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Firstly, nice work in setting something like this up. Personally I'd edit your post and give the background information after you get into the nitty-gritty of what you want from your site - the reason being people don't have much time - so you may get more help that way. I'm disappearing in a moment so here are some thoughts that come immediately to mind:

Have you used the Google Keywords Adwords tool? You might find some of the terms you want to rank for don't get enough traffic to bother with. It will also give you suggestions for other potential keywords: https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal

On your website I'm unsure what the various menu options mean. I wouldn't have known "Noah's Minute" was a set of videos for example, if I hadn't seen you mention it above. The 'Family' and 'Mom MD' options on the menu - I don't know what they are. I say this as usability is very important for SEO. If people don't find what they're looking for on your site they'll go elsewhere - and a high bounce rate can have a negative effect on your rankings. So keep adding the great content, but find a way to organise it in a more user-friendly way.

Maybe (if you haven't already) you could get other parents to write guest blogs on your site about their own experiences. If they or friends have websites/blogs of their own, ask if they'll link to their own posts. In today's celebrity obsessed world, it might be worth seeing if you could get one or two involved - by writing a blog, if they have experience with children with down syndrome. It would be a good way to raise awareness and get more attention (therefore links, therefore increased rankings).

It would be a massive effort, but a great thing to do would be to make the best page on the internet for down syndrome information. Make it factual, with sources. Making something better than Wikipedia and the BBC is usually a good start (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_syndrome /  http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/physical_health/conditions/downssyndrome1.shtml). Perhaps it would be possible to do it in conjunction with a charity or organisation, who could verify what you've written (e,g, http://www.downs-syndrome.org.uk for here in the UK), or perhaps your personal experiences added to something like this would make it stand out over the more information-driven pieces. Maybe some down syndrome organisations could link to you anyway? See if they have links pages.

I hope that helps, sorry if I've been quick to the point on some things!

Google now class a subdomain as pretty much the same website as the main domain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MswMYk05tk - so backlinks to the existing blog subdomain will also benefit the overall domain.

I didn't know this until last year either - it'd be useful if Google updated their help pages!

If I was you josh330, I'd only move to www.example.com/blog if the cost and hassle isn't much for you. Although a subdomain and subfolder are considered roughly equivalent to Google, I'm not sure how other search engines see it.

There's no substitute for hard work. How about concentrating on your best converting products to start with, then that 10,000 will seem less daunting. Also, it might make more sense to test changes on a smaller range of products first - if you make changes en masse and they don't work you could end up doing the opposite of what you want to do.

• Customer reviews can add good long-tail content, so you should encourage and display those.
• Unique and descriptive product information is very helpful - you should keep the default descriptions and duplicate content down to a minimum.
• Rich snippets and social meta tags (http://moz.com/blog/meta-data-templates-123) can help increase click-throughs.
• Linking to related products is a good way to keep people on your site and helps indexing too.

Wikipedia editors often delete pages about individuals or businesses if they deem that the individual or business isn't notable enough to have their own page. So in most cases probably not a good idea.

Without - it's more user-friendly and if you ever change the coding behind the website the URLs will remain the same. It doesn't matter whether it's a 'normal' website or a blog, without is the way.

Matt Cutts stated that only in 1 out of 100 searches does page speed show a noticeable change in rankings, and there are only 1 in a 1000 sites which have slow speed as a big issue: www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO4YuDAkplU

I have a page on one website which has on-page SEO close to perfection for a relatively competitive term, and a few relevant links coming in. There was a query in the SQL on the page that slowed it down - I think the load time was about 4 or 5 seconds. After a few weeks (it wasn't an important page and I knew it would be an interesting test) I fixed the problem and got the load time down to around a second. The following day the page jumped from nowhere (not even the top 20 pages) to page 4 on Google, so that must have been one of the 1 in a 100.

I still think it's better to have exact match. The Google Adwords Keyword tool shows far more searches for office refurbishment over office refurb for exact, phrase and broad in the UK (and globally) - both with 'High' competition.

Unless you're a really well known brand in your target market I don't see it as a problem if your brand is cut off at the end of the title tag on search results.

Nicknames are often put in quotation marks so you could just write James "Jim" Jones when introducing the person (title tag and h tag) and maybe the first occurrence of their name in the text. The most important thing is that and content reads naturally - if you wrote James "Jim" Jones whenever you referred to the person in a few paragraphs of text I doubt it would read naturally.

Depending on who they are, Google might even recognise them as the same person whatever version of the name is used.

