Web hosting itself is not a difficult job and pretty much anyone can provide a decent reliable package. Although the cheap price you see advertised can be appealing, the service you receive is much more important. The problem is that because hosting is easy, often the only times you can really judge the quality of the company is when something goes wrong. That is why a personal recommendation is often very important.

When selecting your own web hosting company you will probably use Google or look at the ads in the computer magazines to help you select. Unfortunately, the better web hosts tend not to advertise simply because they don’t need to – they get a good deal of their business through personal recommendations, and this is kind of the point of this post.

When I decided to write this post, I started thinking why I really wanted to recommend these two companies, and why others are so passionate about doing the same. The answer that came to me was “variation”. Web hosting, more than many other services, is very variable in the quality and value you get. The services are either really good, or really bad. And the really good ones tend to be very expensive too. Add to that the fact that so many of us have received such bad service from so many web hosts that when you do find a good one, you’re pleased – very pleased!

And so to the point. I’ve dealt with loads of web hosts over the years – many of them have come and thankfully, gone, but the better ones have stayed the distance and grown. I’ve dealt with single site shared cPanel hosting and fully redundant and load balanced bespoke hosting systems, but the two hosts I’m recommending are ideal if you want to host a few affiliate sites, or a medium sized site.

Vidahost

I was first told about Vidahost back in 2007. I wanted to diversify my hosting, and was quite surprised at the prices – they were, and still are, some of the best I’ve come across. However, it is the level of service that always astounds me. The first time I had cause to contact them was to enquire about a package upgrade – this was at 9pm one evening and I naturally expected a reply the next day. But five minutes later and the email had been answered and my package was being upgraded.

This experience was not a one off, but has been consistent. I have since moved six more sites over to them on a shared hosting package and because the service had been so good for my personal sites, I was happy to start using them for my company’s websites too. I transferred a mixture of ten blogs and discussion forums from a dedicated server to a VDS server – and managed to halve the costs and gain better performance and service in the process – pretty much all you can ask for! You can arrange the hosting fully online if you want, or email them and ask for something more custom – they’ll reply pretty quickly.

Click here to vist Vidahost » Use this special code for 10% off hosting: NEARLYHOME10

Catalyst2

Catalyst2 were my first proper web hosts back in 2001. They were one of the few companies at the time that did decent priced Windows hosting. What I like about Catalyst2 is that if you have a single website that needs hosting, they are a great value option. The service has been good too, and although not quite up to the standard of Vidahost, it has been consistent and more than satisfactory. I’ve recommended them numerous times and still have a couple of websites with them – and after nearly ten years, that is a pretty good indicator of quality.

Click here to visit Catalyst2 »

Both these companies have been around a good few years now and were both personally recommended to me. I’m not saying these are the only two hosts you should consider, just the ones that I have been consistently happy with, and have experienced over a good number of years.

For the purposes of transparency, the link to Vidahost is an affiliate link, which means that if you click it, and buy a package, I’ll get a couple of quid as a referral fee. This doesn’t in any way affect my opinion here, and If you don’t want to click it, you can of course just Google them instead (or Bing them as we’re being transparent!). The Catalyst2 link is a normal non-affiliated link.

As part of their plans to make the browser interface, or chrome, a more intuitive part of the experience, Firefox have made the ‘forward’ button only show when there is actually a page to move forward to. This makes sense, why use up valuable screen real estate when you don’t have to?

It is a nice usability touch and although I can’t say it was a feature I was gagging for, it was stil something I was keen to try out. Except it didn’t work for me – it was showing all the time.

If you’re having the same problem, there appears to be two possible fixes (although please comment if you know of any more):

1. In Options > Toolbar Layout, you have the ‘Use Small Icons’ checkbox ticked;
2. You have other buttons between the foward button and the address bar.

It was this last option that worked for me. If you use an extension or add on which places buttons in this location (Delicious was the cause for me), then simply moving them to the other side of the addres bar will fix the problem.

You can move icons by clicking the orange Firefox menu option at top right, selecting Options > Toolbar Layout (or right click on the toolbar and click ‘Customise’) and then click drag the icons them to a new spot. Simple.

Unfortunately, at the time I started my websites I was not experienced in SEO. Therefore the keyword research I performed was virtually nil. I had created highly optimised pages based around individual products to get me going. Now this wasn’t a bad way to start – on the contrary – it gave me some nice quick wins and was certainly enough to keep my enthusiasm going as the website grew.

