Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Alan,

First, a few things to consider:

1. Did your site actually get hit with a penalty? You talk about removing unnatural links. Was that just to be safe, or something else?
2. If your 1st site revision changed site urls and generated a lot of 404s, without proper redirection, you'd get the exact result you're describing.
3. Did you get new copy written for your 1st site revision? If so, and you didn't write it, take a few sentences from different pages and search for them, in quotes, on Google. Make sure they weren't plagiarized, because that would explain a drop in traffic, too.

All of that said, here's what I'd do:

1. **Definitely **work to improve engagement. Engagement is good for your business anyway, so even if it had zero effect on visits, you'd make existing visitors happier. And, Google at least rewards you because of the secondary effects of a great UX: More attention and citation, more positive reviews, fewer bounce backs, etc. And yes, there's some evidence Google rewards great UX, whether deliberately or as a side effect.

2. Look for lost links and repair them. Use OpenSiteExplorer and get the Top Pages report. Look for all pages that respond with a 404. Put those pages back (if you had that page before), build a page at that location (if you never had that page) or do a 301 redirect from the page URL to a 'real' page (the easiest fix).

3. Check site performance. Did site load speed take a huge hit with the new design?

4. Look at your log files. Go all the way back to before the 1st site relaunch. Compare Googlebot activity on your site from that period to now. What's changed? Is Googlebot getting trapped somewhere? Has crawl traffic dropped?

5. Finally, I wouldn't engage in old-fashioned link building. It's a terrible idea for a site with a low DA. If you want to acquire citations, you're going to have to do it by making customers really happy, offering great information and content, and generally offering a great experience.

I hope this helps. There's no easy answer here. You're going to need to take a very strategic approach, rather than focus on a single tactic, if you're going to make this work.

Ian

My favorite is the "No, not like this" article.

You poke a little fun at yourself with a piece that says something like:

"Hi. Our name is SuperFry. Yes, SuperFry. There's a lot of confusion out there about our name. We blame ourselves. Folks have used Super-Fri, Super Fry, Super-Fri [list more here].

We appreciate the creativity, we really do. And we're sorry we created a name with so many spelling possibilities. But it's our name because [story of the name]."

Hope this clears things up,

John Doe
CEO
Super Fri SuperFri Super-Fri Super Fry SuperFry

When did you see the change? There were rumors of a Bing algorithm change on May 5th of this year:

http://www.seroundtable.com/bing-search-update-18525.html

On May 19th, Google rolled out the 'Payday loan' Panda update.

Also, what's changed on your site, if anything?

I'm with Kate on this one. marketing/digital/research reflects the site structure, is very easy to read, and shouldn't be a problem.

Keywords in URLs are no longer a real factor, unless you have an exact match domain name.

Go with the URL that's easiest to read, will be easy from a structural point of view (in whatever CMS you're using) and most likely to get clicked.

True TTFB is improved by changes to your basic server configuration, not a CDN. A CDN will improve delivery of static and cached files, but may not impact TTFB the way you need it to.

My gut tells me you need to look at:

• Database caching: Is your e-commerce system using it? The first hit on the database is a huge hit on performance.
• Memory vs. disk caching: Memory is faster
• SSL versus non-SSL for non-secure pages. SSL will slow performance and should only be used where security is an issue, like during checkout or on login pages.
• Server configuration: Is your database on the same server as your web server? That's a problem, if true.

It's the word 'cushion(s).' You use it 14 times in the first 3 paragraphs, and then at least 10 more times towards the bottom of the page. You need to reduce that quite a bit.

In your ALT attributes, you have a button that reads 'show details' but you then stuff the ALT attribute like this:

"Show details for [name of cushion] cushion"

That definitely counts as keyword stuffing.

Change the ALTs for those buttons to 'More details,' clean up the body copy and you should be set.

Hi Jan - I do see your site, #3, for the same article. That doesn't answer the annoying question, though: How does an aggregator outrank you?

While Floost has a higher domain authority (51 to your 35) the specific page on their site has zero authority or social shares.

The content that's helping them rank is the stuff that appears when you click the pull-down tab at the top of the screen.

I'm grasping at straws a little bit, but I wonder if your title tag is hurting you, just a little bit?

A couple of little things to try:

1. Put your title tag at the very top of your HTML.
2. Remove the " from your title tag, too.

See if that helps.

Any chance we can see the site? Matt's completely correct regarding Bing Webmaster Central, I'd start there.

Also:

1. Submit an XML sitemap. Any errors that pop up during the processing of the sitemap will help you diagnose the problem.
2. Check your log files. See if BingBot or MSNBot show up in the logs. If they don't, then your site's not getting crawled.
3. Check robots.txt - any chance the site's outright blocking them?

I can believe anything when it comes to click prices these days. Folks go a little insane.

As far as repeat clicking and spending his money: Google has filters in place to detect malicious clicking behavior. While someone could certainly click once and cost you however much a single click costs, they couldn't click again and again.

You can be really, really devious and find ways to click more than once using proxies, Mechanical Turk style services and such. But it's rarely worth it.

If you're setting up a campaign, the math should always work out such that a few stray clicks here and there don't matter in the overall scheme. Even at $142 cpc. So, if you know you convert 5% of all clicks on your $142 cpc ad, and a single conversion is worth $100,000, then it's probably OK. Same goes for a term that costs $2 cpc.

Hope this helps,

Ian

The 301 will preserve some of the authority passed through from the www version of the link.

One note - Google sometimes has a rough time with consecutive 301s. Normally it's only a problem if there are several in a row. Here you have two. You might consider reducing that to 1...?

Infographics done right make information more digestible. That tends to attract a lot of attention - especially if it's about a hot niche topic. For example, I'm a cycling fan - if someone did an infographic on the Giro d' Italia (a big bike race going on now) I'd be all over it. Put it in front of the right audience and it'll get re-shared a lot.