1. I think a canonical loses a similar amount of link juice as a 301 redirect would, so 100% of the juice would not flow back to john.long.com

2. If Google sees the canonical link is different to the content of the page it is on, Google will ignore it - Matt Cutts has said as much.

Check this out: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/rel-canonical-html-head/

Are you sure the URLs are exactly the same? The following are all different URLs:

• examplesite.com
• www.examplesite.com
• www.examplesite.com/index.html
• www.examplesite.com/Index.html (note the capital 'I')

If they are different it's best to 301 redirect one to the other, or if that's not possible - add canonical tags to the two pages linking to your preferred version. Other than that, make sure you only use one unique URL throughout your site to link to one page.

I wouldn't think it'd be a problem if you have good, unique content on each page. There are a few things to be careful of. This is a really useful post from Rand, a few years old but still mostly relevant: http://moz.com/blog/ranking-for-keyword-cityname-in-multiple-geographies

I would keep them followed - they are your websites, and genuine links so why not? Lots of websites do this naturally without a problem.

If any of the sites are duplicates where the only differences are regional you should make sure everything is set up to Google's liking. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/video-expanding-your-site-to-more.html

You could remove any keywords from the anchor text if you're worried e.g. instead of
Noiselevelmeter.com | Sound Level Meters for the US & Canada just keep the URL as the link:
Noiselevelmeter.com - Sound Level Meters for the US & Canada

Or alternatively link to the other websites from your homepage only.

I wouldn't even worry about DA, MR etc. If there's an engaged audience that's similar to the audience you want to attract for your target site then I'd go for it.

I'd say it has a negative effect on SEO as SEO is also to do with user experience. moneysavingexpert.com used to have a pop-up that appeared just after the site loaded and blacked out the whole of the rest of the screen - I found it hugely annoying; just as I'd started to read the content it disappeared and I had to close something to continue reading. If I didn't already know the site was genuine I would have thought it was dodgy and pressed back or close straight away.

I'm not 100% sure but I think it was the owner of daniweb.com who said she introduced something similar to encourage people to sign up to her forum. Her bounce rate increased dramatically so she took it off as soon as she realised, and the bounce rate recovered. Bounce rate is something that can be measured by the search engines, along with other metrics related to user experience that will be taken into account when calculating the ranking of a page.

Alan's idea, to do something more subtle, is a good one. If it was unique and done really well, you might even get extra links because of it, rather than potentially less links as Matt Cutts suggested in the video Ryan linked to.

The SERPs change all the time these days. It could be due to a change in the search algorithm, changes to your site or competitors sites, new links to your site, personalisation, a change in geographical location - it could even be that the sites around you haven't had an up-to-date crawl, or vice-versa. Sometimes ranks take a while to stabalise if they're new pages or keywords.

And other factors. Even just within personalisation, if you clicked a result at position 8 and didn't press 'back', Google could favour that result next time you return and so rank it higher...or personalisation could be down to people in your circles if you use Google+.

Apologies if you knew all that already and I haven't got the gist of your question.

I don't see why you'd 301 either, if the site was something like the client's name.com why would you need to?

If past social activities had been censored, I'd wonder what a candidate had to hide. Part of the problem with many people in politics is that they don't seem to have a human side.

Here's a good article I read a couple of days ago, it could be right up your street!
http://www.stateofsearch.com/political-seo-can-it-be-done/

You can add canonical HTTP headers to the PDFs to avoid any duplicate content problems: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-advanced-relcanonical-http-headers

If you think these PDFs are really valuable, and e-mail addresses will be useful to you, then yes - you should ask for an e-mail address to download them. If you don't take that route and they're indexed as part of your website, make sure you have a few links to your websites within the PDFs so you get some value if people rehost them.

Make sure your branding and website is obvious on the PDFs whatever you do.

Make sure the language you use is natural. You might be able to rule out one or the other if it wouldn't be natural in your content.

Advice I've read in the past has recommended to optimise for both, though it depends on the term of course; some might be better as plural, some might not. Compare the search results for each and if one is more competitive than the other. Each might bring up completely different results, I think one example I read was that the singular showed e-commerce sites whereas the plural showed descriptive sites - I can't remember the example that was used.

Optimising for the plural is more likely to help with the singular than the other way around, but I think Google can usually tell they're related e.g. www.google.co.uk/search?q=red+bull+sticker - in more cases a longer tail keyphrase will probably show for both plural and singular, even if you just optimise for one of them.

Ah, I thought it seemed slightly unusual for SEOmoz to go with a UK-based company; so they have an office in Seattle as well as London (and now New York too, I see). Seattle is a good place to be if you want to hire a local company. Bear in mind that if you've been unhappy with some of the services you've hired before, you might be paying more than you have from now on - but that's because who we've recommended are amongst THE BEST!

