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So a friend of a friend was referred to me a few weeks ago as his Google traffic fell off a cliff. I told him I'd take a look at it and see what I could find and here's the situation I encountered. I'm a bit stumped at this point, so I figured I'd toss this out to the Moz crowd and see if anyone sees something I'm missing. The site in question is www.finishlinewheels.com In Mid June looking at the site's webmaster tools impressions went from around 20,000 per day down to 1,000. Interestingly, some of their major historic keywords like "stock rims" had basically disappeared while some secondary keywords hadn't budged. The owner submitted a reconsideration request and was told he hadn't received a manual penalty. I figured it was the result of either an automated filter/penalty from bad links, the result of a horribly slow server or possibly a duplicate content issue. I ran the backlinks on OSE, Majestic and pulled the links from Webmaster Tools. While there aren't a lot of spectacular links there also doesn't seem to be anything that stands out as terribly dangerous. Lots of links from automotive forums and the like - low authority and such, but in the grand scheme of things their links seem relevant and reasonable. I checked the site's speed in analytics and WMT as well as some external tools and everything checked out as plenty fast enough. So that wasn't the issue either. I tossed the home page into copyscape and I found the site brandwheelsandtires.com - which had completely ripped the site - it was thousands of the same pages with every element copied, including the phone number and contact info. Furthering my suspicions was after looking at the Internet Archive the first appearance was mid-May, shortly before his site took the nose dive (still visible at http://web.archive.org/web/20130517041513/http://brandwheelsandtires.com) THIS, i figured was the problem. Particularly when I started doing exact match searches for text on the finishlinewheels.com home page like "welcome to finish line wheels" and it was nowhere to be found. I figured the site had to be sandboxed. I contacted the owner and asked if this was his and he said it wasn't. So I gave him the contact info and he contacted the site owner and told them it had to come down and the owner apparently complied because it was gone the next day. He also filed a DMCA complaint with Google and they responded after the site was gone and said they didn't see the site in question (seriously, the guys at Google don't know how to look at their own cache?). I then had the site owner send them a list of cached URLs for this site and since then Google has said nothing. I figure at this point it's just a matter of Google running it's course. I suggested he revise the home page content and build some new quality links but I'm still a little stumped as to how/why this happened. If it was seen as duplicate content, how did this site with no links and zero authority manage to knock out a site that ranked well for hundreds of terms that had been around for 7 years? I get that it doesn't have a ton of authority but this other site had none. I'm doing this pro bono at this point but I feel bad for this guy as he's losing a lot of money at the moment so any other eyeballs that see something that I don't would be very welcome. Thanks Mozzers!

Nearly every post I've seen on Carousel states that "the rankings basically stay the same" but that hasn't been the case for one of my hospitality sites. The site went from being in the top 3 of local listings but when Carousel hit the site got bumped. We have high quality images, reviews, citations...we even added some newer, better photos but aside from that I'm a bit stumped as to what steps to take next. Anyone else get bumped by Carousel or have thoughts on any other factors which I might be missing out on?

Interesting conundrum I've run into with a legal site we've recently started working on. The client didn't initially tell us that their law office shares an address and a phone number with another firm. It didn't take long for us to find this out, but interestingly, it didn't seem to be negatively impacting their rankings...at first. Then as we got into June we simply fell out of the map listings. We occasionally resurface back to a 1-3 position and then disappear again. My presumption is that Google is having trouble deciding if either of our separate listings are legitimate as there are a lot of citations for each and the on site and off site SEO/link factors are fairly similar (with our site having a bit better link profile). So my thought is get a unique phone number (if I can make the client agree) and add a unique suite number and try to reclaim/edit every existing citation we can get our hands on. Anyone else run into a similar problem and beat it?

Recently fallen from 2nd to 5th with Manitou Boats website for the term pontoon boats - this is our money term. I can see eBay jumping us since they're a huge brand, but Avalon and Crest aren't even close by any metrics I can find. Really would like someone else's perspective on this...Anyone?

Working with the main site featured in this Open Site Explorer comparison (you'll need a pro account to view this), and have been for quite some time. Recently we've slid behind Ebay (huge brand, I get it), but the other competitors don't really make sense to me. Main phrase is pontoon boats, and maybe I'm too close to this, but we seem to be in the best shape overall in terms of the domain, the page itself, and even our social media is pretty successful (we're closing in on 5,000 likes and have a pretty engaged audience). More internal linking is an opportunity, but I'd like another set of eyes (or several for that matter) to weigh in on opinions. I'm a bit stumped. Thanks Mozzers!

