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You know I'm all about SEO and originality...

Hi Adam, Thanks for following up, and I will mark this question as answered. I hope you see your business continue to appear well, and that you'll take note of those couple of issues I pointed out. I think we all need to be a bit patient with the carousel right now, because Google is clearly trying out different things with it.

You know one thing you may consider if you have not already is using Google voice so you can track calls for lead generation stats.

Ahhhh...yes, this is a big help. We've been working to get some of the site wide exacts down for a while (a few still showing in OSE have already been changed) - but perhaps we need to push this further. Sometimes you stand too close to a project and you need some other eyes. If we can swap out some of these sitewides with something a little more sensible hopefully that does the trick. Sometimes you get into such a mode of link building you don't step back and take a look at the larger profile. Thank you, Mr. Mike Davis!

That's an interesting question. We use two different rank tracking softwares, we have offices in two different cities, we all know how to de-personalize results, and we look at Webmaster Tools' ranking data as well and we're between 2-5 depending on what you look at. I can say our traffic is down a bit for that keyword, and Webmaster Tools is showing us ranking more at 3-4 than at 2 anymore. So something would seem to be up, or this might just be the new norm?

This is the result of the new Google Images, probably. What displays is this (attached JPG.) The red circle is a link to your domain.  The blue circle is a link to the actual image page. Many photographers are reporting their image search results are down and I've seen this with my own clients. People are clicking the visible domain, not "view this page" and it's really messing with image search hits. Visit page will take the visitor to the actual page but for some reason, many people are clicking the domain instead. coffee.jpg

Hi Guys, Very strange indeed. For my competition, none of their page titles (Not even containing their brand) are being changed in the SERPS. But, mine is. I have to say there might be a correlation with external links. I have been working pretty hard on getting my brand (Journey Beyond Travel) as the dominant keyword that external sites link to me with. This effort allows me to 'clean' my backlink profile which leaned slightly too much on exact-match anchor text. Now that I have gone through and done this, Google has been changing my title by putting my brand first, and then my keyword phrase. Not sure if this is good or bad, but like I mentioned, none of my 'competition' has had their page titles changed and they haven't done much with their backlink profiles. I have been steadily losing my SERP position, which is another issue that anyone is welcome to look into : ) Thanks so much! Thomas

_I can feel your pain here. Since we cannot count on the ranking only because of its unpredictable nature, you can compare and contrast things like the number of total visitors, total organic visitors, referral visitors etc. I think these metrics are good enough to figure out how things are faring. _

should have mentioned we already have done this. thanks for the head's up, though.

So - i don't think this site has a video sitemap - though that could be helping. A lot of videos are implemented in flash and Google have recently begun crawling more and more flash files and indexing them as videos. Google can't see past the flash code - which includes <param name="movie" indicating="" that="" the="" file="" is="" essentially="" a="" video.<="" span=""> Whether the content is a slideshow rather than a video is more a semantic than a technical issue - as it's technically identical to a normal flash video. The video rich snippet it receives are essentially relevant. If you have lots of flash image sequences implemented across sites - then i would encourage you to treat them as videos and use the movie schema markup- as well as creating and submitting a video sitemap. You won't always get the video rich snippet results for the content - but it can't hurt to provide the engines with more metadata and information.

HARO's great when a journalist posts a request to it, but the limitation is that only a very small portion of journalists post for sources before writing their story. But almost all journalists are tweeting about and writing about what they're interested in, which is why we built Muck Rack (I'm the founder, so a little bias obviously). We index all the tweet and articles of journalists, let you search them to build a media list, and then enable you to pitch them through our messaging system or by email. We also have an email alert tool that will notify you whenever a journalist tweets about or shares a story with your keyword.

You make excellent points.  I'll escalate this to "the pros" and see if they're able to bring their guru powers to bear on the trouble. Thanks again Ryan for all your advice.  It is greatly appreciated.

wow...i actually missed that?  i think i need to get more sleep.  that's embarrassing, but thanks for the help.  yeesh...