What would be best for the user? I think it's about finding a balance between load speed and content without spreading the content too thinly across multiple pages, and being aware that constantly clicking to the next page can be time-consuming. Think about how the forum will be used - will people regularly come back to read one or two new posts? If so they won't want 40 posts loading on a page. Do users often make lengthy or short posts?

Things like signatures and images will slow the load speed down, so take that into account when you come to a decision. Perhaps make signatures visible to logged in users only, if applicable and possible? While 'content is king' faster speeds do have an SEO benefit too.

It's a balancing act, perhaps start with 15 and adjust that over time when you start to get a feel for the content that's posted.

It doesn't matter which you choose too much, as long as you're consistent across the website.

I'd go without a stroke; people are more likely to link to you without typing the stroke (as you say), so I think you'll retain slightly more link juice to the chosen URL if you don't include it (saving a 301 redirect from the '/' version). And personally I think a URL looks neater minus the '/'. The speeds "Optimize and Monetize" quotes are minuscule.

That is interesting - perhaps just a coding issue as the other links are all nofollow.

The link should still pass juice - Google counts the anchor text of the first occurrence of a particular link on a page (often called "first link priority") but as far as we know ignores the anchor text of repeated links - so that's probably what you're referring to. Subsequent followed links will still pass juice.

My moz profile link does show in my Google WMT account.

I've just had a very quick look and my first thoughts are you're committing a lot of keyword cannibalisation - basically you have the same phrase competing against itself over multiple pages (useful link:http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization). These two pages for example:

http://www.healthchoices.ca/article/yoga-for-osteoporosis

http://www.healthchoices.ca/video/yoga-studios/yoga-for-osteoporosis

As you know, they have exactly the same video - why don't you put the article on the same page as the video? The video pages themselves aren't unique content from a crawler's point of view - they look like a search results/archive page. It makes more sense from a usability point of view (important for SEO) to do this too, and I wouldn't have the videos play automatically either. The navigation around the site seems slightly confusing as a whole.

You seem to have loads of superfluous code in your HTML, and far too many HTTP requests; can some of those script files be combined?

The extra 70 characters can help - Google DOES index them: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/title-tags-is-70-characters-the-best-practice-whiteboard-friday

If you can, make sure the first 70 characters are most relevant to the page content, and readable for the user - if they don't like what they see or it doesn't make sense without the other 70 characters they're unlikely to click through.

You don't mention whether your brand name is included in the tag; unless you're really well known in your niche it usually makes sense to have the brand at the end of the title tag (if at all). I'm an SEO for a couple of news websites where the titles are often well over 70 characters (with the brand names at the end). It doesn't seem to cause any serious problems and we have had high traffic from SERPs with longer titled articles. I advise the editors to put the main keywords near the beginning of the title if possible, with readability (for the human!) being the most important thing.

I agree that it's better to add it to your own site. What if people like your blog and link to it, but it's not on your site? You've lost some link juice there. You can submit it to blog directories too - more direct links to your site. For ecommerce sites there's a lot of content duplication with other sites when the same products are sold, so like you say in your last sentence, a blog adds regular unique content.

If [hats in chicago] clicks are converting into sales you should be careful about playing with this in case you lose the ranking altogether. Saying that, individual product pages usually convert better than anything else so it may be best to concentrate on those instead of category pages. To rank a category page that lists the hats you have available there are a number of things you can do if you haven't already:

• If you don't want the homepage to rank, make sure you're not committing keyword cannibilisation
• Ensure your onpage SEO is spot-on for the hat page e.g. title tag with your keyword (and maybe a price/offer/incentive to encourage clicks, meta description to encourage clicks, descriptive image filenames and alt attributes, useful URL structure
• Onpage too - add some unique introductory text
• Show review data (such as AggregateRating) by each product and consider adding a small number of reviews to category pages - user generated content is good for getting unique content. I say a small number of reviews to avoid duplicate content issues
• Link to your most important category pages from every page on your website via a main menu
• Add breadcrumbs
• Make sure you have an HTML sitemap, and an XML sitemap submitted to the search engines - both listen all your pages

It isn't wrong to use question marks in URLs.

However - as Thomas says, short and descriptive URLs describe what is on the page, whereas the query parameters you use currently don't. "Keyword present in the page's URL" was also believed to be an important ranking factor by the participants in Moz's Ranking Factors survey earlier this year: https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors/survey

By mirroring URLs, will each product then exist at 2 URLs? E.g.:

example.com/product.php?id=3624
and
example.com/category/product

If so, you don't want to do that as it creates duplicate content. Using canonical tags to fix the duplication doesn't solve the problem completely.

