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Yes, and getting your on-site SEO is very, very important too. I sometimes see much better results by modifying landing pages than "building" links.

OSE has been playing up for us for a few weeks - no just discovered data - only a handful of links found compared to tools like AHrefs and Majestic.

Also - Where is the Linkscape update due yesterday?

Maybe they are busy fixing MozCast which hasnt updated since Sunday?

Or Moz Analytics which only seems to load the data for us when the wind blows in a certain direction...

It will improve your Pagerank - but not to a PR 6.

It will only benefit your SEO if you are applying other methods and the site is domains are relevant to each other.

I have a site that is capable of hosting the landing page description either above the products under the H1 or below them at the bottom of the page before the footer. I have always chosen to keep the text "above the fold" as presumably this would be crawled sooner in relation to the rest of the page content than had it been at the bottom. However, this means that I can only really write just a few sentences for each landing page - otherwise the products would shift further down the page - and I don't think this is good from a UX POV.

Question: If I move the bulk of my landing page descriptions to the text snippet located underneath the products, could this negatively affect my SEO? Text at the bottom of the page is obviously not significant for users, so is there a chance this could be seen as spam?

I just did 3 random searches and you were on page #1 for all 3.

"pearl+beads" position 4
"glass+beads" position 9 (wiki is at 7!)
"shambala+beads" position 9

Seeing the usual ebay, amazon big brand domain clusters for these queries so I'd say your doing OK. You might want to consider moving your category descriptions above the fold to improve further rather than below your products on the landing page.

I think you have got the site hierarchy down just fine. However, taking a look at [what I presume to be] your landing page, I think that you could improve your search position by providing more information on the page here.

Start with your company USP's, maybe include a short explainer video? Then work on your written content. Make your page better than your competitors page and you should be rewarded.

I have a site in a very competitive industry with a landing page that ranks within some huge business homepages, and our domain authority is about half of theirs! You just need to keep working on that page.

Dont be tempted to throw too many links at it either. Work on weeding out only the best links from your competitor profiles.

I guess that would be your decision. I have in some instances reported violations, although they were not always heeded. If you wish to report them then here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1 is the best place to do so.

Taken from: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en

The following are examples of link schemes which can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results:

• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link

I agree with Jane.

TBH I'd rather start with a brand new domain without the redirect, however sometimes we have to go with what the client wants, even if we advise against it, ultimately its their decision.

I have warned them that it's still early days and the penalty may still be passed. My suggestion was made to provide another response that didn't involve potentially destroying a second established domain via a redirected penalty.

I've also seen this discussed a lot here on Moz, and have been involved in some of those discussions. You could try redirecting it to a new domain.

I have a new client who came to me suffering an obvious penalty (they weren't ranking for their own brand name), I asked them NOT to redirect the domain as I wanted to carry out some backlink research amongst other tasks to try to understand the problem. However they chose to go with the redirect against my advice - and it worked.

They went in at number 2 and a week later are at number 1. I cant say for sure how long this will hold, I'm concerned if there is a penalty of some kind that they may well disappear again in the next few weeks. But we are not losing anything in the meantime.

We have recently experienced a huge spike in referral traffic from .fr domains (we are in the UK).

They all lead to our 404 page. Its been going on for the last 3 days, and its still happening with about 20 visitors browsing the site from these domains at any one time, staying approx 3-7 seconds and then bouncing.

The top domain appears to be a parked page. We cant see any obvious links or ads coming from any of these .fr domains and they are quite irrelevant to our sites industry anyway, which leads me to believe these may not be real visitors.

Any advice on what may be causing this? And how to stop it?

Needless to say none of these referrals have converted.

Thank you so much Miriam. Its good to know that its something that's already been picked up in the US. I've added my comments to a webmaster forum thread that Linda Buquet started regarding this issue too, hopefully, Google will tweak this sooner rather than later. At least I dont feel so helpless now! Thanks again.

I noticed something this morning, when performing a search on Google UK for "Intensive driving courses southend" the first position is awarded to a driving school that is using exact match keywords instead of brand name on their G+ page to rank for local terms. See this for yourself here: https://www.google.co.uk/#q=intensive+driving+courses+southend

Until then, my site had held position 1 for this term for well over a year.

Every gut instinct I have tells me that this will not work forever and its not something I should implement, however I'm interested to hear if anyone else is using this tactic, and how its working for them?

How can I compete with this "grey hat" tactic?

Thank you Miriam. I appreciate you sharing with me the broad idea of the type of structure that you feel a site should have in this instance (if starting from scratch).

You have pretty much echoed my proposal for a new site structure, built for how Google works nowadays, rather than 2-3 years ago. We are currently reducing the size of the current site, to bring it as close to this type of model as possible. However the site would need a complete redesign to make it viably possible to have this type of structure.
I guess what I've been looking for is some kind of reassurance that we are moving in the right direction! Its a scary prospect reducing such a huge amount of pages down to a compact targeted set. With prospects of losing so much long tail traffic, it can make us a little hesitant.
However the on-site changes we have made so far, seem to be having a positive affect.

And thank you for giving me some ideas about content creation for each town. I really like this as an idea to move forward after the changes are complete, which will hopefully be by the new year!

Thank you. That thought process did occur to me at the time of adding the robots txt, however that was back in March and the impressions drop has happened this week.

I have updated the robots.txt to show the new disallow command rather than "/search".

I also just installed my last back-up which was just before i added Google comments.

Thanks for your help!

Thanks for this. I knew i needed to stop search being crawled for duplicate content and the disallow "/search" operator seemed to be the way a few others had done it. I will update that line to show the new query instead, presuming this is relevant for blogger blogs?

That line of text is from the fourth post down "Sales Stats Confirm the UK Still Loves Cars", its truncating the posts to show "read more". However the source code, for some reason, shows all of the post.

Could there be something missing from here? I did delete the code that shows number of comments per post as i integrated Google comments late last week and the numbers didnt add up.

We recently redesigned a site which had strong rankings and learnt a valuable lesson about defining URL parameters using webmaster tools.

Basically, the new site used filters and this caused a whole load of duplicate content, causing the site to drop from postion 1-3 for every core keyword to approx position 8-10.

I didn't even know that tool existed until i asked on Moz and its been a lifesaver.

My Google blogger blog is about 10 months old. In that time i have worked really hard with adding unique content, building relationships with other bloggers in the same niche, and done some inbound marketing.

2 weeks ago I updated the template to something cleaner, with a little more "wordpress" feel to it. This means i've messed about with the code a lot in these weeks, adding social buttons etc.

The problem is that from some point late last week thurs/fri my pages started disappearing from Googles index. I have checked webmaster tools and have no manual actions. My link profile is pretty clean as its a new site, and i have manually checked every piece of content published for plagiarism etc.

So what is going on? Did i break my blog? Or is something else amiss? Impressions are down 96% comparing Nov 1-5th to previous 5 days.

site is here: http://bit.ly/174beVm

Thanks for any help in advance.

Hi Miriam,

Thanks for jumping in.

The business model is service-based. So when i refer to "46 products" they are actually 46 different types of service available.

The customer will typically book and pay online, through the website, and they are then served at their location which is most often either their home or place of work. They actually have far more than the 25 actual locations, much closer to 120 I believe. However, I only began their SEO in February, AFTER they were hit by Panda. So building up their local listings is taking time, as the duplicate content issue seems far more urgent. Trying to strike a balance, and fix this all slowly over time to lay a solid foundation for inbound marketing, as its being diluted by the poor site structure.

Does this help? Am I doing the right things here?