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Hi there I wonder if anyone can advise on this. Since the latest google update on 1st Sept or whenever it rolled out, we noticed an initial spike in hits on our site, which was great. However now we are noticing levels going back to where they were and less people visiting the site. It also seems to be very sporadic. So we have a period of say a couple of hours with no one on the site, then suddenly loads visiting. We have also noticed a big dip in enquiries, despite the site having roughly the same amount of visitors. All our stats on Moz, Webmaster Tools, Ahrefs, Serpfox and various other rank trackers are showing that we have had an increase in visibility on our tracked keywords. There is a definite spike on all, but where is our traffic and where are our enquiries? Usually we are able to work out where the problem is when updates occur but with this we have no idea. We are utterly baffled. Is this normal? Is this just fluctuations and will settle down? Has anyone else noticed weird things happening? If anyone has any ideas or experience of this then would be most grateful for any advice. Feeling rather desperate at the moment. Many thanks in advance. Clojo

I was wondering if you have heard about any Google Local algorithm changes.  We have about 200 franchise locations.  Some of our locations have dropped significantly over the past few weeks.  Locations that were showing up in the 1-3 positions are now no longer showing on the first page.  This is for very relevant phrases for our main line of business (which is also in our business name)... ‘Phrase, CITY NAME’.  These locations have plenty of positive Google reviews. We would typically rank well for a phrase like that based on our relevance. I did some brainstorming.  Do you think any of these could have any impact? Google is all about things looking and feeling natural including link building, etc.  We have used Yext which made a lot of changes across the web to fix addresses, etc.  Do you think Google may be seeing this as unnatural?  Too many changes at to many sites in to short a period of time? Along those same lines, do you think Google may be penalizing some of our franchise pages for being to ‘perfect’?  It would be ‘natural’ for addresses to have some difference across the web and a bit unnatural to have them all match so perfectly. I know that Google has always stated the business name should be listed in Google Local the way it is listed to the general public.  Things such as “Business Name Boston” should be listed as “Business Name”.  Each of our franchise locations is named in house to reflect their geo location..... "Business Name Boston", "Business Name St. Louis".  Many of our competitors also use the practice of attaching geo terms as well.  Do you think we may be getting hit with a penalty now even though we have listed things on Google with the Geo term for years.... and is how WE refer to each location?  Is it possible that by working with Yext, we drew attention to this practice?  Should we remove our local listings geo term on Google Local?  How about across the web? We are in a business that does not require customers to come to our location.  Some of our locations have not suppressed the address in their local listings while others have.  Many of our competitors have not.  Do you think this could play into it? Some of our locations that are not showing in Local have good organic results.  Have you heard anything about Google dropping Local if they show in organic? I know Google has been looking at social media more and more and I believe they will continue to do so.  If our local pages have no social presence, could this adversely affect things?  (I think this is probably not the case…. but wanted to throw it out there) I have noticed that in some cases where Local has dropped, we have multiple offices in that metro area.  Is it possible that this could affect things? Have you heard of any Local algorithm changes?  I know they are releasing a new dashboard sporadically, could this be in conjunction with a larger Local algorithm change? Our CMS tool does not allow us to change Title/Meta per page (I know... terrible!!).  So every page has the same title and same meta description. (We are changing our CMS system!  Can't wait!).  Could this play into it? Thanks for any feedback!

We have a website builder that creates sites in sub-domains (i.e. yoursite.breezi.com) on every site we have included a badge that has anchor text and an image. My question is given the fact that we will include this on many if not most of the sites created inside our builder how will google treat backlinks with the same anchor tag/text from non relevant sites after the penguin update? I am concerned about the backlinks from non-theme related sites and it's SEO implications. Any help is greatly appreciated.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2401732,00.asp According to this, Google is bringing the hammer down soon on another 10-20% of the search results.  While we don't advocate keyword stuffing, exchanging links, or anything too risky I am still concerned. Do we know if the example "perfectly optimized page"; http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization  is now going to be penalty bait? Is this over stuffing? Also, how might this effect ecommerce sites in particular?

Our high quality (IMHO!) editorial technology site got hit by around ~20% of Google search referrals when Panda went live in the UK on the 12th. But the last couple of days it's returned to "normal". Is that the effects of our frantic scrabbling around trying things, or have Google tweaked the algorithm again, to remove the editorial sites which got caught accidentally?

I can't seem to find an authoritative answer on this.

So I know have seen how my websites have taken a nose dive from the google farmer update most likely with traffic significantly hit.  Example site is callcatalog.com.  What recommendations are there to deal with the new world order?  How can we look at optimizing, changing, modifying our process to improve rankings and traffic?

I woke up on Friday morning to see that my traffic from Google on Thursday was down 30% on one of my sites. Traffic hasn't bounced back, and I'm wondering why I've been lumped in with the content farms. My site only has original, high quality content. It has a great link profile with tons of links from .edu page, and I've always played by Google's rules. I can't understand why my site has been negatively affected, which makes it hard to do something about it. Right now, the only thing that I can come up with is to work really hard at building more links. Were you affected? What are you doing about it?