If you change URLs, you should 301 redirect the old to the new, so

example.com/product.php?id=3624
would 301 redirect to
example.com/category/product

Just in case you aren't aware - a "301" is a permanent redirect, so when using a permanent redirect, even if other websites have linked to example.com/product.php?id=3624 - the browser will automatically redirect to the new URL, passing most of the authority built up from the links you mentioned.

Whether I'd advise you to change the URLs of existing products depends on whether you can implement the redirects. In the short-term you'll lose a slight bit of link authority through the redirect, but in the longer-term, the frendlier URLs should benefit your website.

Also, there's always a risk when making large scale changes to URL structure - you need to make sure customers can still navigate the site without issues, and search engine crawlers understand the changes you've made - 301 redirects are best-practice to ensure this.

Ideally, when URLs are changed, all internal links should be updated.

1 - the absolute path. It's less error-prone. For example, if the rest of the URL was sometimes partly upper case, and other times completely lower case.

Have you checked www.imageworkscreative.com on Google Webmaster Tools to see if there are any important site messages?

You have a lot of links to your homepage with the exact same anchor text - I notice it's in the footers of your client's websites, which isn't a good idea when it's done to excess. 'custom web design' is one of the phrases and that's a term you mention, so it's possible you've fallen foul of the Penguin update, especially if you had a sudden drop in traffic/rankings.

I haven't used it myself, but this Google Penalty Checker has been recommended by some of my favourite SEOs who work/contribute here at Moz: http://fruition.net/google-penalty-checker-tool/

If you have suffered a penalty there are plenty of online guides on recovering, let me know if you need pointing in the right direction.

If the websites are geo-targeted towards their relevant country then duplicated content isn't an issue. Country-specific domains like .pl and .co.uk will automatically target to Poland and the UK respectively, but you may want to make sure the .com is targeted towards the US, if the US is its main focus - this is so it doesn't compete with the other English versions of the site in the search engines in the UK, Australia etc. Also make sure all content is localised (ideally written/re-written by a native). There are some subtle and some big differences between British, Australian and American versions of English.

These are two links I always mention as must-views in relation to international SEO:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html 
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

I'd say it's only time to buy it if $100+ isn't much money to you. This list gives a good indication of which directories are worth being on: http://www.seomoz.org/directories

You could have something about the success of past events? Maybe you could encourage the businesses to write something themselves as good promotion.

How about some permanent text about the business and/or events they run on the page? If there are no events - perhaps a brief explanation that there are none yet, along with some suggestions of other local businesses running events and/or a call-to-action to sign up for notifications?

I wouldn't noindex the page when there is no content.

Are they showing as duplicate content within Moz Analytics? As long as the search engines don't see it as duplicate content you shouldn't have a problem. Here are some things to check for:

• The content should be localised as best as possible (e.g. the differences between US, Canadian and British English).
• I'm not sure it's possible with your sites, but things like contact details and local currency can help send the right signals to Google etc. - so the address and phone number if you have a HQ in each country.
• Each site should be registered separately with Bing and Google Webmaster Tools and geotargeted to the relevant location.
• Use the hreflang attribute if you're not already (triple-check to make sure it is set up properly): https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en - you can set Canadian English (en-ca) and Canadian French (fr-ca) - the language always comes before the country.

As you mentioned your terms and conditions, I noticed a lot of companies are using very similar wording to yours, so that could be an issue of duplicate content that features on completely different websites. You could rewrite the t's and c's, though I wouldn't see any harm in noindexing those particular pages.

You could look somewhere like elance.com, peopleperhour.com (UK-based) or odesk.com. Check for good feedback and employ someone who is preferably a native speaker of the language. Alternatively there are probably loads of good copywriters and copywriting companies who will have samples of their writing online - there are quite a few when I search for [copywriting london].

Does the link benefit the users of the websites? If not does it need to be there at all? You could link to them on another page on your website, a contact us/about us for example, alongside an explanation of the international nature of the business - the link is then within context rather than stuck in a header.

I wouldn't bother nofollowing or blocking bots as I doubt you'd get penalised for the links - if you haven't already just do your best to make sure that the .com is not competing with the .com.au in Australia, I'd be wary of duplicate content on two English versions of a website.

Google rolled out Panda and Exact-Match Domain (EMD) updates on September 27th. As one of your keywords almost exactly matches your domain the EMD penalty could be a possibility. I don't know enough about the EMD update to be certain, but your link profile still doesn't look perfect either - it'd look more natural if more of your links had your URL as the anchor text, but be careful about where you get links from.

