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I would imagine that the best solution would be to point the sub cat canonically to the parent this making the parent category page the dominant authority page.

I suppose it could be a few factors...

1. Local country specific - are you checking UK or US based searches.
2. Have you got personal search on within google, as this will most definately skew your results.
3. I think the keyword ranking tool runs once a week, when it ran your positions will be stored, however the day after they could be different, but this won't be picked up for another week.
4. Sometimes there is simply a misread signal too so may show as 50 it would seem.

Hope that helps

Possibly not solely for Brand but there is one for organisation which could be interpretted as brand in some instances. Maybe have a look into utilising it. Organisation Schema

First of all nice new site, I love the look and feel....

As far as content goes, is it a fresh approach or have you used the exisiting body content and meta details from your previous site. As for what I can see via MOZ, the majority of the key indicators suggest your site is in an already strong and healthy shape. Personally I can only assume it is a particularly difficult market to be in. Especially in London. have you done some research into the top 10 to see just what they are doing different from yourselves? And have you considered trying to do more local search techniques to see if that helps.

Cheers

Tim

If like you said an independent agency was doing the SEO work, could they have added a lot of dodgy links to both your homepage and deeper links. These may be holding you back to their irrelevent nature. Take a look on opensiteexplorer to see if that is the case.

Sorry, I do not know the answer, but like yourself I am experiencing a very similar situation were a main key term returns our home page and yet a couple of days back it was the specific deeper page being returned, it is switching around quite regularly. Would also like to see if anyone has a response!

Good Question SRWills.

If you have done all you can to request the links are removed - why not try out the disavow tool on those that simply won't budge... just make sure you detailt to google that you have tried every effort to have them removed.

NIcolas could also do some link digging himself... maybe look on www.opensiteexplorer.org and see what linked domains have been generated. Hopefully they willl be of a relevant nature to your site and not paid directory submissions etc.

For the site to bounce up and down the rankings it could be a mix of the recent Google Algorithm updates settling or like Karl mentioned some dodgy tactics for short term gain.

Personally, I would avoid Flash for mobile in particular iOS mobile platforms as they will not display...I don't think!? I would suggest moving to HTML5 Video or animated HTML and JS, you could always still run Animated GiFs. Others may suggest otherwise.

Hello All,

I have a page (http://www.caravanguard.co.uk/touring-caravan-insurance/) we have seen it drop a bit over recent months and now we have been appearing low on page two (Google UK) for the term "Caravan Insurance".

Now I do not expect to rank above some of the big players in our market and the aggregators, but we do feel we have good content and have tried to act as white as we can in terms of SEO, link building and alike, but we are still slipping.

My main issue is this - one minute we have the link appearing in the serps and then the next it drops from the serps altogether. At this point i often resubmit for indexing in webmaster tools and a few minutes later its back.... is this just likley something I am seeing local to me due search becoming more personal (I have toggle hide private results too) or is there a cause to its sudden disappearance and reappearance?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Would it be possible to do a redirect from /section/index.php to just /section/ without causing a completely pointless infinite loop etc....

There has been a sudden leap from a couple of sites employing the same tactic. In fact one site I checked also had a very similar backlink profile (possible a sister brand to the one I mentioned in my first post above) and they too have climbed in recent weeks. I will look forward to any further insight you can provide on the matter

Good luck.

Very true, I had not considered they may have started to disavow some of the really poor links allowing the quality links to once again shine through...

Edit* : If it is not a case of utilising the Disavow tool, I do hope that any impending Google Algorithm update (which may have been in testing of late) comes along and bite them in the proverbial bottom.

Cheers Marie.

Cheers Tom,

Have to agree, I want to keep it on the straight and narrow, helping to maintain a site that should be seen as white to the core.

I do hope that the algorithm will be further cleaned up and that we will soon see our site moving back ahead of those employing dodgy tactics for short term gain.
Thanks Tim

Cheers Andy and Jonathan,
I didn't check to see if they are paid links as yet - but will go have another look for sure.

Andy, I totally agree, despite being as clean as we can be, we do know that many of our competitors can be a little shady when it comes to SEO and we also understand that we cannot really challenge the super huge aggregators for authority, however consider ourselves to one of the best of the rest.

We do try and create great linkable assets, but mainly for peripheral elements associated with us e.g. charity news, product reviews etc I am trying to get more genuine insurance articles on our blog etc - infographics, case studies etc... but finding people that think our content is valuable to both them and their readers is the hardest bit. I think people have certainly become a little numb to direct contact and so the content really has to shine and stand out from the crowd.
Cheers for your help so far.

Howdy fellow Mozzer's,
I have been doing some background seo checking on a competitor in my small "insurance niche" to try and see why they have recently shot up the listings and are now consistently out ranking us.
We have quality content on our site and have always taken an approach of trying to be whiter than white when it comes to developing out SEO plans.

The site in question has recently moved ahead of us (along with some aggregators e.g. confused.com)  possibly due to shifting patterns from possible algorithm changes favouring brand or could it be a case that Google has dropped a ball when it comes to checking back links as the competitors site is 99% linked to link farms, link submission sites, directories and lots of other spammy/poor quality sites.

We do not feel they are doing anything from a content stand to justify their sudden propulsion up the ranks. I am reluctant to pursue dodgy tactics to help get out site back in position as I feel it could then contribute and hurt us down the line.

Does anyone know how I can combat against their poor QUANTITY over QUALITY banklink profile that is surely helping them at the minute?

At a bit of a loss so any help would be greatly appreciated.

aRTu4cT

Cheers guys

Cheers Dave, would you potentially recommend reworking the sites link infrastructure to point to /section/ as opposed to /section/index.php? or would it not likely make much of a differance? Thanks for the prompt response.

I have noticed that Google has started to simply link to /section/ as opposed to /section/index.php and I haven't changed any canonical tags etc.

I have looked at my pages moz authority for the two /section/ = 28/100
/section/index.php = 42/100

How would I go about transferring the authority to /section/ from /section/index.php to hopefully help me in my organic serp positions etc.

Any insight would be great

Hi Highland.

This was the article in question - http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects

And this was the statement that made me worry as we have numerous dealer redirects doing this kind of action. Unless I am interpreting it wrongly.

_Savvy SEOs have known for a long time that redirecting a huge number of pages to a home page isn’t the best policy, even when using a 301. Recent statements by Google representatives suggest that Google may go a step further and treat bulk redirects to the home page of a website as 404s, or soft 404s at best. _

This means that instead of passing link equity through the 301, Google may simply drop the old URLs from its index without passing any link equity at all.

Cheers - Tim