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I think you are misunderstanding something, yes.

On a website with a CMS, the URL is not "dynamically generated." The page is dynamically generated. Here's what that means. Whenever you type http://www.domain.com/page1.html into your browser, you are telling your browser to go to that website and pull up the HTML that corresponds to that URL.  URL stands for "uniform resource locator," meaning directions to the location of a resource. If you have an old-fashioned website, the URL points to an HTML file that you created, either by typing everything yourself of using a WYSIWYG editor. If you have a CMS, the URL essentially instructs your website to build the corresponding HTML page on the fly.

It's like ... okay, imagine that you walk into a bakery and ask for a chocolate chip cookie. They could either pull a pre-baked chocolate chip cookie off the shelf and hand it to you, or walk in the back and bake you one cookie from the ingredients in the kitchen. When we're talking about baked goods, option 1 is almost always better than option 2 because it's orders of magnitude faster and more efficient. The benefits that option 2 offers aren't worth the extra time and lost efficiency. But when we're talking about websites, that's no longer the case. The server can construct an HTML document almost instantaneously. Your browser gets the HTML just as fast as it would if it asked for a static HTML page.

In fact, your browser really has no idea that this is all happening. Here's another food metaphor. You walk into a fast food joint and order a hamburger. The cashier walks into the kitchen, and a minute later, walks out with your hamburger. Did the cashier pull the hamburger off a shelf of hamburgers that have been sitting under a hotlight for hours? Or did the cashier ask the cook to prepare a fresh hamburger just for you? Assuming the hamburger tastes great either way, you have no way of knowing. In this metaphor, the customer is the surfer, the cashier is the browser, and the kitchen is the server your website is hosted on. Either your server has a bunch of pre-made pages sitting around waiting for someone to "order" them, or your server has a clever program that makes the pages only when they're needed. That clever program, the CMS, is like the short-order cook.

The thing to remember is, the search engine spiders are customers, just like the surfer. They don't know what's going on in the kitchen. They don't care. They "typed in" a URL and got some HTML back. They now know that that URL produces that HTML. They remember that. When they see a link to that URL, they know it's pointing to that HTML.

Clear as mud?

Do you have the resources to create unique content for all those pages? Because adding 500,000 pages of duplicate content will absolutely damage your site.

Absolutely. If he was logged into a Google account, that can have a big impact. Even if he was logged out, though, a cookie on his computer stores information about his search history, and that can have a big impact, too. Then there's location -- not necessarily where you are, but where you've told Google you are. I've told Google that I'm in the U.S., so unsurprisingly, I see your .co.uk site toward the bottom of the 2nd page.

How competitive are the keywords you're targeting? If you're trying to get onto page 1 or 2 for something like "women's shoes," that could take years. On the other hand, if you're targeting something like "cthulhu pajamas," you could end up on page 1 right off the bat.

Remembering that rank is a combination of relevancy and authority. It's pretty easy to make a site that's relevant for a keyword, as long as you know the basics of KW density, title tags, img alt tags, and so on. At that point, Google will try to determine how authoritative, trustworthy, and popular you are. Is anyone linking to your site?

I'm confused. This page is the definition of thin content. It's short, it's valueless, and it's poorly written. Sorry to be harsh, but that's the way I see it.

I don't know if your current ad arrangement and ad sizes will cause Panda problems, but until you get some real content on your pages, I suspect the ads are the least of your concerns.

The main concern is whether or not the spider can read the HTML. If something's broken, the spider may get confused. It's a good idea to check the site's W3C compliance and correct what you can, but I'm certain the search engines don't ding you if you're not perfectly compliant.

The real problems with bad HTML are load times and cross-browser compatibility. (Although, frankly, great HTML can have cross-browser compatibility issues, since IE still refuses to get with the program.) Make sure the site looks good in all major browsers.

Absolutely not, for a few reasons.

1. Google says they've de-emphasized keywords in the domain, meaning the benefit you'd get would probably be extremely minimal.
2. Changing domains can be a complete nightmare. There are several steps in the process where a single screw-up can have a huge negative impact.
3. If your current domain has been around for a while, that may be a positive ranking signal. This is a controversial issue, but everyone can at least agree that an established domain is definitely NOT a bad thing.
4. When you have to redirect all your old URLs to your new URLs, you will lose some of the value of links to the old site. If the old site has zero inbound links, this isn't an issue, but if it has some high-value inbound links, this could be a big issue.