The Need to Track Keywords

About 12 months later I started to rank for some of the niche subjects general keywords. Only a few here and there, but it was enough to make me realise that the time had now come to start attacking more generic key phrases. In order to do this I needed to be able to track my progress so I could learn and spot the opportunities as they arose, so off I went in search of some decent ranking tracking software. Now there are many ways to do this. Online software like SEOmoz is great for tracking campaigns, and even some Firefox extensions will do it for you, but I wanted something standalone and more in-depth. Heck, I wanted pretty progress graphs too!

So I started looking and found that like most software, there are a number of programs that will do what you want, and they all promise much. Most of them have flashy websites, nice looking graphics, and also come with a free trial so we can really get to grips with them.

However, I’m a fussy person, and the thought of installing 6 lots of trial software on my PC really didn’t appeal. Experience has told me that I would probably disregard half of these programs after the first few minutes of use, and their flashy sales talk would prove to be just as thin and empty as the programs were. So I went off in search of some recommendations first.

There were only a couple of programs that were consistently recommended by users, and that were suitable for my needs. One of them, Advanced Web Ranking, had received a glowing personal recommendation from an affiliate marketer I know. He was not involved with the company, and had nothing to gain from the recommendation so this was the first product I decided to trial.

Installation and First use of Advanced Web Ranking

Now to say Advanced Web Ranking is basic software is a massive understatement. I’ll be honest and say that when I first fired it up, I was daunted with what I saw. I was even tempted to just close it down and try something else, but software doesn’t get to be popular by being average, so I persevered. And I’m glad I did because it got easier – much easier. The tutorial that greets you when your first launch the program is a real help and whilst it doesn’t explain absolutely everything to you, it tells you enough to get going. With the help of the help section on the right of the screen, over time I started exploring more about the software and what it can do.

I started off with the basic keywords, and then expanded them to longer tail keywords as I went on. The meant I could spot patterns where I would see one main keyword improve (or decline) and see if the same effect happened on the longer tail version of it.

As well as being able to track your own websites, you can of course add in competitors too. I’ve added some direct competitors (similar size of website), but also some much bigger retailers to compare against and it does show up plenty of useful data.

Day to Day Usage

After we had trialled the software we decided to go ahead and purchase AWR. Rather than just start over again, you can just activate your trial version and so keep all your projects intact. You get a nice ‘Advanced Web Ranking Licensed to your name’ in the title bar just to make you feel a little more valued!

The updates are very frequent – almost every day there is an amendment to the search engine listings, and there are frequent patches too to help keep it ahead of the game. The latest version is especially good, and includes and much improved, and more graphical interface. This will make it easier for new users to get to grips with it.

Recent updates and additional features – such as plugging into Google Analytics to get visitor data, and obtaining link data from SEOMoz – have made the program more powerful. I’m currently using version 8.6 and it is much improved from when I first started using it.

The Graphs Go Up, But Also Come Down – Especially When There’s a Panda About!

This is a scary screenshot of Advanced Web Ranking showing rankings drops during Panda 2. Note the number of keywords that just disappeared.

The Advanced Web Ranking graphs following the Panda update did not make pleasant viewing for some of my sites! But being able to see what keywords suffered and what didn’t really helped me target my recovery plans. To have this information to hand was immensely useful – and to be honest, I’m not sure where I would have started without it.

Why you’ll like Advanced Web Ranking

Advanced Web Ranking is not a piece of software that is going to do everything for you and tell you what you need to do, but it does give you the information you need to be able to spot opportunities and trends, and where you need to focus your efforts.

What’s also good is that you get a pretty full featured free trial so you can fully test it. No software is perfect and we were pretty thorough before investing in it – we needed to get along with it day in day out. We even called on the support guys a couple of times for help – they were excellent and on one occasion had a patch written as a result of a suggestion we’d made.

If the great support wasn’t there we’d still use Advanced Web Ranking (don’t tell Caphyon that!) but with it, we’ve no hesitation in recommending it.

The ‘Standard’ edition is extremely good value for money, and although it lacks a couple of features such as reporting and PageRank data, for general day to day use it will probably suffice. The ‘Enterprise’ version will suit most full time SEO’s and agencies, and the ‘Professional’ version will suit those in-between.

Read more about AWR and the offers available here: http://www.advancedwebranking.com/

Disclosure: I am a genuine every day user of AWR – I used it at my last company, and made my new company buy it too! The only thing I am getting out of this is a licence to use at home, and everything I have said stands true regardless of that.

