You came to the right place for the validity you seek I frequently vet things here in the forum and it has proven very helpful in convincing other members of my team to go one way or the other. Also, I completely agree with George's suggestion to use the "alt" attribute if it is indeed an image we are talking about, but it appears we are really talking about a bonafide

tag for text with keywords in it.

That being the case. Stick to your guns and insist on it being visible. If you really feel that it disrupts the design...it would be better to leave it out than to make it invisible.

Good luck!

Dana

Personally, I wouldn't do it. Does it work? Maybe. Or, maybe it works for a while and then Googlebot wises up and deindexes you. Is all the work you will have to go through for reconsideration going to justify hiding that tag? I'd say, definitely not.

It's just an

tag...leave it on the page and visible. Listen to your conservative gut and do what you know is the right thing. That's my two cents

Great answer AWCThreads. Mine would have been "ditto."

Hi! I thought I recognized this thread Yes, I am the culprit of the "hub page" suggestion.

I call a page a "hub page" if it functions like the center of a wheel with a bunch of spokes attached to it. Okay, so for example, you have a store selling sweaters. All of your seaters have a specific part number based on size, color and style. You have some choices. You could create a separate page for every part number. However, this quickly becomes a daunting task for you, and an impossible site to navigate for your customers because you could have 200 separate product pages all for the same sweater, with the only difference being size and color.

Instead, you could create a "parent" page that is just for this one particular style of sweater. You create "children" pages for all the possible sizes and colors. You then allow your customer to select size and color either via dropdown menus, charts or whatever seems best for a particular product. You set all these product pages as either "children" of the parent product or attach their part number to specific options, so that when that option is chosen that part number goes in the cart. The customer never actually sees an individual product page for that color and size of sweater, it simply exists in the back end as a means of allowing your customer to pick specific items from your inventory.

So, you see, because you created (technically) separate product pages, you technically have a whole bunch of URLs but all circling around or connected to the parent page. The individual part number "pages" are like spokes on a wheel connected to a parent "hub" page.

Now, all that being said...a hub page on a content site can follow the same principle, however for completely different reasons. This even happens in e-commerce. For example, say you sell clothing. On your site, you also have size charts. From every clothing page you link to your size chart page. In that case your size chart page becomes a "hub." Hub pages tend to outrank other pages because you are pointing to them with lots of your pages, indicating to both visitors and search engines that they are somehow especially significant.

So, on the one hand a hub page can be used for online merchandising, on the other it can be used as an important reference point for visitors. The simplest version of a hub page would probably be a main category page on a Website.

This is really my own viewpoint. I have had extremely good results ranking well for hub pages. I am interested to know what others think and how they explain the concept.

I like this suggestion Andy. Curt, this might be worth a try if you haven't done it already.

Also, have you compared your link profile to your competitor's link profile in Open Site Explorer? You might get some insight there as to how your competitor is buidlng their Page and Domain authority.

How old is your competitor's site? This would also be a factor.

Good luck Curt!

Have you looked at your site by typing "site:http://www.YourDomainName.com" in the Google search bar?

If you see any results there, it means that you have been indexed. Even for sites experiencing the "sandbox," they are in the SERPs, they just aren't ranking very high.

Have you tried also viewing your site using the tools at http://www.semrush.com?  It could be that you are ranking for some terms, but they might be obscure.

Hope this is a bit helpful. New sites can appear overnight, take a couple of days or a couple of weeks to start showing up in SERPs. It's much faster now than it used to be as Google has become much faster. If it's been 6 weeks, I am thinking you are indexed, but maybe just not very high up yet.

Dana

Thomas, I've been doing a little research trying to support my hypothesis that the location of your hosting company can effect your SERP results and I found this:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

This is probably a great starting point.

Hi Thomas,

I am always learning too and am very interested by your question. Are you based in the UK but hosted in the US? Or are you based and hosted in the US? The reason I ask, is that if you are based in the US, I presume that your target market is US. If you are based in the UK I presume your target market is UK-Europe. If the latter is true, have you considered changing to UK hosting? Although I don't know the whole story, it seems from looking at your site that you are indeed UK based.

I am thinking that you are having a bit of trouble ranking for a more British term because you are USA hosted. I do think the location of your host is a factor in ranking for certain terms. The problem is, I can't point to any proof to support that opinion. I am interested to hear what others have to say about this.

Thanks Thomas!

Dana

I really like Chad's last comment. Yes, if they start talking about "proprietary" software and intellectual property, they are probably full of beans. If you aren't going to own your data after you leave them, or if they won't give you 100% transparency into their methods and which keywords they are going after, then the aren't worth pursuing.

Hire someone who acknowledges that SEO is a matter of time, patience and intelligent work...not magic potions, spells and chanting.

Best of luck to you!

Google did some user testing on this topic, to find out if users preferred longer pages or paginated pages. According to their research, users preferred longer pages because there is always latency when moving from one page to the next. Here's the video where a Googler cites that research: http://youtu.be/njn8uXTWiGg  If you want to have it both ways, you could always break your content into pages, but put a "View All" option at the top. Personally, I am one of those folks who doesn't mind scrolling down through comments. If given the choice to continue on to a second page of comments, I probably wouldn't.

From an SEO standpoint, provided the pagination is handled properly, I don't think there's an advantage one way or the other, unless you take into consideration that your bounce rate could potentially go up with paginated pages. Even if it did though, I doubt that would significantly hurt you from an overall SEO viewpoint.