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Hello there, Answers to your questions below My client's site has a .com domain where most others have .co.uk I suspect this isn't the issue. but provided your client is only targeting the UK you might considering setting up geotargeting in Google Webmaster Tools - see: http://moz.com/community/q/geographic-target-set-up-in-google-webmaster-tool Most sites on the first page have either jewellery, wholesale or both in their domain names This is unlikely to be the issue. Relevance of linking sites could be playing a part here. My client has links from wholesale sites but few from jewellery-related sites. Attracting relevant links is never a bad idea, plus even if you don't see ranking improvements you'd hope that relevant links sent good quality traffic. I'd definitely do this if I were you Within my client's link profile there are very few, if any exact anchor text links for the term 'wholesale jewellery' I'd suggest it's unlikely that this is the issue - anchor text is not the ranking signal it once was. Legacy of a penalty could be making ranking progress that much more difficult? I think this is the most likely answer, but I don't quite agree with your phrasing. You mentioned a past penalty - given that you're ranking on the first page I suspect you're not suffering from said penalty any more. However, if you do still have a lot of 'low quality' links, then further clean up might be the way forward. However, you'll also need to continue to build the sorts of links that Google want to reward (i.e. links which are editorially given from quality sites) in order to improve your rankings. Incidentally, you mentioned you've disavowed a bunch of links. 3rd party tools (ahrefs, majestic, moz) aren't able to filter these out because they've no access to your disavow files I hope this helps, Hannah

Hi shr109, I've sent an email over so you have my address. Please let me know if it doesnt come through, we're recovering from a couple of email issues this end (infected web server in the same IP Subnet as our email server got us blacklisted), it might have ended up in spam! Thanks,

Hi, Having a self referencing canonical tag on your own pages is not a problem. The canonical tag needs to go into the head of the page though (it is not valid if in the body of the html) so just make sure that the 3rd party syndication service actually provides this - it might - but it might not I am guessing. Even with the canonical I would still include a clean text link back to the original page if this is possible (both as a second indication of origin but also for the visits it might send).