For anyone who knows anything about walking boots, the Scarpa SL M3’s are pretty legendary. At the time I bought them I was oblivious to this fact, and frankly the price and ‘serious’ look of the boots scared me a little! However, they were literally the only pair in the shop in my size (Go Outdoors – shame on you!) and so I tried them on.
To say the boots were in a different league to anything I had tried before is an understatement – they were a revelation! The boot was so solid and stiff, and yet comfier than a pair of slippers. The construction was also very impressive, with not a stitch out of place. So despite the cost (£160), I couldn’t see me being happy with anything else, so I made the purchase and looked forward to my first walk.

The first walk in the Scarpa SL M3’s

My first walk was rather ambitious in new boots. I made a trip to Edale to undertake a walk which I’ve done a number of times – up the Nab to Ringing Roger, across the top and back down via Grindslow Knoll.

First of all, and to point out a rather obvious fact, the Scarpa SL M3’s are hill and mountain boots. This means the construction is solid, thick and as a result, heavy. This made the walk on the road from the car park at the bottom of Edale, to the start of the Pennine Way just beyond the Nags Head, difficult. By the end of this short stretch, the fronts of my lower leg muscles were aching. These boots are not meant for tarmac, and it took a while for my legs to adjust – so if you will be undertaking any length of tarmac walking in these boots, I’d have a trial run first to allow your muscles to adjust.

Once off the road, the characteristics of the boot changed – they became much easier to walk in, and gave me a great deal of confidence in the icy conditions – even up the part rocky climb up the Nab, I didn’t slip once, with the Vibram M3 providing much reassurance. Further on in the walk, the ice turned to deep snow, and the M3’s coped well with these conditions too.

Longer term use

The boots have been absolutely top notch, and have been a dream to own. The only problem I have had is scuffs (more on this below) which is hardly the fault of the boot, and the inner fabric split after the first wear. This problem was dealt with very well by Go Outdoors, and it was apparently the first pair they’d ever had back.

Looking after the Scarpa’s – HS12 Cream or Nikwax Aqueous Wax?

Scarpa, rather unusually recommend both their own Scarpa HS12 Cream and Nikwax’s Aqueous Wax. Because I already owned the latter I thought I would stick with it, and have had generally good results. Not surprisingly, the wax doesn’t really soak into the new leather, and it was only until there was a generous selection of scuffs on the front of the boots that it did. The wax however, doesn’t cover up the scuffs at all, so I thought I’d order some of the Scarpa HS12 cream and give that a go. It was £5.95 from Taunton Leisure (who despatched very quickly I might add) and has been amazing. There are no real instructions with the cream so I just applied some to a sheet of kitchen roll and rubbed it in a circular motion into the leather. Almost straight away you could see the scuffs improving. It was also very good at beading the water, and seemed to do a much better job of nourishing the leather.

If you have a pair of Scarpa SL M3′s I would strongly recommend you invest in some of the HS12 cream also – it really will keep them looking like new.

These boots have now been replaced by the ‘Scarpa SL Activ’ – with just a new name and slightly updated styling to distinguish them from the classic M3’s. If you are the market for a pair of new walking boots, I would strongly recommend you give them a try – even if it is to set a benchmark. And if like me you are a wide size 12 fitting, then the wide BXX last used in this boot means there is very little in the way of competition.

Having studied a few places to go, and wanting not to venture too far off the main roads, I decided that stopping at Okehampton just off the A30 in Devon, and undertaking the circular walk from Meldon Reservoir to High Willhays and Yes Tor would be just the ticket.

I followed the route as described on Walking Britain (but the one here takes you through the woodland which I’d wish I’d done now), and in general it was quite easy to follow. Leaving the car park, you are immediately faced with a climb.

From Meldon Reservoir Car Park, and Up!

The track down to the riverside track that leads to Black Tor

Getting to the riverside track seemed to be tricky though – I followed a track down to some steps, and finally a footbridge with a locked gate. There didn’t seem to be anyway over the gate so I high-tailed it over and continued on my way.

This part of the walk was pleasant and the Dartmoor ponies and the foals made pleasant company, and made up for the fact that despite hearing the river tumble over the Dartmoor stone below, I could only actually see it in places. You then start to near another walled area which and you can see the approaching climb to Black Tor.

The Climb to Black Tor

The obligatory Dartmoor pony photo! The foal kept me company for about 300 yards too!

