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Alex,

I would make the category page Toy cars with the separate product links: Blue toy cars, Red toy cars, Racer cars, etc. By linking one higher category page to a lower product page you are establishing your own page ranking "Score" that is read by the search engines as higher or lower in authority.

Your meta descriptions will further reinforce this higher archery by having the category pages describe most of the terms used in the lower level pages. Then be very specific on the separate product pages.

Now if someone searches for toy cars your category page is a higher result offering an entire selection of toy cars. But if your customer wants to type a longer search term "Blue racer toy cars" they will be directed to your specific product page.

Mike may be right, I see that same thing all the time, however MOZ isn't in the business of making work for themselves, by producing pages that don't mean anything. They try and anticipate what the search engines may look at.

Yes we have competitors that outrank us, that get an F in the on-page report. However I suspect the out ranking is due to other factors, such as inbound links, or website age.

I have to go back to what Google keeps saying to us. Good Links, Relevant content, Page Speed.

Besides learning how to construct a great page comes in handy the next time you want to build a new one, rather than trying to go back and fix one that is questionable.

As far as your question about how to fashion the keyword your optimizing for? I subscribe to simpler is better, web searches are preformed by folks that want to optimize their time, otherwise a Iowa couple would order a phone book for Las Vegas and look up the information that way. Perhaps you use both keywords, and cast a wider net. You never know what your customer is going to search for.

Joe,

Your NOT being overly cautious, but I do think your not thinking outside the box. The box being your 1 Meta Description you are trying to use.

Think about it this way, you cant control your customer, and you cant control their mind, you cant control what they search for. So your perceived problem is actually an opportunity to have 20 ways to describe your 1 Meta description. If the meta description your going after is "Pet Products" the chance that 100% of you audience is going to be searching for that exact term is pretty slim. One customer may search for "Pet Shampoo" yet you want them a customer or at least the opportunity to sell them "Pet Products" as long as they are a vertical, you might sell them something else.

So in my opinion you actually have 20 opportunities to optimize those pages for different keywords and cast a wider net at capturing a customer for your website.

404 errors are definitely not what you want.

You loose any link juice that may have been established for that URL. I believe you should look into a free plug-in available for Magento. It can be found with the search term "Canonical". It is easy to use, and is designed specifically for this issue.

Bing, Yahoo, Google, all follow the Canonical directive, and will solve the link juice issue automatically.

We use a different shopping cart, but have implemented the "Canonical" tag in a slightly different way, with the same result.

If you have multiple pages, each with the complaint from a search engine that they have duplicate content, then you should try and look at the page and think why does the search engine consider this duplicate content. Perhaps you have the same template being used for each of the paginated results. This page then is a great candidate to be "Canonicalized".

Canonicalization does not hurt you search engine rankings, think of it like a downtown metro area. Will your business stand out more if you have two small downtown locations, or will it draw more attention if it is a single building that is twice as tall? When you Canonicalize a url the link juice flows from the duplicate page to the single page specified in the Canonical url.

Theresa,

Not sure if I would call it a "Black hat tactic" but it will definitely hurt your google ranking. Google will penalize your site if it has site links from sites that are not indexed by Google, and Google wont index a site with no content. You could protect yourself by disavowing these links, but if you already own them just stop redirecting from them.

A better way to do what you want is to have your domain name, then under it, pages with good content that use your keywords as part of the page name.

Owning the domain names of the products may help by keeping them out of general circulation (Squatting), so a compeditor cant purchase the domaine name of a product you want to sell

Nenad,

We have a similar issue, and we Canonical any paginated pages to the show all page. The Show all page does not need to be canonicaled because it is the root of all the products.

Cindy,

Check out: http://pro.moz.com/campaigns/your account number/keyword-difficulty/

With your account number, you will see that points are given to keyword rankings that use the word in the URL, however also notice that its domain and page authority that are king. So even if you change domains and 301 the old domain to the new one, that the quality of links your website receives will out preform any URL name you choose. Also check the old domain for bad link juice before you go through with the renaming decision. It may be carrying with it links you may not want to have associated with your new URL.

My best advice is to focus your efforts on obtaining quality links to the URL you already use.

Jason,

We have had experience with this, and here is what we found. First it did NOT hurt our SEO scores from any of the measuring company's or metrics.

Where we did see an improvement is our website performance. We are now on a stand alone server, so our performance has greatly improved, and we are able to present a page much faster. In addition, server crashing has greatly improved. Where we have seen a hit is our ability to automatically send an e-mail "order shipped" response. Our e-mail message is getting refused by certain e-mail hosts, specifically ATT based address. Somehow the server space provider has a block of IP address that have been marked as not so desirable. We never send out spam, but it seems that someone close to our IP address block does, so the entire IP block is rejected by ATT.

So to answer your question the IP address has not caused a SEO reset or degrade of our Authority or rank, however you should be cautious about what your neighbors are doing with respect to sending out e-mails. Perhaps you could get a list of IP address that your hosting provider uses, then check those address with respect to spammers, before you commit to a hosting provider.

Scott,

I'm not sure if its the right answer but here is what we found.

Our compitation out ranks us at times as well, so we did some research into the ratio MozT/MozR in your case 5.42/4.38=1.23744 your compeditors MozT/MozR is 5.37/4.23=1.2695

So their ratio is much higher than yours which we presume means that somone may have more links but their just junk links as shown by the ratio. You can see this ratio come into play at MOZ Tools rank checker.

We will kill John Deere in everything but still rank lower because of their MozT/MozR ratio.

Snoop,

If getting more online visitors is the goal, then using some of the online page grading services might help improve the skeletal structure of the pages.

Just my quick scan of the landing page indicated the page title is too long and a H1 title tag is missing. In addition there are two images that are missing an "Alt=" tag. These two missing tags represent an opportunity for you to promote you keywords further.

