Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Given what's been going on with Penguin, I'd say steer clear of this. Alan's spot on.

A few possibilities. We just went through this:

1. If your site recently got hacked and delivered malware, Google may temporarily remove your site or push it down in the rankings. Assuming you fixed it, you should recover fairly soon.
2. Do you rank #1 for your own brand name? If not, you may be under a Penguin or Panda penalty. Did you get a warning message from Google regarding unnatural links?
3. Is the content on your site unique? (aside from the scrapers) If it's not, that can cause what you're seeing.

I would precisely describe the image. If it's a picture of a doctor taking someone's blood pressure, the ALT should be "doctor taking someone's blood pressure". Don't insert the brand name unless the image contains it, or the person in the image uses the brand and the text below it is their testimonial.

I think mobilemoxie may not be generating 100% accurate results. When I searched for "ixl.com" on my Android phone, your brand came up #1.

A better rule is to make sure it reads well. Don't focus on ratios - that's a huge mistake.

That said, I do recommend that you:

1. Make sure you use the phrase that folks search for. If you sell 'running shoes', don't write about 'athletic footwear'.
2. Make sure your writing is structure and styled so that your key phrase fits in naturally: When you write, you shouldn't have to force the key phrase into the page. It should end up in headings, captions, etc. because it makes sense. If that's not the case, double-check that you're writing the right thing.
3. Check the grade level of your writing. I use http://www.readability-score.com/ most of the time. Grade level can impact bounce rate, which can impact rankings.

Hope this helps

I prefer www, because folks will generally tend to use that version when they link to you. It's reflex.

But you can check this. Run Open Site Explorer for both versions of your domain.

If more people link to you using 'www' than non-www, use www and 301 redirect the non-www to www.

If more people use non-www, do the reverse.

Ooooh, that feels all wrong.

Seems to me .htaccess would block visitors that you may want. And while Google may obey the directive, they may also misinterpret a referrer-specific directive as cloaking.

If you want to get the same effect, here's what I'd do:

1. Change the page to which the offending links point. Have it say "This page is gone, but you can get the information you want here" and make that a link to a new page.
2. Set up your server to return a 410 code when folks visit that page.
3. Set up a new page with the old page's content, so folks can click from the old to the new, but visiting bots and browsers get a 410 code and dump the page.

That will get Google to de-index the page in a hurry.

Another option: Simply add noindex, nofollow to the targeted page.

But I like the 410 option, because that should break the authority flow and has the best chance of giving Google what it wants, short of removing the link.