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Number of keywords ranked in SEMRush? This isn't such a great metric for a number of reasons. SEMRush as a whole isn't all that great for small to mid-sized sites. It's great for huge sites and even "pretty large" places but I wouldn't think you'll find many results on dentists, plumbers, photographers & even SEO agencies. "my belief is that the more related keywords that you have ranked the better you will do." I'll take "dresses" and you take 250 keywords related to window tinting in Kyoto. "More" keywords isn't necessarily better. A lot of SEO agencies don't bother trying to rank keywords as they're often busy working on client work and not on their own marketing (I know two of the agencies I'm intimately familiar with don't 'drink their own koolaid' - their marketing is way behind their actual skills.) Finding a good company is challenging but you should look places like here (Moz Q&A is great and you get to know people before you work with them) as well as LinkedIn local groups, social media (again, insight) and try to get an idea of what someone's philosophy is before you engage them. When you talk about traffic "drop offs" - again, if this is SEMrush, it's hard to say ... but I've seen frequently when a company is engaging an SEO agency that has their own private network, the contract ends and they remove links. If you have 20-200 strong links removed, you're going to take a massive dive. Also, check if these dives are around algorithm changes.

For me, go for more links on relevant football related sites / fan forums / US sports colleges, places where your products will likely be seen and have genuine interest in rather than directories, as per Oleg also maybe have an alternative en-us site. If you are truly looking to broaden your horizons and eventually have a presence in the US, I would suggest developing a series of useful export partnerships with key members in the US who can advocate for your products and link to your site, then once you have a foothold, maybe look to introduce shippers and use them as the address for local us services. If and only if this takes off, it may be time to have a US base/office for committing to the US market.

Dirk Thank you for your response it is very helpful.

I am John but on a client site today. Drop me a mail over and I will get straight back to you. -Andy

Hi John. Correct, your site is indexed with Google, and Google will distribute your site across its search portals, for example you can run the site search on Google Italy, Google Russia, and so on, but when you set the search to pull specific results from just the UK your site doesn't appear. It's still in Google, but what you're asking Google to do is show you only UK-based sites. You can do something similar with Italy here: https://www.google.it/#q=soccerbox.com changing 'Paese' to Italia.  Then the site:soccerbox.com search returns no results. Another way to see this behavior is to go to Google Advanced Search where you can select 'region'. Here: http://www.google.com/advanced_search For the descriptor of that, Google states, "Find pages published in a particular region."  Since you're publishing globally instead of locally you won't appear when you search your domain plus a given region, like Australia, the UK, and so on. It looks like Global results are your preference so everything looks to be working as intended. Cheers!

I wouldn't worry about the fact that you are seeing hundreds of thousands of links from one site. It's not the number of links that make a link unnatural, but rather, whether the link is there primarily for SEO reasons. It sounds like this link is bringing you good traffic. It's probably a good one. Provided it's not a paid link or one that is there in exchange for something, I'd keep it as is.

Gary Thank you for your response. I have asked my web developers if they can point the domains to the same directory. I used to rent a virtual office in the USA but our main supplier took humbridge to this and ordered us to remove the address and telephone number from our website. John

Thank you for the advice. I am not keen on leaving pages with no products to offer as I do feel it may annoy customers.

Thank you for your reply, I will follow your advice and go over all of my links again. John

There are various plugins available for download to help you create a Wordpress sitemap that you can upload into Google Webmaster Tools. GWT allows for multiple sitemaps to be uploaded. You're likely missing the Google Analytics code on your blog as well which is leading to the weirdness within analytics. Yoast makes several Wordpress plugins that help with SEO which you can find here: https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/, that cover both sitemaps and Google Analytics. There are others, but those two things are what will address your questions above most likely. Cheers!

Hi John I always try to think about what is best for the user. The URL should ideally descriptive, keyword targeted without being too long. A great article about URL SEO can be found here at MOZ. worth a read. http://moz.com/learn/seo/url Good Luck

Hi Thank you so much for your recommendation for the Redirection plugin. I have installed it and it is working fine.

Hi Thank you for your response. The site is a new site launched last month. It is Chinese however I could not find any contact details. I did send an e-mail via the website but up to now there is no response. Some of the search terms which they have used with our name are appearing on page one of Google which this morning was quite bad for any Google searcher as they were then re-directed to a different product to what they were interested in. Through Google I put in a request to have the urls removed stating the above and that they were using our comany name which is in the process of being trademarked. This afternoon I have now seen that all of the urls are now 404s. Has Google actually read my request or are the urls removed as standard until they look into it. I have had no response from Google on this? Thank you in advance.

Chris Thank you for your help it is much appreciated.

Chris Thank you for all of your help.

Good link or bad link - has to do with a lot of what you'd expect. For example, a link from (I'm making up examples) Forbes.com would probably do a business a lot more good than a link from a site like mikesbuisnessknowledge.com. Or, links from .gov/.edu also are seen as better because there's criteria around what kind of institutions can have those URLs. One .gov link could be better than 100 links from OK sites.

John, Promoting a single blog post via 20 bookmark sites with or without duplicate descriptions isn't going to do anything for the post or your site's authority site, one way or the other.  At scale however, if this is the only method being used, it's going to hurt you.  I would recommend taking a closer look at the other ways your vendor is promoting your site and I'd start first with examining the quality of the content.  If it's not of the quality you would be proud to show your college English teacher, put before a peer review, or frame on the wall of your store, I'd be thinking of looking for another vendor.

"An SEO Company from India doing articles" That is a BIG warning sign. My guess is that you've got a bunch of low quality spammy links pointing to your site. Another thing to check on is your anchor text distribution as well. Make sure it's not over 10-20% for your main keyword.

For the sake of this argument, I have a website where there were some 120-150 spammy links created. Basically I see a ton of low quality bookmarking sites who are somewhat scraping content of each other. Very few anchor text names and those are taken from authority sites in the niche as well, the others (some 80% of them) are direct domain name anchor text links to the site in question now. So, would any of you recommend adding all those links into the disavow tool if nothing is happening in terms of penalties or ranking changes now? I am having a lot of opposite opinions about this matter. Thanks!

Hi John, well that is exactly the topic most of the SEO's are fighting about: But in all honesty nobody really found the holy grail yet. If it's backlinks, content, likes on Facebook or whatever every so called expert swears in his methods. So, I just come round and share my experience with you and what works best for me and my clients. That doesn't mean that it'll work for you at all; On-Page I think content is king No keyword stuffing, just a text which is full of information for the visitor and easy to read AND understand. Google (as you can measure on Analytics) recognises and records the time a visitor spends on your page. This is an important factor in my eyes as a visitor who is not interested in your information/services etc. won't spend 5+ Minutes on your page, would he? Furthermore, good quality content shares easy. Interested visitors are sharing good stuff, logical. And visitors turn into buying customers if you convince them from your expertise and quality. Off-Page It's no secret that in regard to backlinks the factor quality counts way way more than quantity. When I create backlinks I take care that they are organic and from a blog, directory, website etc. from the same business branch as the website I am optimizing. A website with an anchor backlink in a blog post of a high PR and High DA blog counts thousandd times better than 10.000 bought backlinks for whatever $ 29.99 Bottom Line So my opinion is that ranking builds on logical factors. Google measures the quality which comes in (backlinks), how it comes in and what is in it at the end (content). If it's all on a high level it returns into sales/leads or whatever aswell as higher rankings. Hope I could give you an idea and it helps, Mickey