The climb to Black Tor is clittered with rocks. These are not close enough to clamber over, so you kind of have to walk around them, but in-between the rock is marshy and often very soft ground. This made it hard going, and if you’re not sinking into the bogs and pools you’re having to hop over the various boulders.

Arriving at Black Tor was a relief, and sheltering behind the bigger cairn gave some respite from the strong winds too.

Despite the constant threat (as can be seen in the photo) rain never came – but them neither did the sun either. It was cloud and wind all afternoon.

High Willhays and Yes Tor

The summit of Yes Tor with the lower-able Army flag pole next to the Trig Point

Actually the top of Yes Tor was very pleasant for me, but if you want a quiet unspoilt area, then this isn’t it. There are a few strange portakabins and huts at the peak (although well hidden) which add a little mystery and eeriness. There is also a very rusty old flag pole right near the trig point on the peak, but the views are spectacular, and despite this being a Sunday on a decent day on the May Bank Holiday, I could not see anyone else from the top.

Yes Tor back to Meldon Reservoir Car Park.

The final part of the downhill trek back to Meldon Reservoir car park with the rather Eastern Bloc looking Dam

The descent went on for ages! It was only then that I realised how far uphill I’d walked. I eventually joined up with a rough track that took me around Longstone Hill, over the dam and back to the car park. From the top of Longstone Hill you get a good view of the area you’ve just walked and might be lucky enough to see a Buzzard circling around the ‘bowl’ looking for food.

Final thoughts

The walk itself was taxing – much more so that I was lead to believe, with the going underfoot very heavy at times. Perhaps this was due to taking wrong turns, but the combination of the rock clitter and marshy hills made it hard going.

It might also not be for everyone. The Dartmoor landscape is often featureless and bleak, and in the MOD land you might well see strange huts and things that seem out of place in the natural landscape. You also may not even be able to do the walk on certain days if the Army are active (check the link below).

If you like to get away from it all you’ll probably enjoy this walk. Despite there being being plenty of cars in the car park, I saw a grand total of two other people on the entire walk until I returned to the reservoir area. This was despite the volcanic ash scare just the week before, where lots of people were supposed to have been out and about over the Bank Holiday weekend.

It is an enjoyable walk and getting to the highest point in Southern England is an achievement in my book. If you like Dartmoor and are not worried about solitude, then it is defnitely one you need to do.

• The car park has decent toilets and is free to park (although donations are welcome).
• You’ll need Ordnance Survey map OL28 – available from Amazon.co.uk
• The walk is very hilly – I reckon I did less than a mile on level ground – so I think you need to be reasonably fit to undertake it.
• Like many hill walks, Dartmoor weather can change quickly so make sure you have waterproofs. It was also very windy up on the Willhays
• I measured the route I took at 7.5 miles – it took just over 3 hours with a few stops
• The walk enters an Army training are where live firing takes place – make sure it is okay to walk on the day you plan to go by checking here.

Firstly, I have always been a supporter of what Google were trying to achieve with this update. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be have been well implemented, with a raft of people being hit (it would seem) unfairly, and a load of worse websites getting an apparent boost in the rankings. This final point has muddied the waters somewhat and Amit Singhals recent post has done little to clear the murkiness. It would be easier to look at a penalised site and work out a strategy based on the guideline, but when you also look at sites that were as bad or worse, and have benefited, it becomes harder and more confusing. For now, there is little to do but follow the guidance.

The problem is that the guidance given is very subjective, and I empathise with Googles predicament here. Ideally they would give us some real world examples of websites that were hit, and ones that weren’t. But that won’t happen because Google never release that kind of detailed information for fear of it being analysed and reverse engineered. So we’re left with the guidance on that blog post, which is hard, and sometimes impossible for a webmaster to gauge their site against. Quality guidelines are all well and good, but if I’m bad at writing, that doesn’t make my content worthless.

So what are my plans?

So what do I do to ‘improve’ my hit website? Well, early on I did some fairly reactionary things:

• removed Adsense (a small 200×200 block)
• removed links to the website from the four Ezine articles I had written
• reduced the number of links on the home page
• merged some of the pages into one as described on this SEOmoz YouMoz article

In hindsight I don’t think any of these will really make a difference, but I still think they are good things to do for a smaller site like mine.

So the next real step is to take a deep breath and go through those pointers on Amit Singhals post, along with Richard Baxters response, point by point.

