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Thansk again for the effort. I like your answers, they are very helpful. Although in this case our target aren't English speaking people, just Spanish people from or in Tenerife for vacations.

Hi and thanks for the comment. It helps. But tell me, what are the great insights you are talking about EGOL? Did I miss anything? Was his/their answer profound for you? I really can't see any good in EGOL's answer but a bit of arrogance instead.

That kind of answer doesn't help. Yours, on the other hand, is very usefeul, thank you ameliavargo ! I really did like and very much appreciate your third parragraph most of all !

I completely agree with you, there seems to be no correlation. I don't mean to say all this metrics don't work or aren't useful, I0m just saying there are sites up there in top positions and they still don't deserve it according to moz tools, for example. Thanks for your comment.

1.- I did give them a mention and I knew it would be good for them, but I did it because I wanted moz people to understand the precise case, but perhaps I was wrong in that, in that case sorry.

2.- I didn't say it was hard to beat. I'm only asking why is that url on top position when according to all metrics it doesn't deserve it. There are 3 or 4 competitors that have more and better incoming links, a better page optimization, better content, etc.

About user experience. have you entered the site? Did you really see anything that you did like of that page for the user?

What would you say is the main reason for them to be on top? "This website has the word Tenerife on it many times.  It has pages with Tenerife in the title, in the URL." So that is your conclusion ? Thanks in advance.

Hi there, I've been working in SEO for more than five years and I'm always telling clients about the more than 200 factors that influence rankings, but sometimes I meet several urls or websites who haven't optimized their pages nor built links and still appear first.

This is the case of the keyword "Escorts en Tenerife" in google.es. If you search that keyword in google.es you'll find this url: escortislacanarias.com... (I don't want to give them a link).

My question is why the heck this url is ranking first on Google for that keyword if the url isn't optmized, the page content isn't optimized and hasn't got many or valuable incoming links?

Do an on page grader to that url regarding that keyword an it gets an F !!! So there is no correlation between better optimization and good rankings.

I totally agree with you, although people don't like to receive answers that might brake their strategy. .co.uk is pointless.

Thumbs Up for Egol and Marcus and all the other who fight against non logical Thumbs Down. It is good that we defend each other when we deserve it. Cheers, EGOL, great answer as well. You have answered my questions as well and you always give good, profound answers !

Ok thanks a lot ! Cheers !

Do you see any errors or can you localize the mistaken PHP function in this code?

if ( $postImg['showImage'] ) { ?>
                                   

endwhile;
                    else :
                        echo '

'.__('There are no featured posts selected to display in this area (yet).',THEMENAME).'

';
                    endif;

//Reset Query
                    wp_reset_query();
                    ?>

} // end if( featuredContentActive != '')
                ?>

// Home Page Blog Posts
                if (get_theme_var('homePostsActive') !== '') { ?>

global $firstPage;
                    $firstPage = true;

if ($paged > 1) {
                        // filter for offset and proper paging
                        add_filter('post_limits', 'my_post_limit');
                        // modify paging (to work with offset for home page)
                        $paged = $paged-1;
                        $firstPage = false;
                    }

Thank you very much for your answer, it gave me some clues I will investigate.

Hi all, I am having a peculiar PHP problem that  is affecting the user experience of the site and thus, the SEO.

The site is www.atlantiksurf.com and as you can see I use the QTranslate Plugin to manage the 3 different languages:

1. www.atlantiksurf.com (Spanish)
2. www.atlantiksurf.com/en
3. www.atlantiksurf.com/de

If you enter the german version: http://www.atlantiksurf.com/de/ , and you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you will notice there are a couple of posts that have (Español) in their Titles. This means that this particular post is written in Spanish and should only appear in the Spanish version of the site.

Every single post is published on the three versions even when they are language orientated. The result is that when you press that specific Spanish title on the German version, you get nothing but this:

http://www.atlantiksurf.com/de/aritz-aranburu-tendra-que-estar-un-mes-sin-competir/

Because obviously there is nothing there.

If I go to the wordpress admin panel and search for the post manually, I can solve the problem by erasing all the default code of the different language versions that should not appear. But this is only a manual and non practical solution.

The problem, I think, might be in the PHP orders that the Wordpress Theme is receiving from somewhere.