Plus, you'll have to reprint your business cards and letterhead.

Ideally, guest blogging should be #RCS that introduces your brand to a new audience, and also happens to have an inbound dofollow link. It's possible that authorship markup will make you choose one or the other -- sign it and get the branding, or don't sign it and get the inbound link credit. But that's speculation at this point. Maybe Google will think "Well gee, the blog owner wouldn't have let that person write on their blog unless they were a fan of their work. That counts as a vote for their website."

If it becomes an either-or proposition, I would just treat guest blogging as a branding/inbound traffic strategy with no direct SEO benefit.

The two results you're referring to, the ones with people's names and photos next to them, are blog posts where people have used the rel=author markup to link their blog to their Google+ profile. That can influence rankings. I don't think anyone is sure how much influence we're talking about; part of the problem is that the people adopting this new markup are probably already doing good basic SEO stuff, so correlation and causation can get mixed up. In any case, it's likely that this author markup will become more influential in the future, so adopting it now is a no-brainer.

If you consider the meta-description field "important as a ranking factor," you're simply incorrect, I'm afraid. It can have an extremely small effect inasmuch as it impacts click-through rate and pogosticking, but there are about 8,000 better things you could do that would make a bigger splash than optimizing meta-descriptions.

If this is what your client wants, by all means go for it, but make sure they understand that this will not change their rankings significantly.

Search results are personalized even when you're logged out, based on your search history in that browser. You can turn that off, though.

http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=54048

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the obvious: The Google AdWords keyword tool assesses competition based on AdWords, not based on SEO. A high competition keyword is a keyword that many advertisers are bidding on. It's common practice in AdWords to bid on low-volume high-conversion keywords. Those can actually get you the best ROI sometimes.

It has nothing to do with SEO. It's not a bad idea to own them and redirect them to prevent competitors or even other non-competing companies from getting traffic that should be going to you, but if it's not in your budget, don't stress.

I can't see why they wouldn't.

They should count for Analytics purposes because obviously that person was looking for the company in question, even if they couldn't spell or hit an incorrect key on the keyboard.

Also, Google is returning 7-result pages for queries like "ammazon," "jc peeny," etc. so obviously it knows what the misspellings mean.

I'm not sure the title-rewriting is a bad thing. The title is being rewritten to highlight the KW used in the search -- isn't that good?

Is your company a local one, like a pizza place or a shoe-repair business? If so, then people who are in your industry but not in your city are not actually competitors. If you're both national companies in direct competition, though, I find it hard to believe they'd accept your guest post.

Your copywriter's first priority should be writing content that converts. That means it needs to be informative, appealing, full of benefits, all that good stuff. That's the hard part. Including a few keyword variations is the easy part.

Yeah, I didn't figure that out for a while, either.

The category pages definitely don't look clean and professional right now, and that will impact conversion rate. You have enough copy on the category pages to establish relevancy, so I would be extremely surprised if your rankings went down after you stopped showing the product descriptions on the category pages.

If you're hesitant, would it be possible to test it both ways? Choose a couple of categories and pull the product descriptions off them. See what happens to their rankings and traffic.

Getting from page 3 to page 1 is a serious undertaking in a competitive niche. Personally, I would go for the more specific keywords you listed. I would also expect those to convert better, since people get more specific as they get more serious about buying.

Can your client's business survive the next year or two with little or no traffic while you go after the big keywords? I'm guessing no. 100 actual visitors a month is better than 10,000 theoretical visitors that never materialize. Start out targeting attainable keywords. Once those are secure and your client is getting decent traffic, move on to more challenging keywords.

PR is one of many, many ranking factors, so low PR doesn't necessarily mean the page isn't ranking well.

But you didn't mention where that traffic is coming from. Referrals, direct, ads, or search? If it's search, what KWs are getting them there? Maybe it's ranking for a ton of great long-tail KWs, or one low-competition high-volume KW.

