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In going over your site really quickly I would have to say that you are a victim of Panda.  I would suggest tightening up your page focus and not being so broad in your titles.  Also, you do have some duplicate content issues that Google may take as an attempt to manipulate the search results.  here's an example: - http://copyscape.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.shuttlefinder.net%2F

I would suggest an on-page overhaul.  I am not, in any way, saying anything bad about your site, it just needs a Panda compliant clean up

Good Luck!

Hi Cyril,

As an SEO that specializes in hotels, and has for years, I thought I would share a bit of experience with you.  I can not stress the importance of On Page SEO in our industry.  Links are, of course, important, but On Page can not be ignored.  I hope you don't mind but I took the liberty of quickly going through your site and I have some suggestions that I believe will help you to achieve the rankings you are looking for.  Each page of your website should have a clear and definite focus i.e. the focus for the hotels page should obviously be French Quarter Hotels etc... the page's focus needs to be reflected in each page's Title, Description, alt text, H1 and all through out the content.  No pages should have the same title or description (they all appear to be the same right now).  Unless you are using the keyword tags for internal reporting (we do) you should drop them.  If you do use them clean them up (right now the terms in them are far too broad and there are far to many).  Internal linking should be structured to flow for the user etc... just basic stuff.  With your current link profile and the age of your site a good on page clean up should be all you need.

Good Luck!

The only tool I know of that does this for you is BrightEdge.  Otherwise doing it manually is probably the best way to go.  If there are other tools out there that do this I have no doubt someone here will know of it.

Yeah and I guess if it was a penalty you would have received an email - Google is being all transparent now.  This is an odd situation you have.  maybe you should kill the 301 just to see if the old site shoots back up.  Weird, my friend... very weird.  I wish I could be of any assistance but I have never seen this before.  Good luck.

I hope that is the case  Thanks for responding.

If they were, and still are, indexed in Google just do a site: search

High high PA and lower DA is simply because the DA is an average of each page's PA (at least that's how I understand it).  It may not be quite that simple with certain page's weighing more in the average but I believe that is the simplest way to look at it.

In my personal market it is very hard, if not impossible to get links to any page other than the home page so I use very thought out internal linking structures to spread authority throughout the website.  However, I do not believe I have ever seen a website who's Home Page Authority was not considerably higher than the over all DA - for instance, the site I am working on right now has a DA of 59 and a PA (on the home page) of 65 while the PA of one of the internal pages is 43...

Tricky.  Here is my take.

Google, as I am sure you know, recommends responsive design so all 'versions' of a website operate under the same URL. https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details

However, it is very clearly stated "...serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device"

I read that as "Don't hide anything"  They want the SAME html being served so I take that to mean all of it - not some.

Could you compromise and make it an H2 or H3 and just set the CSS to show that particular tag as a small sub-header on the desktop version, but a bigger more prominent header on the other versions?

Where I work we provide both template and custom solutions with templates being, obviously, more affordable.  Although we do very well with the customs our templates sell far more and of those there are, of course, templates that sell better than others.

We have never had any issues between websites that decide on the same templates.  Never.

Due to my practical experience with different properties using the same templates I have to say that I disagree with the assertion that the html and css (and jquery and everything else) that goes in to the template construct would be considered duplicate content.  I have always believed, and still do, that "duplicate content" refers only to the subject matter that is published on the website.  Nothing else.

You want to add the content to help your users, right?  You aren't trying to get it indexed, correct?  Just noindex those pages...

I would drop the "keyword in bold, italic and underlined" as well as worrying at all about density.  I would only do that if it enhances the page for the reader rather than bolding etc... a word simply because it is your targeted term for the page.  Also - alt tags are very important, yes, but remember to describe the image, don't just throw keywords in.  I think will all of the recent talk about 'Over Optimization'  those are things that the algo's could potentially be looking for etc...

Just a quick look at the home page a some quick navigation of the site showed me that on the home page alone there are at least five links that go to howtotradecommoditiesDOTcom/go/etoro which just redirects to the etoro website.  It almost looks like there are ads that are disguised as internal links in order to keep from getting the 'above the fold' penalty.  Who knows how Google sees this but I would think that they wouldn't see it in a very good light whether this was the intention or not.  I would certainly look at reworking your internal linking structure as well.

Good luck

I wouldn't bother with design element only images; borders, backgrounds etc... only actual images of something you can describe.  I would also stay very far away from just adding keywords to the alt attribute.  If the images are relevant to the page's focus just describing the image accurately will help a great deal.

I like the idea of 301's the best in this case - in any event all of your suggestions are right on.  Thumb up!

Go to your Dashboard and click add new plugins and type in Word Press SEO Plug in and download the one from Yoast.com

That is what you need

In the market I work (strictly hospitality) I would have to say that our mobile success, of which we have a good amount, is actually based on the desktop websites ranking very well and the sniffer delivering the mobile website to mobile devices.  Whether or not this will go on forever, I just do not know.

We expected strictly mobile search to take off in 2012 and optimized our mobile sites accordingly but alas, it is still the ranking of the desktop sites that is delivering the vast majority of mobile visits.... maybe 2013 ?

I stand corrected  Thank you, sir.

See, interalta?  Told ya if I was wrong someone would politely point it out  I love this community.

I wouldn't do that.  It would work, but in case your site was ever manually looked at for any reason and that was noticed, that could look like an attempt to manipulate search results and you could get hit.  I would just put it on as text and either noindex the page in your robots.txt file or do as Raymond and Nakul suggest and set up a canonical tag.  In my very humble opinion I think the safest thing would just be to block bots from the page but the canonical isn't a bad suggestion at all.

I totally agree.  Going a bit deeper, each page should have its own clear focus and the Titles should reflect each page's focus.  For the home page, however, location and service is the way to go.  Good answer, Matt.

Mr. Weiss,

I suppose, for me, it would depend on the campaign.  If it was going to be a long running client or if it was going to be my company's website I would pick one phrase and run with it for a few months and then change it up and run the other for a few months and compare the data to determine which one was the most successful.

If, however, it was a short running client like a 'one time' optimization (which I hate but they do happen) I would first rule out that I could in no way run them both together and if I couldn't and if I determined that they both carried equal relevancy to the page's subject I would take the one or two words that make the short tail phrases different (in this case 'background' and 'credentials') and I would find out which of those carried the most search volume and make an educated guess from there - I know you touched on that and I agree that it doesn't 'mean' much - but it does help with getting an idea, in my opinion.

You pose an interesting question and as I have taken your advice many times - and you certainly give excellent advice - I am quite curious as to how YOU or others here would approach this.  I will be watching this thread closely.

Cheers, my friend