There were three statements that really made the penny drop for me though:

One by Michael Martinez of SEO Theory:

If your articles really ARE robust, unique, and truly “link worthy” then getting rid of all the clutter on your pages and in your site structure should free you of the Panda curse. Exorcise all those bad design and SEO choices you have made through the years.

…a brief Twitter exchange between Tom Critchlow and Matt Cutts:

Tom: “…assuming a site completely reworks their site/content after panda, how long before they will regain traffic?”
Matt: “…it’s not data that’s updated daily right now. More like when we re-run the algorithms to regen the data.”

So any updates won’t give me a quick improvement in rankings (if at all) – it will take time. That gift of time actually makes things a lot easier, and when you consider Matt Cutt’s statement about wanting websites to be packaged like Apple products, it makes the penny finally drop.

So, in my case I’m going to:

1. Remove thin content – Yes, I did have some, and to be honest I surprised myself. They were so old, that frankly I had not looked in them over two years and had no cause to – they were dead as far as I was concerned, but still there in case anyone still needed the information.
   Google should probably have ignored them because of the date of the articles but they didn’t and in the case of the ‘Apple’ statement, I now think of them as those annoying advertising postcards you get stuffed in parcels from Amazon – they’re useless bits of the whole experience. If Apple were posting me something, I doubt they would be there.
2. Redesign the website – I know it won’t make any difference for Panda but this update has caused me to be less scared about making changes. I would not change anything before for fear of it knocking me out the rankings but now I plan to simplify the site a little and trim of some of the fat – to be a little more focussed.

I’m almost glad for this opportunity to change things and improve, but it could have been done a whole lot better. For such a big update, I still thing they had the dial turned up too high. We’re probably still in the middle of it all and it will settle down, but at least I think I’m making progress, whether I actually do is another matter.

I’m sure many of us have submitted articles to Ezine and Suite 101 amongst others for the sole purpose of getting links. And why not? The premise was simple and effective – write a decent article, get it reviewed and quality checked by a real person, have it published, and get a backlink in return. Traffic from the article might have been very little, but as long as the backlink was there, everybody’s happy right?

Thinking back though it was never something I was comfortable doing.

Whilst doing things completely white hat and above board on my main website, article marketing felt wrong. Although I spent time making sure the article was well written and meaningful, I couldn’t have given a flying jiggery if anyone actually read them, I knew why I was writing those articles: for links.

Despite my gut feelings though, article marketing was seen as a sure fire winner in SEO circles and was constantly recommended. A decent backlink, in return for a decent article – nothing wrong with that, and quite safe too. Why would Google penalise you for writing decent content? Well they probably wouldn’t have done until article spinning became popular. When the same article was spun, re-written, spun, and re-written again the quality went down, and the quantity of these articles went up. Google had to act, and they did so like ruthless ninjas, coming in and slaughtering the article sites overnight.

And I’m glad they did. It never felt right writing decent content for someone else’s website when I could have written it for mine, but it was necessary to do…

1. Because it was accepted practice recommended by dozens of SEO and experts;
2. My competitors were doing it and I needed to so I could stay in check with the competition.

But I’m glad that avenue has now gone. It is something else I don’t have to worry about doing. My competitors aren’t going to be doing it (or hopefully they will!), so I don’t need to do it.

I was never a big article publisher (I think I did a grant total of four) so it has not been a problem to go back and pull those articles, and lose the links. However, doing so made me realise what a waste it was to write them for someone else in the first place – I may as well have written them for my own site.

When so many SEO’s are suggesting you give it a go, sometimes, despite your best judgement, you end up saying ‘everyone else is doing it, so why shouldn’t we?’ But at least now I don’t have to.

There have been lots of people very upset by this update, and a lot of people who have been unfairly hit. There is of inevitably going to be a large amount of people who should have been affected regardless of what they say, so I’m not going to sit here and say I am the exception to this rule, because like it or not, there is little I can do about it.

There are some cold hard facts that can be gleaned from this update that just serve to frustrate, and only lead me to believe that Google have only applied this update to certain websites – but seem to be well short of the mark with the algorithm that determines who these websites should be.