For one site I work with the images link to the home page of the site rather than the page the image lives on. I think this is hurting my bounce rate quite a bit. Thoughts?

I have a few sites set up this way with their title tags: "Keyword rich phrase(s) | Company name" and Google is showing more and more of them like this in the SERPs - "Company name: Keyword rich phrase(s)" I don't see this happening to many other sites...am I hallucinating or what's going on here? Is this happening to anyone else? I don't see it necessarily affecting rankings, but for my sites with little brand recognition I want those keywords first. Bueller? Bueller?

Hello all. I work with a number of ecommerce sites and in trying to gauge year over year performance I'm struggling to properly account for some of the organic shrinkage in SERPs. Many people have discussed the topic of SERPs with 6 & 7 results and the growing real estate being taken up by paid results. What I want to know is if anyone out there has done some large scale number crunching to find some averages on lowered CTR or traffic loss so I can better understand my numbers. Anyone have any input here?

Interesting dilemma I've run into. Working in an extremely boring B2B space and started making some quality content to grab some .edu links. Well, it worked. Let's put it this way, our target keyword is "{keyword} services" and we pulled in so many .edu links the resource page which is an educational resource with our target keyword in it, has now surpassed every commercial site and ranks second. The problem is, the page doesn't have much in the way of services on it, it's strictly educational and targets a different audience than our customer. The home page, our desired landing page, jumps back and forth between third and twelfth depending on the week. Any thoughts on how to make these flip flop? We're getting a ton of traffic to the wrong page and bouncing most of them at the moment.

Saw an interesting SERP today that made me wonder how this is working - A search for alaska train tours reveals the Flash slideshow from this page http://www.alaskatours.com/alaska_railroad_packages/alaska_family_tour.htm showing up on the second/third pages. I'm guessing this is the work of a video sitemap perhaps? Unsure how they pulled this off exactly, but I am very interested to see what people think as I could probably use this for a few different sites.

Hello all, Have multiple ecommerce projects going right now and thought I'd throw this one out there. We use follow up emails to try to encourage reviews for customers to all of our ecommerce stores, but find that many of them are pretty tedious as far as registering to write reviews and requiring a lot of information to get started. We primarily use Reseller Ratings and Trustpilot, but were interested if anyone had better luck using some different sites that Google also crawls for review data. Any input is appreciated. Thanks.

Hello all, Been happily using HARO for some time now, but was looking for some supplemental ideas/locations for hooking up some of my clients as sources.  Any ideas/suggestions are definitely welcome. Thanks!

A very similar question was asked previously.  (http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-google-did-not-index-our-domain)  We've done everything in that post (and comments) and then some. The domain is http://www.miwaterstewardship.org/ and, so far, we have: put "User-agent: *  Allow: /" in the robots.txt  (We recently removed the "allow" line and included a Sitemap: directive instead.) built a few hundred links from various pages including multiple links from .gov domains properly set up everything in Webmaster Tools submitted site maps (multiple times) checked the "fetch as googlebot" display in Webmaster Tools (everything looks fine) submitted a "request re-consideration" note to Google asking why we're not being indexed Webmaster Tools tells us that it's crawling the site normally and is indexing everything correctly.  Yahoo! and Bing have both indexed the site with no problems and are returning results.  Additionally, many of the pages on the site have PR0 which is unusual for a non-indexed site.  Typically we've seen those sites have no PR at all. If anyone has any ideas about what we could do I'm all ears.  We've been working on this for about a month and cannot figure this thing out. Thanks in advance for your advice.

Recently got handed off a .org site for a quasi state agency here in Michigan.  Turns out the developer had the site live for the past six months but left the noindex, nofollow tag on everything so the site was invisible to search engines. Obviously we wiped all of those things a couple weeks ago when we got started, added all of our sitemaps to bing/yahoo/google webmaster tools and we've already started getting indexed by yahoo and bing and showing up for branded terms...but NOTHING from Google.  WMT says our pages are all indexed, but we aren't showing up for anything in search and we don't seem to be indexed at all. Granted, if this site was brand new and didn't have any links I could see us taking a little time to get found, but this site has very good .gov and .edu links, plus we've built some other solid links to it since we've launched and Google continues to ignore it.  I haven't seen this before, but could Google still be ignoring us from the months of noindex, nofollowing?  If so, any tips on how to get back in teh Google's good graces here?