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im not sure if you are still searching but I have spent the last 3 years experimenting with various options. I initially started with the usual suspects but then found RankWatch. This was great but there were some instances that were not 100% correct - bear in mind that I monitor 800 keywords daily. i then switched to ranktrackr which is really great. HOWEVER, there were some instances when the software was out of snyc and I woke up a few times to a screen showing hundreds of drops which, in fact had not happened. More recently I came across this which so far seems to work well http://serptoday.com/

Personally I would release it over a decided period. This way it would seem that your content is being continuously added rather than a massive once off DUMP.

So, we now know that Google are changing the Title and Meta Desc length limits to 70 and 200 respectively. Does this mean we all need to jump to immediate attention and modify all our current pages OR, do we wait?

This is a tough question and you will by no means ever find the perfect all in 1 solution. Remember that quite a lot of the date comes from Google Analytics and Webmasters. Some of us are either too lazy or simply dont have the time to sift through all the data, which is why we revert to these tools. I personally use Ahrefs, Monitor Backlinks, Moz and Ranktracr to monitor any spikes in my ranks.

Thanks for the information Dr

I need some help here too please guys. I got the dreaded manual penalty last month (Unnatural links to your site—impacts links. Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. Learn more.)due to a mysterious donator of spammy links. I suspect a competitor has done this. Admittedly when I started the site years ago I was using bad techniques but have since converted to all white hat best practices. Ive been working desperately to disavow and am about to embark on a very costly content exercise to gain some real quality links. However, since Google gave me the message my life is in a downward spiral as my site literally feeds me and my children. My DA has gone from 49 to 15 (I lost about 150 links to the disavow), my ranks are dropping daily. Is this huge drop in DA due to the disavowed links?

What can i do to save my site?

Unnatural links to your site—impacts links

Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole.Learn more.

I assume your referring to implementing SSL? Let me give you some personal advice here. Forget about it. there was huge hype last year about Google giving reward to https domains so I immediately went ahead. In doing so I lost a ton of indexed URL's which took about 2 months to recover from. So, I would say forget about making any changes, not worth the effort.

Dave, I had exactly the same issue a month ago with being indexed on subdomains but was able to modify robots.txt in root domain swiftly enough to avoid real damage. Your main root robots.txt can override the subdomains. Simply disallow the subdomain in your robots file disallow: /subdomain url/robots.txt OR, if im not mistaken simply remove it altogether from the subdomain

Perhaps they should look at re-branding the product offering before they look at ranking. Take a look at this inspirational video by Rory Sutherland.

Guys, please could you let me know the outcome of this as well. I realise the necessity of the canonical tag regarding the categorization of pages but this tag issue is a concern to me so I would really appreciate the findings.

The solution is simple. Remember usability is key to the user experience. If you have a blog then place the blog/ in the URL. Think of an e-commerce website. You want to categorize items correctly. You don't want customers finding fridges in the microwaves category

This is a very interesting topic and as always we have no proof of the consequences from Google. I was always under the impression that should a page be seen as a replica of another page then the older page would rank higher in the SERPS. I was also under the impression that should duplicate content be discovered by Google that page would be flagged and penalized? I'm subject to correction because, as I said, there is no definitive proof relating to this at all.

Hustler has a very good point about your traffic sources. I spent the last 2 months converting my site as a precautionary measure and Im ready. My advice would be to stay away from quick fixes. Start your conversion on high traffic pages and slowly work your way through to the lower end pages.

2 days ago I saw my site listed with the 'mobile friendly' text in the Mobile searches. Today it has vanished. I have checked my site using the Google tool and it shows my site as Mobile Friendly. Has anyone had a similar experience?

Automation is always risky as you never really have control over the results. As mentioned by Ryan and Dennis, you should put in the effort to create your links manually

Matt is 100% correct, there are definite delays on Google's side.

Sorry to jump in here but I am about to launch a redesign as well. I am only implementing a new Wordpress theme - all pages, content and structure is identical. The reason being is that the new theme is more mobile friendly. Am I to expect a decline in traffic?

To me this is a simple solution. Make your content more valuable. The high bounce rate is because readers dont want to see what you are displaying.

Thanks Dirk, could you tell me why that would not then show for all the other pages as it is present on all the pages?

How long ago did you create the page? I can see a Twitter feed on page 2 referring to you. Perhaps the actual page has not been indexed as yet? Have you checked in webmasters?

Have you tried manually submitting a few of the links to see what their 'status' is in webmasters? I find this topic so vague as there is nowhere to actually get a solid answer from Google. It would be great if there was a facility to test these exact kind of issues.

I received an error from Webmasters this morning "touch elements too close" relating to the mobile version of a page. I cannot see what they are referring to:

http://carhire-southafrica.co.za/car-hire-durban/

As far as I can see all the elements are perfectly positioned? Maybe I am blind and hopefully fellow MOZ guru's can assist

I totally agree with Ryan. Let sleeping dogs lie

Personally I would find a way of thinking laterally about generating new and unique content for your existing and potential users. "Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new," according to marketing guru Rory Sutherland. This rings true with content.

This seems to be a tough one - similar in many ways to an e-commerce site. As far as Im aware the canonical link will only work on the same domain, I stand to be corrected. In terms of duplicating the content you will end up being penalized by Panda at some stage.

Im assuming your pages have been crawled? Obviously if Google has crawled them they will be flagged as having errors. Once they are repaired Google will crawl them again. You should be fine if it is only for a few days.

Personally I would start afresh. Your content has been flagged as Spam by Google's algorithms. If they crawl your new site it will basically end up with the same result.

Adding to Hutch 24 I have fund that all in 1 seo plugin by Michael Torbert is very powerful plugin which could be of assistance

i want to say here that I have a competitor website who is ranking VERY well for spammy low ranking backlinks and he seems to continue to evade any penalties. Its very frustrating for those of us who try to adhere to preferred standards.

Mindlink has it nailed. Concentrate on your on-site SEO firstly. An important foundation is critical. Once your foundation is solid you can then look at building inbound links. MOZ has some excellent articles on these topics.

I find it amazing that we all strive to acquire rank in Google using suggested SEO standards to avoid their dreaded updates, yet they themselves cannot even get it right!

Thanks for the response Don. I will certainly give that a test.

We are often being preached to not get backlinks to dodgy or spammy sites but how do we identify these sites?