet. That's not to say that there aren't things you can do to improve you position. For a start, you're up against lots of very authoritative domains and big brands such as Jamie Oliver, BBC Good Food, Betty Crocker (US) and Channel 4. So not only are you having to battle for rankings (especially for the more generic keywords) but getting the click-through from the SERPs is going to be a challenge as people tend to be drawn to the names/brands they trust. As a result, you'll want to make sure that the individual recipe pages are pulling their weight. Lots of recipes getting a few visits is going to be better than a generic keywords sending you very little. Look at which recipes are attracting traffic and which aren't and adjust your content appropriately. These are lots of different factors such as freshness, seasonality etc. Recipes with pumpkin go nuts around halloween! So while I get that Turkey is the focus - don't forget your other ingredients! You could definitely improve the on-page optimisation and increase the amount of descriptive text about the recipes. Just the method and the list of ingredients isn't going to help you capture long-tail keywords. One recipe page I looked at consisted of just 165 words. (The html was ~150k!) Schema markup for recipes can work well. Google has specific search options for recipes enabling you to filter by ingredients, cooking time and calories. Look at how you can encourage ratings and comments. Lots of your competitions recipes have these! From a user experience point of view it may also be worth looking at implementing a faceted search to enable people to search your recipes on your site by ingredients etc rather than just pretty bland top level categories. I'd also consider a responsive design (are people are more likely to have a smartphone/tablet in the kitchen than a laptop or desktop). It would be worth looking at your traffic to see how much of it is coming from mobile. Hope this helps.

Some great tips here! Thanks guys. Regarding guest blogging, I've had some pretty fantastic results. My tips are to make sure the site is REALLY relevant and don't use keyword rich anchor text.

It is usually better to redirect one to one instead of redirecting from a redirect. Where possible it should be avoided because eventually, if you chain too many redirects to redirects, Google will stop caring. There will be no negative impact from changing an old redirect to point at a more relevant page. You may want to double-check that the level of traffic and inbound links pointing to the page is worth going through the trouble of the 301 instead of letting it 404. Sometimes it can be better to just let a page die if no one is clicking through on it.

Hi Neooptic, Here's a recent tweet from the Local Track at PubCon: from Google's point of view, when you move locations, you're starting a new business @marybowling #pubcon — Greg Gifford (@GregGifford) April 24, 2013 Unfortunately, there is some truth in this. I recommend you read this thread over at the Local Search Forum, outlining Google's most current change of address policies: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/moving-name-changes/3138-business-moves-procedure-changes-again-just-edit.html You may experience a fluctuation in rankings or not. You may also lose your reviews, so brace yourself for that. Changing an address or phone number can lead to some unwelcome surprises. Read up as much as you can on this topic so you are prepared to expect some fluctuations. Good luck!

Hi Neoptic, Keri asked me to stop by to take a look at your question. I believe what you are asking is how to get your homepage ranked above the local pack of listings. Is that correct? If so: If you are already in the local pack for a given keyword phrase, you are unlikely to also gain an organic ranking on the same page. Since the Venice update last year, it has become quite uncommon for any local business to have more than one spot on the first page of results, except in industries or geographies that are sparsely populated or poorly documented. If you are not in the local pack for a given keyword phrase, perhaps because you are lacking a physical location in the target city and are having to rely on organic SEO for service radius cities where you lack a physical location, then having city landing pages for each of your service cities is the typical marketing strategy. For example, an SAB (service area business) may be physically located in San Francisco, CA., but may serve San Jose, Berkeley and Oakland. This business model can pursue high local rankings for San Francisco-related searches, but must typically purse organic rankings for any other service city. He can create city landing pages to help him go after these secondary organic rankings. If this concept is new to you, let me point you to a recent article of mine that I've been told has been really helpful to many Local SEOs and local business owners: The Nitty Gritty of City Landing Pages If you already know about city landing pages and are experiencing a scenario in which your SAB is already ranking organically  (not locally) on page one for a given keyword phrase but is simply ranking below rather than above the local pack of results, then your ability to influence this may be limited. Google has several different displays. In some, there are a couple of organic results above the local pack. If a business is strong enough (SEO-wise) it could appear in those couple of top organic results, or, it may find itself just below the local pack in the handful of results that appear there. Very often, what I see in the US is those top spots being occupied by giants like Yelp, but not always. I think it would be quite difficult/impossible to outrank something like Yelp, but if I saw a result in which the top couple of organic results were other direct competitors of my client, then there would be a chance that some strong organic efforts might succeed in allowing them to break in there. This would likely involve both content development and linkbuilding and possibly other things. I hope one of the three scenarios I've described matches yours. If not, please provide a more detailed description of your scenario and goals. Thanks!