I come to all of you SEomoz users as my last chance, because I've been months in discussions with Qtranslate users and php amateurs that cannot solve the issue.

I know that this question isn't strictly about SEO, but in a way it is, because it must be affecting the way that Google look at us.

Please, some help or orientation would be highly appreciated.

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Yes you are right. I just wanted to help by making you see that your problem has in fact happened to many people. Mine is a bit diferent. To be honest, I still don't know why it happened and Google also told me it was not a penalization... Good Luck.

Hi Sara, I am sorry for your loss. It happened to my site as well but it is finally going up again. You can take a look at this thread:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/amazing-decrease-of-visits-in-a-good-content-site

I hope it might help you. By the way, I finally noticed that the problem was in the alt attributes.

HI Grasshoper and other repliers, many thanks for your answers.

1.- The alt attribute: You might be absolutely right, I know the attribute and use it every day in my job but hadn't apply it on General-History. The alt attribute is nothing new, so if I hadn't inserted them on the first place and reached 14.000 visits, how come I now descend to 1.5? Is google penguin so powerful? I did not read any change about the alt attribute when I read about penguin, did you?

2.- The Wordpress Theory: This, I admit has impressed me. I think this might not be the only reason, but it can be a major reason of the decrease as the older posts get far away from the home thus decreasing its importance. I very much liked this answer, thank you.

3.- Competitors. I fullishly dismissed this issue because I did not think that other history sites would invert or do something about their SEO, but I might be wrong.

Grasshoper would you like to have access to the associated analytics account to study the case? I have SEO friends who consider this issue as interesting as anything, I mean, have you ever seen a non spammy site decrease it's visits as such?

Thanks in advance, and by the way, if it is the ads that appear in the header, I would not mind to take it off as it gives very little money.

Thanks a lot to all of you.

Dear Sirs, contributors and aspirants of Seomoz:

I have a site called General History (http://general-history.com/) that was created in 2010, and has a current PR of 3, a DA of 23 and a home page authority of 32. It also has 1.690 links, knowing that we have not invested on link building, all the links were built manually via post inserting or viral via social shares.

The thing is that in only 5 months, it passed from receiving 14.000 visits/per month to only 1.500. Is that a decrease of 700% in 5 months?

I must admint that I earn my life offering SEO to companies, but this is one of my own sites, a site in which my 73 year old father likes to write about General History. I really think, given that he used to be a journalist, that the content not only isn't spam but it is high quality content.

As I had Analytics, I started searching for the cause. The first question was...

1.- From what source did I loose the most amount of visitors? Organic, Paid or Social. The answer is organic by far.

As I discovered it was an organic loss, I tried to find what content used to have the most visitors. I found 3 posts that brought 80% of the total traffic.

How did the people find the content? Well, some of them found the site in the first page of google when searching for "Holocaust facts and figures" for example, but Analytics says that the most people came from image search in Google Images.

General history disappeared from the SERPs but progressively, not from one day to another. So then I thought, It can't be a penalization.

I contacted google and send them a reconsideration. 5 days later they answered saying that general-history.com is not a spammy site and thus it has not been penalized. For the ones who can read Spanish, here is Google answer:

"Estimado webmaster o propietario del sitio http://general-history.com/:

Hemos recibido una solicitud del propietario de un sitio para que volvamos a comprobar si http://general-history.com/ cumple las directrices para webmasters de Google.

Hemos revisado tu sitio y no hemos detectado acciones manuales del equipo de webspam que puedan perjudicar la clasificación del mismo en Google. No es necesario que presentes una solicitud de reconsideración para el mismo, ya que las incidencias relacionadas con la clasificación que puedan producirse no se derivan de acciones manuales realizadas por el equipo de webspam.

Existen otras incidencias relacionadas con tu sitio que pueden perjudicar la clasificación del mismo. Los ordenadores de Google determinan el orden de los resultados de búsqueda a través de una serie de fórmulas denominadas algoritmos. Cada año, se realizan cientos de cambios en los algoritmos de búsqueda, y se utilizan más de 200 señales diferentes para clasificar páginas. A medida que cambian los algoritmos y la Web (incluido tu sitio), se pueden producir fluctuaciones en la clasificación, ya que se actualiza para ofrecer a los usuarios los resultados más relevantes.