For a business that's very local-focused, it's a good idea to use location keywords in your title tag and occasionally use them in copy on the page. So your title tag might be something like Bob's Computer Fix-It Shop - Alexandria Computer Repair. Then your homepage might claim "We are the most awesome computer repair experts in Alexandria, VA."

Keep in mind, however, that searches with local intent often have the organic results buried underneath the Google local results. Make sure your Google+ page is amazing and encourage customers to review you on Google+.

We use SEMrush to get a general idea. They project search engine traffic based on KW volume and position. The numbers are wrong, but the proportions are usually close; e.g., they think we had 20k visitors in March and 10k visitors in April, and we actually had 40k visitors in March and 20k visitors in April. It will get you in the right order of magnitude, at least.

That's exactly the model I was thinking of. The mouseover effect is a bit gaudy for my taste ...

Do any of them have an iPhone? That should be pretty convincing.

As far as I know, the Class C issue is only relevant for linking. It's widely suspected that links from domains on the same Class C IP are less valued, since that's a good indicator of a "fake" link (i.e. a backlink that the site owner created, rather than a true editorial backlink).

Useful content, amusing copy, appealing design, intuitive navigation, easily crawled HTML ...

SEOmoz officially favors www.domain.com/category/subcategory/product.html -- see http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/url. However, depending on the depth of your categories, that can get ridiculous really fast.

In a recent webinar, I believe Everett Sizemore said he prefers www.domain.com/subcategory.html -- see http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues.

Posts and pages are different in a number of ways, not just in the URL structure. The back end handles them a little differently and you can display and organize them differently on the front end. In general, posts are for articles, while pages are for the more "static" foundational parts of your site like product information, FAQs, Contact Us, and so on.

As a side note, long URLs like www.domain.com/category/subcategory/page-name.html are not necessarily good. Don't get too many layers deep.

SEMrush can help with this. Once a month, they scrape the top 20 results for something like 95 million keywords, so you can see a great number of KWs you currently rank for, including KWs you might not have intentionally targeted or even thought of. It's not perfect, but it's potentially valuable information. Plus there's good PPC data as well, if you're doing that in addition to SEO.

I just learned about vlookup this year. Super useful for cross-referencing spreadsheets.

Here's how it works. In the same Excel document, you will have two sheets. The first one will have all the data from your last OSE report, the one with 50K links. (I'm assuming you exported this.) The second sheet will have all the data from your more recent OSE report, the one with 30k links. The vlookup function will quickly check if something on the first sheet is also on the second sheet.

If it's on the first sheet but not on the second sheet, then that's one of the links that "disappeared." Look those over, check for patterns, test some of them. Maybe you had a sitewide link on a giant website, and that website just went down. But if the missing links are still online, then OSE simply didn't crawl them this time.

If you've never used vlookup before, it's worth spending a few hours reading tutorials, watching videos (tons on YouTube!), and learning the syntax. Best of luck!

Set realistic expectations for your client. It's fine if that's how they want the site to work, but explain to them that search engines primarily read text; without much text, the search engines will have a harder time figuring out what the page is about. Also explain their options: They can have more text on each page without compromising the design, by using tabs, collapsible divs, etc. Figure out whether or not visitors want more text on each page. If you can make that case, they might be persuaded.

Meanwhile, focus on the things you can control, like title tags and img alts. Then focus on linkbuilding. That should be relatively easy -- fashion is popular and has great potential for compelling content. At least you're not working for a plunger manufacturer.

It might increase CTR, but I would expect it to also increase bounce rate.

As people are becoming familiar with the snippet format, they're associating it with articles and blog posts. If they think they're clicking on a link that leads to an article, and they arrive at a product page, do you really think they'll stick around and give you their money?

It's widely believed that pogosticking (users bouncing immediately back to the SERP and clicking another result) can harm your rankings. So be careful with anything that might lead to a mismatch between searcher intent and page content.

I wouldn't be surprised if Google eventually starts ignoring rel=author markup on e-commerce product pages. (Which they will be able to identify very easily as more and more sites adopt schema etc.)