very odd indeed. Its a frame-forwarded url, it's something 123-reg.co.uk still offers They sell it as "if you do this you can have two homepages/urls with different titles and descriptions but the same content" ... its nothing of the sort. It would be near impossible to offer real SEO to the new url, it would do nothing for it. It feels like a case of the company rebranding and this was the shortest way for them to "move" the site to a new place. To do an audit just have one line - can't see website, it's in an iframe good luck

just make sure your redirects are good. Fix those asap and make sure the site doesnt have any crawl issues. Check out your page speed since you just moved to a new platform. Get the onpage stuff done asap to start getting the traffic back

long url ... could be seen as over optimisation / manipulation also went to that page and nothing was found / out of stock - no description it also reads like a bog standard manufacturer description that other sites would also use and so is duplicate content in some ways (i am looking at other lawnmowers) the list in the content is not a list it's a bunch of images and text? mega menu = lots and lots of links - could be bad not really much to go on I know but it does seem content update would be good plus some working on cleaning out html and urls

It's definitely possible. Why are they hosting their newsletters on a 3rd party site, anyway?

Did your drop happen around October 5?  That was when Penguin refreshed. If it is Penguin then we have not had a lot of stories of recovery yet, even with the disavow tool.  Most likely Penguin needs to refresh again in order for a site to recover. But, I have found that most webmasters really don't know which links to disavow.  I'm guessing that there are very few actual quality links to your site.  I didn't look at your links but I'm concerned.  The page that you mentioned as a potential "natural" link looks like a site that publishes articles.  You may argue that it's a guest post, but it's not black and white.  Matt Cutts in a recent video recently mentioned that guest posting is ok if you are doing it occasionally and are a great writer who has been sought out by a quality blog.  But if you're doing it for the point of building links in a large scale it's not going to work and could be penalized. Unfortunately the only links that are truly natural are ones that are earned because someone else decided that your site was worthy of a link. You've got a pile of backlinks all with the anchor text "anglian windows".  That type of pattern doesn't happen naturally. Now, with that being said, before you go disavowing more links you need to be sure that your problem really is Penguin.  Panda refreshed on September 27 as well and it affected a lot of sites.  Cutting links and disavowing links will harm your site if this is the case.  Panda is about on page quality.  If you've got information on your site that is duplicated across the web then Panda could be your issue and links have nothing to do with your drop.

Good question, because those pages look different to a human. The SEOmoz web app uses a similarity threshold of 95% of the html code. This takes everything on the page, both hidden and visible into account. In this case, it's counting all of the navigation and sidebar as well, which is significant. What's left of the unique content - the part that matters, makes up less than 5% of the code. Here's a tool you can use to check the similarity: http://www.duplicatecontent.net/ I ran the pages through a couple of tools which showed 96% HTML similarity. (but only a 92% text similarity - which is good, but not great) For perspective, take a look at Google's cached versions of one of these pages. This is how googlebot sees the page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4fKrbNTUnegJ:www.gear-zone.co.uk/blog/september-2011/win-a-the-north-face-nuptse-2-jacket-with-gear-zone+http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/blog/september-2011/win-a-the-north-face-nuptse-2-jacket-with-gear-zone&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1G Since Panda, when I see a site with this many navigation links, I usually advise them to restructure their site architecture into more of a Pyramid shape, so that you reduce the overall navigation on each page. There are 2 ways to look at this: First of all, Google is much more sophisticated than SEOmoz at detecting duplicate content, and they are also better at contextual analysis - so they can probably tell these are not true duplicates. Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.