Si has detectado un cambio en la clasificación y consideras que no se debe simplemente a un cambio de algoritmos, te recomendamos que investigues otras posibles causas, como un cambio importante en el contenido del sitio, en el sistema de gestión de contenido o en la arquitectura del servidor. Por ejemplo, es posible que un sitio no obtenga una buena posición en los resultados de búsqueda si el servidor deja de proporcionar páginas a Googlebot o si el usuario cambia las URL de una gran parte de las páginas del sitio. En este artículo se incluye una lista de otros posibles motivos por los que tu sitio no obtiene una buena clasificación en los resultados de búsqueda.

Si sigues sin poder solucionar la incidencia, accede al foro de ayuda para webmasters para obtener asistencia.

Atentamente,

Equipo de Calidad de búsqueda de Google"

They say interesting things like it might be other problems that caused my position decrease like: Site content change, content management, server architecture or change or urls.

After receiving this, I thought I should get in the admin panel in wordpress and search for bugs, html or css, php errors and I found that somebody had hijacked my site, entering the wordpress panel and adding a code of into one of my landing pages. That page does not exist anymore. I erased completely.

The span code was as follows:
General History | General-History General History | General-HistoryGeneral History | General-HistoryGeneral History | General-HistoryGeneral History | General-HistoryGeneral History | General-HistoryGeneral History | General-HistoryGeneral History | General-HistoryGeneral History | General-HistoryGeneral History | General-History

I thought that would be the problem ! But it was NOT, because Google did not penalize me as you can see in the letter they sent me. I erased the complete page in which the span appeared, I updated my sitemap, re-check my robots.txt, searched my folders via FTP and mucho more...

Conclusion? I have no idea why I General-History has lost 700% of its traffic in 5 months.

Hi Martin and Lee, thanks for answering this question, I'll just answer your points Martin:

1.- Because the owner of the site is a friend of mine and he thought it would be a good idea.

2.- I think it does give my domain some value, because it is a link coming from a Non Spammy site that has a Page Authrotiy of 39 and a Domain authority of 28 according to Open Site Explorer, which I think is not bad at all. But the thing is that it is not relevant although the anchor text that he put might be relevant.

3.- I get some visitors but  very few. And they all have a Bounce Rate of 100%, so they really dont like or are not looking for any possible service that I offer.

Conclusion: I think that it is passing me some Link Juice, because the domain has a better Domain Authority than mine ! But, it has nothing to do with surfing, my site is about marketing online and translations..

But, his anchor text was "Marketing Online for your Surfschool" (In Spanish), so in that way, it does have some relevance, but it is not producing anything.

I hope I have answered your doubts so you can tell me your opinion. Thanks in advance. And Thanks Lee Jackson as well, I marked both your answers as Good Answers! Cheers.

Good Morning Seomoz Fans, let me explain what is going on:

A surfing site has included a link to my Site in their Footer. apparently, this could be good for my site, but as It has nothing to do with my site, I ask myself if I should tell them to erase it.

Site A (Surfing Site) is pointing at Site B (Marketing Site) on their Footer. So Site B is receiving backlinks from every single page on Site A. But Site B has nothing to do with Site A: Different Markets.

Should I ask them to erase the link on their footer as Surfing people will not find my Marketing Site interesting?

Thanks in advance.

Thank you Boomajoom, I have received several answers in other discussions, but I like yours the most. In the end, it is reasonable what you say, the answer in SEO is always the same: Create for users, not search engines !

Hi everyone:

I have seen that many SEO Agencies have contacted my business (Also SEO but In- House) in order to interchange links.

They have created a specific page on their site with the Label "Links" or similar, and on that page they add multiple links of the competence.

I have heard that you can only do that if you make sure you add two things:

1. No follow in links.
2. Not inserting links of websites that have nothing to do with our sector.

Either way, I have never found this amusing. I always recommend people not to do this but I have my doubts after all.

¿Could some one give me their opinion?

Cheers !

Hi, there are several ways to solve this issue:

1. Go to Google Webmaster Tools and go to Configuration>Configuration and click the url that you prefer.
2. Use 301 redirection.
3. Add the urls you don't like to your robots.txt

you should learn more about these 3 technics before applying one of them.

Cheers !