They're also helpful because there are lots of infographic directories/review sites out there. If you can submit your graphic to those, you gain some easy links.

If you then make the infographic embeddable, you can pick up a lot more links and re-shares as folks embed the infographic in their own blogs.

Creating a good infographic requires real expertise in data visualization. I strongly suggest hiring someone else to do it for you. Expect to pay $3,000 or more for a real pro. I've seen them offered for as little as $1,000, but generally those aren't data visualization folks - they may make something pretty, but it'll be hit-and-miss as far as a really great graphic.

If you are a good data person, then you might want to try creating your own infographic first. Use a tool like http://infogr.am/ . The worst case is that you have a sketch you can provide to a graphic designer to guide their final version. Best case, you discover you're an infographics artist at heart

Hope this helps!

You're in the business of managing lots of servers. You could easily write content about:

1. Security
2. Performance
3. Deployment
4. Testing
5. Log analysis

The list goes on and on. Write about your industry and your specialty - it'll get you lots of attention.

Hi Jan - I do see your site, #3, for the same article. That doesn't answer the annoying question, though: How does an aggregator outrank you?

While Floost has a higher domain authority (51 to your 35) the specific page on their site has zero authority or social shares.

The content that's helping them rank is the stuff that appears when you click the pull-down tab at the top of the screen.

I'm grasping at straws a little bit, but I wonder if your title tag is hurting you, just a little bit?

A couple of little things to try:

1. Put your title tag at the very top of your HTML.
2. Remove the " from your title tag, too.

See if that helps.

SEOMOZ crawls and updates their link index on a schedule you can see here:

http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/25141119/Linkscape Schedule

If this is a fairly new link, it may not have gotten indexed yet.

Also, note that page rank may have little or nothing to do with MozRank. Toolbar pagerank is notoriously inaccurate, and could be up to 6 months old. Plus, Toolbar pagerank doesn't reflect all the factors Google uses in PR calculation. And (as if that weren't enough) toolbar PR is based on a sort of Richter Scale - so a jump from, say, 4 to 5 could reflect a HUGE change, or a tiny one.

We normally focus on MozRank, instead.

I'm late to this particular party, but here's an approach that's worked for us  helped a friend in reputation management crises:

First, you need to get some indexed content for the phrase you're going to insert into suggest. I'll go with "Gibble Gibbet".

1. Add a page to your own site;
2. Or even better, find a phrase for which you already have indexed content.
3. Either way, get some Twitter/other social traffic going to ensure it stays indexed.

Now, you need to get some search volume:

1. Don't think of this in terms of directly generating search volume. Instead, think of this as a social engineering experiment.
2. Determine what phrase you want to show up in search suggest. I'm sticking with "Gibble Gibbet".
3. Create a test on a service like Amazon Mechanical Turk. Tell everyone involved you need them to tell you the first 2 results they see when they type in "Gibble Gibbet".
4. Send out the test to 5,000 or more people.

Depending on the term, the search volume around it, and the competition among different queries, this should get you what you're looking for.

Not that I've ever done this.

It was a friend of mine.

I'd go with the Gazebo Shop domain. The exact match domain isn't that great. If it were 'Gazebos.co.uk' I'd think differently.

Here's what I'd do:

1. Clean up the link profiles, first. At least a little. One thing I've seen is that if you set up a 301 redirect from one domain with low-quality links to another domain with low-quality links, that can trigger an algorithmic cluster$#@!*@.
2. When you rebuild GazeboShop.co.uk, try to maintain the same URL structure. If that's really impossible, then redirect old individual pages to their new equivalents wherever possible. Don't redirect individual pages to categories unless you must. I'm thinking more of user experience here - if I click on an old link to a product, I want the product, not the category page.
3. Launch the new site.
4. Redirect relevant individual pages on the exact match domain to relevant individual pages on the new domain.
5. Redirect category pages the same way.
6. Redirect the home page of the exact match domain to the home page of the new domain.

Hope this helps,

Ian

It's the word 'cushion(s).' You use it 14 times in the first 3 paragraphs, and then at least 10 more times towards the bottom of the page. You need to reduce that quite a bit.

In your ALT attributes, you have a button that reads 'show details' but you then stuff the ALT attribute like this:

"Show details for [name of cushion] cushion"

That definitely counts as keyword stuffing.

Change the ALTs for those buttons to 'More details,' clean up the body copy and you should be set.

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.

As the underdog you can make the biggest splash!

Here's a formula that always works for me: Pick a topic that's on everyone's mind. Making sites run faster, for example, seems to come up a lot. Write a huge list of tips for speeding up your site, from server tuning to coding to database management.

Then, when you publish it, submit it to Hacker News, Inbound.org, StumbleUpon.com, Twitter, etc.

And, e-mail a link to the post to all of your customers, so that they can read it. It's a great service for them, so even if no one ever links to the article, you've built value with existing customers.

Make sure you have easy sharing buttons on the post, too, so that customers AND strangers can all tweet/like/stumble/vote for the post.

I will say this: It doesn't happen overnight. I wrote for years before I had my first big hit.

But every post you do that 'fails' now will potentially generate attention later. You're building an asset every time you publish.

Hi Ryan,

First question: Did you receive a warning notice about unnatural links? Google's been sending those out to most Penguin victims. I still see you at #1 for your brand name at:

http://portent.co/MDY6Qy

Normally with a Penguin penalty I'd expect to see you buried for your own name.

It's more likely you got caught up in an onsite, content-related update. Although there are some fairly suspect links in your profile, like this page:

http://www.hasenchat.de/chat-verzeichnis/index.html

It also happens to be your highest-DA inlinking page.