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this isn't an exact answer, but i might be able to point you in a correct direction . you might be able to do a mod-rewrite by doing a redirection based on rewrite conditions.

for example, we once used the following to send users to our non-https, www page if they enter on a https: url. fyi we use helicon's isapi mod rewriter at www.isapirewrite.com/

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} (on)?
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Host} ^(?!www.)(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (.+)
RewriteRule .? http(?%1s)://www.%2%3 [R=301,L]

I'll just add to Kevin's comment - the turfy part of this is that the "3rd party" website probably had terrible metrics, so it's probably not doing much for the target sites ranking.

It's frustrating to see, but don't worry about it too much. Hopefully google algos will eventually catch it. In the mean time, concentrate on building high quality links in relevant areas of interest to your site. Quality links will crush this sort of lameness from competition.

Not sure you can or that it's really worth the effort. I requested once right when i was getting familiar with things, and the crawl test had finished by the time support got back to me. Crawl credits are monthly on paid accounts i believe.

I'd suggest checking with your host. I'm not sure if your reference to reg ex means "reg ex" in the sense of it being reforwarding software, or in the sense of using regular expressions to type syntax to handle it.

most hosts will have reforwarding software of some sort installed with their user accounts (the 301 thing is pretty common). once they let you know what it is (for example it might be apache's mod-rewrite or isapirewrite.com), you can figure out the format you need to write the rewrite commands in.  some of them use IIS, some of them use .htacess, it all just depends.

if your old url and new urls are in respective "structures" you may also be able to put in wildcards to handle the directory words all at once.

yes, it's  possible. it would really depend on what keywords you are ranking for and the relative strengths of the sites listing on that keyword compared to your site.

keep in mind, on-page SEO is only part of the larger picture. building links will make a difference.

as to indexing, you can view what google is indexing/caching by mousing over a search results in the SERP page, and clicking "view cached result". within the cached page there is also usually a text result link as well.

Our ranking report super - swayed a couple weeks ago (all rankings dropped, were not what i was seeing in manual checks) but it seems to have corrected itself on the next week's report.

I'm not having issues with the page report cards.

the hash "#" is sometimes used as a link reference to a specific spot on a linked page

i.e.  www.companyname.com/category.index.php#specificspot

do you have access to google webmaster tools? in there, you should see a section about duplicate content that google is seeing. that might be of some help to you.

if by chance the # is not used in the way mentioned above, and it's some weird content management system character to manage pages, you may want to implement canonical tagging so that when someone views

www.companyname.com/category.index.php#

the canonical reference is for :

www.companyname.com/category.index

hi

Sure you could. We use it to export link reports to excel and then filter by  moz page rank. we'll do that for every site that comes up in google under terms we want to compete for. next, we'll add a column in excel for yes/no to qualify the links in terms of whether we can/should go after them. It's a great tool to wrap your head around what other sites are doing and where you are relatively and to get in that "link circle" so to speak.

I would map them out, see what the itineraries are for each and go from there. I know SEOMOZ sells videos for download of their past sessions. perhaps reviewing one of those would give you a better idea! :>)

Do you have access to a referrer URL  field in your website's logs? or perhaps via an "orders table" in your website's database that records the referrer ?

you may be able to filter it  out orders and then by affiliate in the URL.

Andy is correct. It's going to vary by conversion rate and your specific area of business. What kind of metrics do you use for your website in terms of period of time?  The bottom line is you need a little time to "smooth out the averages" of your data to get a realistic sense of how it's going to behave. This is especially true when considering if your business is seasonal or not.

For us, we look at season (quarterly) metrics, and then again on a week to week basis.  If it's early on and you are looking at dailies, it's useful to use that data to filter out keywords you don't want that are costing you money.

It's not going to be a 4-5 day thing. It'll take some time to tune in.

One way to handle this is to change the content between the pages (the descriptions, titles, etc.) enough that you are no longer seeing the duplicate content problem.

Another option would be to pull the products (white, sandstone) into ONE product page that has a dropdown or menu selector to choose color. This would probably be less work than changing tons of descriptions, but it also may depend on your ecommerce platform. most platforms have a "variant" selector on product pages as this is a common problem (think: tshirts, clothing, shoe sizes, etc.).

Hope that's of some help!

I'll just add to Kevin's comment - the turfy part of this is that the "3rd party" website probably had terrible metrics, so it's probably not doing much for the target sites ranking.

It's frustrating to see, but don't worry about it too much. Hopefully google algos will eventually catch it. In the mean time, concentrate on building high quality links in relevant areas of interest to your site. Quality links will crush this sort of lameness from competition.

How much time/data do you have in Adwords?

We've lowered our highest bid and seen the same amount of traffic/conversions even though we aren't the "top bid" anymore.

I suspect this will vary greatly depending on what niche you are in and how much you mess with your bid (i..e top bid gets a LOT of eyeballs, middle bid gets some, low bid may not even display).

you have to decide if that sweet spot where the ad displays in the middle generates a better bid price and conversion against the "paying full price" for the top spot.

so in short, test both over a period of time and then go back and check the conversion data! :>)

hi -

you need to set up a 301 redirect from index.htm to the straight domain URL (www.domain.com). this usually needs to be done from the server end. have you explained the specific issue to yahoo? customer service may be able to do this for you if it's not in the yahoo hosting/admin interface.

EDIT: see you've done canonical which is good. have you given google enough time to spider that change into SERPs?

Eric,

Every page is another opportunity to be relevant on a given subject. If you have a limited budget I would suggest determining the top 25 pages (or 200 - depending on your time/budget), building those up, and using their optimization successes as justification for a larger budget.

Nothing wrong with starting small.

Dan

hi Kyle,
all the domain forwarding sounds kind of dangerous to me.

i've done a few site redesigns and can offer the following advice:
1.) if it ain't broke, don't move it.

2.) if you can develop your new site via a local server, or a cheap host (set up a pw so only you can see it while you develop), i would do that.  again, just moving domains seems risky.

301 redirects communicate to the search engines that you are permanently redirecting your content to your new site. you want to consider doing a 301 for ALL content/urls. this will help preserve rankings. a lot of times you can use a program like rewrite to handle this if you have tons of urls.

your best bet is to get all your "new" content ready to go, live, and then 301 redirect to it at your new domain. if that is happening on THE SAME domain (old content -> new content ; same domain), you want to 301 redirect your old url's to their equivalent new urls.

hope that helps! :>)

Language is a pretty clear divider. I would do 2 company pages and just make it clear in the links to them which is what. That way you have 2 specifically targeted audiences.

i would consider adding social features such as seo-able comments/forums/disqus etc. to help build each sites "local"ness in kw's. get each site as far away from the "template" mindset as you can.

in terms of "templates" keep in mind that google is not looking at template code for the most part. they're looking at the content (stuff in text) on your site and it's relevance.

i'd also consider shelving 260 of those domains, and making 10 really great sites.

best of luck!

i use them as well and have not seen any issue.