1. Firstly, if this update is about quality, why is a leading UK price comparison website outranking me? They add no value whatsoever except to display three prices from retailers. I may display prices but I have added value to the process by writing over 350 words about the product, including its shortcomings and good points.
2. Secondly, if this is about user experience then why is a single product on the Amazon.co.uk website outranking me for a product type key phrase which was number one for over a year. If I was investigating a type of product, I wouldn’t want to just see one example of it on Amazon.
3. Thirdly, Googles algorithm seems to be rewarding older sites with no updated content. The number of abandoned sites that have risen to the surface is staggering. I’ve found competitors I never knew I had in the last 24 hours, except they are not competitors because they are not operating.
4. Finally, Google seem to ignoring sites that no longer exist. Two big retailers who went out of business last month are still showing in the top 20 for major keywords despite their websites returning 500 errors.

So what am I doing about it?
Should I can the website?
Leave it alone for a year and comeback to it in 2012?
Or continue to plug away as if nothing has happened?

I don’t know, but one thing is for sure, I’m going to take a break from the affected website, and mull it over. I will probably carry on with it, but I’ll need to formulate some ideas on how to recover.

This website Nearly Home Time did not suffer one bit, and some of my others didn’t either. Another took a marginal hit, and honestly, it is probably now sitting where it should be. My thin affiliate site is up – higher traffic at 5pm than the whole of yesterday. Go figure.

But I cannot fathom why the big site dived.

That site has been my baby. I’ve nurtured it, built it slowly, and fed it nothing but nice quality links, rejected paid link requests, and written decent useful articles for it. It’s grown month on month, year on year, and then, bam! And it hurts. Not just in the pocket because that’s not what it’s about, it hurts because it’s been rejected.

I didn’t do things Googles way, I did things my way – Google just happened to agree with me.

Sorry Google, I love you, and I know you’re trying to do the right thing, but this update is incomplete and poorly executed, and I’ve lost a lot of respect for you as a result.

Firstly a few days after my main keywords dived, they actually recovered for a bit – not to the position they were, but an improvement all the same.

Checking the rankings again today reveals more bad news though. The main keyword for the site has reverted to the bottom of page one, (from position 4). The other keyword recovered to position 19, then rose to 12, and has now completely nose-dived to position 109. This is very odd and has all the hallmarks of a Google penalty – but why?

Another keyword that has had very stable rankings for well over a year was also de-ranked last week. It recovered after 5 days but was a big traffic driver so was noticeable.

I didn’t start with the ideas I came up with in the last blog post because the rankings stabilised. However I need to look carefully at them again, particularly number 4 (making sure none of the links have become dodgy). Other possible reasons include a short outage (30 minutes) at my webhost which may have cause Google to panic a little. The Facebook page for the site has also lost about a dozen likes in the past few weeks which might be having an impact. SEOMoz reported the correlation between Facebook shares and positive rankings, so could the opposite have an effect too?

The worrying thing though is the inconsistency of Google UK results at the moment. Perhaps the Panda update is taking place in the UK and mixing things up a little? Whatever, it is very annoying and employing purer than white hat techniques doesn’t seem to be helping at the moment.

I wouldn’t normally moan about such things but every time I think I’m seeing a
correlation between the work I’m doing for certain keywords and their position in SERPS, Google comes along and destroys it.

The keyword in question has been a consistent page two sitter for about 5 months now – firstly at the bottom, before rising to the top. As I carefully and slowly built quality links for the site I could see the effects taking shape, as I tracked the site up the SERPS to the top of page two. Only a matter of time then before that breakthrough took place then I found my way onto page 1? Unfortunately, that wasn’t to be the case and the site has just been relegated to the bottom of page 2 again.

I can see no possible causes for this that actually makes sense. Looking at all the link indicators from useless data like PageRank to SEOMoz’s more useful scores like Domain Authority and Page Authority seem to suggest that the pages rightful place was at the top of page two. Now sitting above me are merchants and price comparison websites, one of which has gone out of business (but Google doesn’t seem to have picked up on the lack of any content on the page yet?!).

Now, and I know I’m bound to say this, but this seems to provide very little benefit to the user. As an end user typing in a generic key phrase, I would not think that Google can take the decision that my only desire is to buy – I may be researching or learning.

The merchants are sure as hell not providing any info about the subject.
My page, is full of content, images and genuinely useful articles – not one affiliate link, no scraped content, spun articles or dodgy (or even external) link – I would have thought an angelic looking site in Google’s eyes? Annoying to say the least.

So what am I going to do about it?

1. Keep building the quality links in a slow and methodical fashion.
2. Last week I altered the content as I thought the keyword density was too high and may have appeared spammy to Google – so I’ll change it back.
3. Start targeting a more niche related keyword.
4. Double check that any of the links have not all of a sudden become ‘dodgy’

Anyone else got any ideas?