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This is exactly right. Two days ago is no time at all - I would keep waiting. It's also important to know that you may not get back to #4 anyway - 301 redirects pass most of the link value but not 100%, so you may experience some loss in rank anyway.

Plenty of sites using Google Site Search do not get this search box, including HubSpot. None of our properties that use Google Search have this box. There must be more to it then that.

For Google, that content will not get indexed.

Robots will win the fight of Robots vs Sitemap, as it says "Don't access or index this content, even if you find a way into it". Sitemap.xml is helping them find their way to content that they won't access or index.

Bing and other engines may be different on this. I'm not sure. I would guess that Bing at least will also respect Robots over sitemap (as it seems the proper behavior), but I have not tried this ever.

Here are three tactics that I use for finding good places to guest blog:

1. Look at the link profiles of the current 1-20 for a keyword you're interested in. There will be a lot of noise and some unwinnable links, but you can get some good prospects as well.

2. Look in Google Analytics at what sites have linked to your last 5 (or 10) blog posts on that topic. Anyone who's already linking to your content at all is probably a great target for further link power.

3. Identify and reach out to any industry websites or publications that might be hungry for content. It's easy to say "They have staff writers, they probably are all set for content." I've found that they are often actually pretty hungry, and always interested in fresh viewpoints and perspectives. You might not think of their site as a "blog", and they might not call it a blog, but if it has an editorial space where you can write great content and collect a link or two, you've got a hot lead.

I hope that helps!

Assuming that this is the entire contents of this file: It says that no robot (search engine spider, other crawler, etc.) should visit or index anything in the /stats/ directory or any directories inside of it.

More info available here: http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html

Hi,

If I understand you correctly,  you mean that your page titles look like "Are-hyphens-not-a-good-thing...", and that is definitely something that you should change. Search engine programming aside, this is probably not going to a good experience for your site users. It's different than what they're used to on the rest of the web, and will probably look strange to them and possibly discourage them from clicking in the SERP. Personally, I'd switch to just using spaces in my page titles.

Could you provide the name or keyword you see this happening for? I can't really help without more information about them.

I can't find a link to this video right now, but I know last year Matt Cutts posted a Webmaster Central video responding to questions about how Google treated adult websites in its algorithms. Matt stated that they don't treat adult websites any differently at all in their algorithms.

He did admit that he thought doing good white-hat SEO for them is much harder than other verticals however because many websites and properties will not be thrilled to link to adult websites, and so linkbuilding and getting exposure can be harder if you don't have a good network, but that there was nothing algorithmically against you.

That sounds pretty reasonable to me - I can't think of why they would arbitrarily penalize such a large category on the web, other than it's hard to do whitehat work for them. It sounds like you have the right tactics down already though.

The best way to do this is to look at your client's analytics application (such as Google Analytics) and look at what keywords they are already receiving traffic on. If they are receiving traffic on a keyword, they must be ranking at least somewhat well, and that will give you a great base to start with for showing them what keywords they rank for. This is by far the easiest and best way to go about this.

Alternatively, you can also use tools like http://search.grader.com/ if they get enough traffic, but be warned that Search Grader does not work very well on sites that do not get much organic search traffic ( < 400 organic search visits/month is a good cutoff)

I got a great question from a franchise owner today regarding Google Places for his business. His businesses are all in malls.

With Google Places there is an emphasis on using consistency and full contact details, as we well know. The issue is his locations are in a mall and don't have a physical address to receive mail or verify their address. Is there a way to leverage Google Places in this kind of situation, or do you just use the general mall address?

This is definitely okay to do. Especially if your old account was poorly managed and didn't show good results, it's absolutely fine to set up a new account and use the coupon. Because your past account history can impact your quality score and other factors, if you have an outdated account it can actually hurt you. If you're turning over a new leaf or have a new agency/person administering your account, it's a good step.

It's good in Google's eyes as well - They are very happy to give you the first $100 for free if they think it'll make a lifetime customer out of you. $100 really isn't that much in AdWords budgets, and if it brings in a long-term customer then they'll quickly recoup the money.