Correct. Here is an official blog post on the subject: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/duplicate-content-due-to-scrapers.html

Can't believe I didn't think of this earlier, but are you comparing the numbers you're getting here to the numbers you're getting from Google Webmaster Tools? Did you also see a drop in backlinks there?

If they have videos, they could add transcripts in a collapsible div. That also address accessibility and general user experience. After all, if someone is sneaking a peek at the site at work, they probably don't want to have the sound on for videos.

Zappos.com has amazing on-site product videos, and their YouTube channel ain't too shabby, either.: http://www.youtube.com/user/zappos

You mean two authors collaborating on one article? I believe you have to choose one or the other for the markup.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say "My most recent report, this week, gave us a PR 8 for this keyword." Are you saying the ranking report put you in position #8, but you see yourself in position #11?

Well, first of all, if you control all those links, they're probably not "quality." Second, collective wisdom suggests that post-Penguin, you need to keep KW anchor text below 50%. So if you're building 300 links, they can't all have "example tools" as the anchor text.

If a page isn't intended to be a major landing page from organic search, there's no need to optimize it for your target keywords. When you write naturally, you'll use the keywords from time to time anyway.

That said, don't underestimate the long-tail power of pages like this. A case study about widgets in a five-star hotel could be optimized to catch people who are searching for things like "what are the best widgets for five-star hotels" or "using widgets in top hotels," that kind of thing. Write naturally, but make sure the writer ponders the various things that someone looking for that information might type into a search engine, and varies their wording accordingly.

http://scholar.google.com/

Are these blogs actually intended to provide useful, interesting, amusing content to web surfers? Or do they exist purely to pass pagerank?

If it's the former, I have a hard time believing that readers will trust the information if it looks spammy (and 3-5 exact match KW links per post looks spammy). So the strategy probably wouldn't work for that reason.

If it's the latter, it's trivially easy for Google to figure out that you're running an incestuous little blog network to move pagerank around. That's not the sort of thing they want to reward. Meaning they've already figured out how to devalue those links, or they will soon. So the strategy either isn't working now or will stop working soon.

In either case, your questions are about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Mobile users won't scroll? I've never heard that. I browse the web on my phone all day long (er, I mean, on coffee breaks ...) and I happily scroll.

Word count isn't a firm limit. You need to spend some more time thinking about what kind of information your visitors actually want from that page. If they are looking for legal information on Children Act Orders, what do they want to know? What are their needs? Are 47 words really going to meet their needs? Probably not.

I agree that this may require a migration. Not only will the e-commerce work better for your client, but you'll be able to get things right from the ground up. Or at least more right. All the usual e-commerce platforms have their SEO problems, but it sounds like basically anything would be better than this.

This is definitely not 'great linkbuilding." It's spammy linkbuilding. Now, as the other commenters noted, spammy linkbuilding still works to some extent. The question is, how much is it working? Will it work at all by the end of the year? Given its limited benefit and the high likelihood that it will soon have no benefit whatsoever, is this the best use of your client's resources?

I'm a new in-house SEO at a company that has been doing something similar for years. It's still working, so we haven't stopped it yet. But I'm working on transitioning to the content-marketing model, so we'll survive the inevitable Penguin update that tanks it all. So educate your client about how outdated and spammy that kind of linkbuilding is, and make sure they understand that it's just a matter of time before it stops working. If they want to keep doing it for now, that's their choice. But they cannot afford to only do it. They also need to start a solid content-marketing plan ... and if they don't think they can execute a solid content-marketing plan, they need to think about shifting resources to other inbound marketing tactics like PPC.

What I mean when I ask "Are you sure you have the right keywords?" is "Do you know what words people type in when they are seeking the information you offer?" You may suspect that people type in one thing when they really type in something completely different.

I think you are being blinded by your bias, yes.

If you, the web designer, insert a link to your site into the footer of all the sites you design, that is not an editorial link. It's not a link that the site owner created of their own volition because they think it's valuable content. In fact, if a company is hiring an outside web designer, they might have no idea how to remove the link from their footer. They might not even notice it.

The search engines know all this, and it's why they don't like footer links. They are well aware that web designers, Wordpress theme developers, and so on have been using this technique for years.