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I have absolutely no idea. I don't think they really need to at this point.

Could be. I don't see why they'd waste any effort trying to dominate a result they're irrelevant for and no one will click on, or if they do, will bounce.

I know Google has been favoring brands a big names lately, but I'm seeing something a bit more alarming

Our company offers custom embroidered patches, and through keyword and search research I have discovered that almost all searches for "embroidered patches" are by people who need embroidered patches and are looking to purchase them, or learn more about the process of purchasing them. The SERPs for this term used to be all embroidered patch companies such as ours.

In the past month:

We've been outranked by a page on Amazon that's fairly irrelevant.

An equally irrelevant ebay page has emerged

The Wikipedia page for "embroidered patch" is now number seven.

This has pushed three other embroidered patch companies off the first page (not that I'm complaining because it wasn't our company . . . yet).

My question is, has anyone else noticed something similar happening, where large sites are gaining ground, in spite of the fact that they have low relevance to the search term?

Thanks for the code. It worked! And thanks for providing the link to the server header check so I could properly test it.

I'm a bit leery of this. Where's the concrete proof that he ever worked for Google? I realize nothing he said was overly shocking, but still . . .

I 100% agree with this, and I am working on long term strategies in the hopes that our competitors will face consequences soon enough--two of our biggest competitors were completely destroyed by the first Penguin. It's a little hard when you have higher ups demanding answers as to why we went from number #1 to #4 over the past three months.

Yes, I did that yesterday, but unfortunately, a few weeks ago I got an email from Google saying they received a spam report I sent them for a different site over eight months ago, so I'm not expecting any kind of expedient action on Google's part.

Two very good answers, however they're rather contradictory to each other. I'm still not sure what to do about this.

The redirect is back now (don't know what happened) but now when I click on the order page, which is supposed to be https, it redirects it to http even though I have the following code in the htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/order.html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/cgi-bin/order.cgi

I am referring to the one in my profile. I will check that out and get back to you. Thanks.

Over the past few months, through Google Alerts, I've been watching one of our competitors kick out crap press releases, and links to their site have been popping up all over blog networks with exact match anchor text.

They now outrank us for that anchor text. Why is this still happening? Three Penguin updates later and this still happens. I'm trying so hard to do #RCS and acquire links that will ensure our site's long-term health in the SERPs.

Is anyone else still struggling with this crap?

The https version of our homepage appears in Google's SERPs. We have rel canonical on the page pointing to the http version. We have a redirect in our htaccess that sends https to http.

I thought this was just a fluke and it would be fixed by the next crawl, but it's been like this for a few weeks now. Not only that, but we're losing rank a bit and I'm afraid there's a correlation.

Has this ever happened to anyone?

Adam is pretty much right on. The October Linkscape update only crawled 55 billion URLs this time. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/octobers-mozscape-update

Our DA went down two points after this update. It's nothing to worry about. The real question is, have your rankings dropped?

Yup, makes sense now. And try not to focus too much on an actual percentage when it comes to keyword frequency. Google never set a standard; that is just some experienced SEO's best educated estimation.

I'm not even sure at this point because they've upgraded the interface so much, but the best thing to do is to choose one of the templates they provide and then from there, customize which buttons you want to appear and where. i think as far as sizes go, you only have the option of 16px or 32px, but I could be wrong.

I toiled over this for half a day about a year ago, installing and trying out dozens of different plugins for sharing. The only one that I found to be adequate was WP Socializer. It's not the easiest to figure out how to customize, but once you finally can wrap your brain around it, it's great.

The first thing that came to my mind is that you may not be intending to target this specific word, but because it's stuffed throughout the page, Google may think you're targeting it.

I'm also confused as to what the issue is if you're afraid Google will think you're keyword stuffing and won't rank you for ''Wordpress'' but you say that you actually don't want to rank for that anyway.

I'm just going to go with the standard best practice here and say to write the article for your users, not Google. Write it the way you would if Google did not exist. Google's algorithms are smarter than you think, and penalization of quality content that is intended for user experience is not something that generally happens.

Something just occurred to me today.

I work in-house for an embroidered patch company, but I respond to a lot of HARO queries about Marketing, SEO, SEM, Web Design, ect. So, we have a lot of links from these types of sites. Additionally, I have done guest blogs on these topics because those are what I'm knowledgeable about.

We also have links from customers' personal blogs or websites stating they got their patches from us and are happy, blah, blah, blah.

On top of that, we hired someone who ended up getting tons of .edu links by spamming blogs. Oy.

I'd estimate only about 10% of our links come from embroidery, sewing, screen printing, promotional products, etc types of sites.

I guess it's not really known or documented how much weight Google places on niche-specific links--we just assume that it matters, and I'm sure it does.

Our rankings are fine now, but I'm looking for some opinions from other SEOs about how much they think this will matter in the future or how much it matters now. Could this hurt us in the future?

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Can you clarify a little what you mean? You really don't need a plugin for that, as you can specify right in the editor when you're writing which text you want to assign a heading tag to.

SEOmoz seems to have weeded out the issue without my doing anything.