I feel pretty safe about recommending this as well because the Google account rep that I spoke with when I first signed up for Google AdWords and their Engage platform recommended that I set up new accounts for any of my clients that I was working with, specifically to take advantage of $100 coupons that I could give my clients only with a new account and so that they would get a fresh start with me and not have any past mistakes count against then. If I was in your position, I would absolutely do it this way.

The number that you see there is not really the number of pages they know about. It can vary based on time of day, logged in state, which data center responds to your request, and numerous other factors. They also don't tell you about every page that they know about - Just the ones that they might want to show you. I wouldn't base anything on the numbers shown in search results there.

It wouldn't help your domain authority - It would hurt it quite a lot. That's because all of your work is going to be split up, and none of your domains will share in each other's success. You will have to do four times the work to build your domain authority. I would strongly recommend against doing this.

Having that many domains is just setting yourselves up for confused customers (who get onto one domain for your business but can't find what they were looking for), CMS headaches as you bounce between sites, and there are no practical benefits to doing so.

Hi Michael,

Tom Anthony wrote a great introduction on the SEOmoz Blog here on how to use Google Docs to help automate this kind of work. Check out his post here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/competitive-analysis-in-under-60-seconds-using-google-docs-12649

There's still some work to do to set it up and configure it the way that you want, but it'll help get you closer to what you're looking for with automating OSE reports.

We've had some pretty good success in beating exact match and partial match domains in the SERPs. I don't think I could attribute it back to any one thing that we did, but here is something that we did:

We aggressively pursued many exact-match or near-exact anchor text links from a number of websites directly to the page we wanted to rank. Your link profile may already be stronger than theirs, but it needs to be even stronger. This is pretty tough - When I look at our stats vs the exact match domains that are still page 1 but now lower on page 1, they have very few inbound links. Below is a screenshot from page 1 of Google for "marketing automation".

I know OSE hasn't crawled a lot of inbound links for this page or some of our competitors, but you can see the rough impact. We have a DA of 86. They have an 11. You might not think they would even be in the same ballpark as the other domains ranking for this term, but Google loves exact match domains, at least for now.

AQfsB

I use the Ontolo link toolset to help me find and prospect for blogs for guest posting. It's not free but it works really well and has saved me a ton of time / made my life a lot easier. They do have a free trial though. You can get info at www.ontolo.com

(No outside relationship here, just a happy user of their software)

Hi Devon,

How recently did you finish these changes? It's possible that Google hasn't even seen the changes yet and moved you down for reasons totally unrelated to this. For example, if you changed the page title or meta description, is that new title or description showing up in the search results yet? If not, chances are Google has not crawled the page recently and the changes are unrelated to your ranking change.

If yes, what elements did you change on page? Did you change the URL of your page? If you changed the URL, even if you did a proper 301 redirect right away, you may still see a temporary drop in rankings for about 1-2 weeks before it recovers and rises back up. Even with a 301 redirect and everything done perfectly, it can take some time for Google to recognize the authority of the new URL and rank it appropriately.

Please let me know if you have any questions!

Best,

Hi Brett,

While I don't really intend on being self-promotional, HubSpot (my employer) recently published an ebook on how to use Google+ for business that I wrote a section of. You can get it here: http://www.hubspot.com/how-to-use-google-plus-for-business

It's extremely important the sitemap URLs match the canonical URLs that people arrive at. If they do not match the search engine will consider the sitemap "dirty" and not valuable as it is not accurate to the actual layout of the website.

Essentially, the search engines consider a sitemap URL that does not return an HTTP 200 status a bad URL and reject the sitemap. This is absolutely something that you should work to correct.

I don't know if this is specifically related but I spotted a typo in your homepage's source code while reviewing this. You have this code: <metaname="robots" <span="">content="noodp,noydir" /></metaname="robots">

in your HTML head. There should be a space between meta and name in that tag.  I didn't spot anything else that jumped out to me as wrong. I'd fix that tag for sure, and I hope someone else here can help illuminate further.

Best,