I Googled some of your text and it was duplicated on other sites (e.g. experts123), so Panda could be a possibility too.

The homepage doesn't look too bad; perhaps the title tag looks a bit spammy and you use "doctor loan" an awful lot in alt text; including the alt text there are 17 occurences of "doctor loan" on your homepage, so I would definitely reduce that. I'm not sure if that sort of keyword usage ties in with EMD, so have a look if some trusted resources have advice on it. I haven't read through it but this looks useful: http://searchengineland.com/google-emd-update-research-and-thoughts-137340

" Launched in 2003, back then it wasn't such a bad idea to use keywords/tags in the URLs, so I did that." - it's not necessarily a bad idea now - I'd question why you feel the need to change them? Shorter is often better though.

If you do go ahead, 301 would be the best practice. Canonicals pass link juice too but they're not always honoured.

A couple of extra things - make sure to update all of your internal links to the new URLs as millions of 301s could negatively impact the speed of your server. And check a sample of the old URLs just to make sure everything is working as expected.

I'd recommend http://www.linkdetox.com/ from Link Research Tools. It pulls in backlink data from 20+ sources to which you can add your own data, and it categorises links based on a risk rating.

I'm in the UK too - they're based in Austria (I think) and the support is always pretty quick to respond (usually within a couple of hours).

I haven't used Link Risk so can't compare, but a colleague tells me it doesn't pick up as much data (and is more expensive).

Edit - to add to Marie's comment, I agree that links should always be reviewed manually whatever tool is used!

Have you looked for any SEO companies or individuals local to you? If you find someone, Google has some advice on what to look out for here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35291?hl=en

You could post a job on a website such as www.peopleperhour.com and www.elance.com and invite applications.

If you're willing to post your link publicly, you could get some free help here...or maybe we could help you anyway. The first questions I'd ask are; is your blog registered on Google Webmaster Tools, and if so, are there any messages regarding a penalty in your account? Do you have many pages with duplicate or little content?

Another reason for having separate phone numbers is to make sure there's no confusion when people search for your phone number.

I often find searching for the URL directly on Twitter and the Facebook public posts search is the best way to find out.

If you use Google Analytics you could go Acquisition > All Referrals and click on e.g. facebook.com to see a list of referring URLs. "/" (the homepage) will probably be most of the referrals but there might be some group or page URLs in there. Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals is another route.

Perhaps a competitor or hacker are trying to displace them from the search results? One of the 'spam' results has "2,427 links to this URL from the past 32 days" according to Open Site Explorer - have you checked to see if any of that anchor text is the company name? I don't have full access to Moz at the moment so can't see.

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/just-discovered?site=www.yolo2.cwsurf.de%2Findex.php%3Fpage%3DUser%26userID%3D4146%E2%80%8E

I think it depends on your business, but it's not just about promoting yourself and posting endless tweets etc. - you need to build relationships and target the right people - get involved, help people out, comment on how you enjoyed something they posted, if you genuinely did, and if it's relevant to your market.

If you just post everything from your sites to your StumbleUpon profile, for example, why would anyone follow you? If you post other interesting content that's relevant to your websites, with occasional posts to the best content on your websites, then I reckon that's a better tactic.

If you have nowhere more appropriate to redirect to I don't see a problem redirecting to the homepage.

I'm not an expert on this, but I know the 100 links thing doesn't matter anywhere near as much as it used to, or I'm not sure if it ever did in terms of being penalised. I think it was just a guideline that said if a page had more than 100 links, Google might not crawl them all, or PageRank might not be passed to anything over the 101st link...something like that. Google's crawling is a lot more sophisticated now, so as long as your site doesn't look like a link-farm I think you'll be fine.

I haven't read it yet, but I've just found this, it looks like it'll help: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

I like that idea but I'd consider alternatives to Facebook and 302 temporary redirect the article. When the traffic decreases I'd want to remove the redirect so all of those links and shares benefit my own website, and not another website.

I agree with EGOL.

Another problem with Wikipedia is that you don't have control over the content - anyone can edit a page.

Maybe one day your company will become well-known enough for someone to independently create a Wikipedia page about the company. At that point Wikipedia might be less likely to outrank your own site!

Google Blog Search is good; you can view related blogs for a keyword and set up alerts. There's a good list here: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/20-essential-blog-directories-to-submit-your-blog-to/5998/

You can also do tag searches for your topics on places like Wordpress.

Yes, they're different. Stick to one or the other and specify it in a canonical tag.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html