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Using the canonical element can help you fix this. More info in this article 

Hi James,

The loss of ranking could be attributed to various factors:

• Over optimization penalty
• The changing of the servers
• Competitors outranking you with more quality and aggressive SEO

If you do have a co.uk domain then the changing of hosting from the US to UK could have impacted the rankings.

Here's a link to a discussion on Cloud fare's impact on SEO.

This article might be helpful.  Link 

If the domain that you acquire has backlinks associated with it, then the 301 would help with SEO . After a while, those backlinks will be associated with your main domain and you can derive SEO benefit associated with it. If the domain has no backlinks then there isn't any SEO advantage to it. You can benefit from any direct traffic that domain gets because once you 301 it to your niche site, any direct traffic associated with that domain will now go to your nice site.

In my opinion, i don't think you will derive a lot of SEO benefit from hosting the yahoo answers. You are better off building your own Q&A database . It is definitely more work and time consuming however there can be a lot of benefit in investing time and resources in this.

There is an old post referring to Q&A as a strategy that you can access here.

Yes definitely, Google's over optimization penalty seems to be impacting a lot of sites. Your best bet would be to reduce the over optimization on the pages , hopefully when Google indexes the new changes, you will regain your rankings.

seems to be working fine. I tested a few sites and it gave a correct response.

• the tool seems to work , did some tests and it is returning accurate responses
• Not used screaming frog, previewed the demo, it looks like good tool and the features mention the redirect check
• this might take a bit of time but eventually yes, the url that was 301 redirected should not appear in the search results
• wait for a while before you run crawl reports as it might take some time for Google to register the 301 that you have setup.

In this instance your best bet is link building. As Ryan mentions in his response put a lot of focus on beating your competitors with targeted and high quality links with the keywords in the anchor text. Do keyword research on synonyms that are very close to your core keywords. Build a keyword list with those related keywords and do both the on page and off page optimization with those keywords. If your industry is competitive, you're better off focusing on related keywords.

Eric, try focusing on one location at a time in your title tag . At present you are trying to target 3 states ( MN, IA, WI) on the home page title tag. Build backlinks for the MN key phrase from quality sites. Be very careful with the over optimization penalty while you work with the on page factors.

Kyle, a 404 page pops up if a visitors tries to access a URL on your site , however the server is unable to find that page on your site. A 301 redirect on the other hand is a technique to forward a particular URL  permanently to another page.

Based on what i read in your question, you should have the 301 redirects set to your home page and not the 404 page. If you set them to a 404 page with your home page link on it then the visitor has to take an extra step to reach your home page and try to find the info they are looking for.

Try calling them at 0800 633 5915. If you just have one other competitor bidding on your name, then yes, i think just bidding higher should do the trick.

Chris,

File a complaint with Bing directly. If you own the trademark/copyright on your name then you can file a complaint.

Link to the copyright infringement form here

Link to the Trademark misuse in ad copy form here

If you do not , then you'll just have to bid on your own name to compete for the position.

• Mobile - this should grow exponentially. We've already experienced a huge increase in demand for customized mobile sites from our clients and are seeing a consistent increase in mobile visitor traffic in the regular monthly analytics reports
• Local - will continue to increase in relevance
• Content - i think we'll see the article directory submission tactic taking a hit with ongoing google updates
• Organic Traffic Growth - less focus on rankings as Google continues to evolve personalized searches and more focus on organic traffic growth overall and conversions

yes and from a content perspective , it looks sensible and goes with the flow.

that's a great list Dana :). thanks for sharing.

Not sure of any Google courses for conversion optimization, however i would recommend the courses run by Market Motive. The faculty there is top notch and the conversion module is really good.

I'd do any of the below :

• Submit a new site map for indexing
• Use Google's removal tool

Good post on this topic here 

Good question Carlo . If i had to handle that for the client, i would classify the links as "related content" or "related posts" which is a common practice with blogs and news oriented sites. The "incoming search queries" classification can be misleading and a direct suggestion that it is aimed at the search engine bots as opposed to the visitors.

For our insurance clients we always recommend geo targeted approach unless they have very deep pockets. We also recommend a short and a long term strategy. The short term strategy being PPC advertising, identifying the core search terms that are converting and getting traction for the client using the "search terms report" in adwords. Once we identify the best keywords, we utilize them in our keyword selection strategy for the SEO campaign and go after optimizing those keywords using SEO best practices.