A page that is easily indexed, and optimized for your keywords will rank higher, and attract more visits.

Camc,

I did a search in google for a portion of your title "Modern Bathroom Furniture & Home Furnishings in Toronto On Canada" and there you were the #2 result. Probably because its such a long, and unusual term. However when doing a search for "bathroom vanities" your website was not on the first 3 pages I checked.

So first of all your website is operational, and being indexed by google, and on the first page of results when an extremely long and unique search term is used. However just because you have "bathroom vanities" in your title doesn't mean you will automatically rank for that keyword as high a a more unique keyword that has a lower competitive score.

I'm sure if I had enough patience I could look through enough of the google results and eventually find a result for your site. But the bottom line is how well is your site optimized for your keyword "bathroom vanities".

So here is the good news. you are able to do the research here at MOZ to find out how well you site focuses on that keyword. Go to the keyword analysis page found here http://pro.moz.com/campaigns/YOUR ACCOUNT NUMBER/on-page. and have a look at your url and determine how to increase the page rank so that you will rank higher in the search results.

Alejandro

I really hate it depends type answers, but you have some choices to make, and only you can answer the question about starting over.

First how easy was it to get the links required to get the PR 3 result? Do you already own the domains that brought that type of page rank. Or do you have a friend that you may contact to quickly build the links back? How about negative baggage the old domain brings with it. Does the old domain have links that that are non desirable that you may want to separate yourself from? Is the new website a completely different idea than the old website? If the new domain and old don't share a similar idea, the spiders may look at the old domain redirect as a negative for the new domain. An example might be if you had a chat room about camping products, and the new domain is related to Indy race cars, your not doing yourself any favors doing a 301 redirect.

Ciaran,

Don't forget when looking at GWMT that is a one sided view of the world. Meaning that you are only getting reports from Google, about Google, and their view of the world.

By using MOZ you are receiving a more balanced blend of the world as they see it. So I would suspect that if you used Bing webmaster tools you would notice as we do yet a completely different opinion. That's not all bad thing, its like getting different peoples view on a discussion point.

In our demographic Google is the 800# gorilla. So we base our decisions skewed towards Googles WMT and temper our efforts on what others sources are saying about the metrics.

Edward,

Same thing happens to me! But it turns our its operator error. Try checking you on page grade here: https://moz.com/researchtools/on-page-grader

That is the moz webpage to check your page grade, a compleatly diffrent page than probably the one you are using. The page in the MOZ Champaine manager is using a chached representation of your url. So by using the above page grader you will see the new changed page you have presently hosted.

KempRugeLawGroup

The Canonical page reference is supposed to be used to tell the spiders that these 2 pages are identical. Sounds like if you have different links on 2 separate pages then they are no longer identical.

That being said there are all sorts of reasons why you may want to canonical one page to another. Hec if I could get Microsoft to Canonical their website to my storefront I would jump at the chance to pass their link juice to my site.

So here is what we are seeing with our Canonical pages. The original or lead page, page A in your example improves in its link juice, and becomes the dominant page, the second page, or page B in your case does not loose importance or have less link juice, it only serves to bolster page A.

So what this effectively does is tell the search engines how to order their results for 2 identical pages. But how does this work for two different pages? If we are selling widgets, and thing-a-ma-bobs. Neither page looses its importance in search engines as long as we are targeting different keywords and optimization for each page.

but once they are identical, then we are ranking the more important page.

Uesat,

I like Michael's response, looks like he put some effort into what he provided. I just wanted to add a point that might help you, and perhaps others concerned about the same thing.

We have used a company called Link Research Tools. They charge for their service, but I have found it invaluable. They may be found online here http://www.linkresearchtools.com Their spider will index your site for all of the inbound links, then report back on the possible impact of the link. The report provides all sorts of data about the inbound link, if it is indexed by Google, webmaster contact information, number of links that the inbound links receives, inbound link subject matter. You get the idea. They also suggest if the link is possibly impacting negatively on your ranking.

Hate to admit it, but this report can also be run on your competitors website, which may help you discover new quality links to go after or avoid for you own website. They even provide an automated Disavow tool.

Check them out

jessential

If you are looking at your on-page report card from within your account and the on-page checker you have setup for your keywords, that page caches the results to a predetermined URL.

Try this instead: Go to this URL http://moz.com/researchtools/on-page-grader this page does not cach the results and requires you to enter your keyword and page URL each time you check a page. So it will have the information from your live webpage. I bet you will see a big difference.

I think you may have already done that, and just not relized you have.

An example would be Binding #1 set up as yourdomaine.com and the second binding set up as www.yourdomaine.com . Check the SEOMOZ "Site explorer". First do a report on yourdomaine.com noteing the results, now try it on www.yourdomaine.com notice the differance in the results. and your right about the answer. The sub domaine does retain some of its DA.

I'm not sure if it is the correct thing to do, but in GWT, I have manually chosen to have Google use the higher ranking DA name as its default.

Just my thoughts.

Vince,

Lets remember that Moz and Google are two completely different and independent company's. They have different spiders programed to do different things. One company could not "take" or "scrape" the others data. A good example is the fight that ensued between Google and another well known search engine that was allegedly "scraping" Google's data, and presenting the data formatted differently as their own. You should NOT expect Moz's data to exactly reflect what's going on at Google. Moz is a fabulous tool, to use as reference to the changes you make to your website. They come to your web project on an advertised interval, and provide reference data for the changes you have made.

Have you tried this area of MOZ? http://pro.moz.com/campaigns/account number/rankings

Substitute "account number" above with your pro account number. The results page shows your keyword results. Next to each keyword there are two icons. The Icon that looks like an EKG symbol will take you to a report that does exactly what you want. Shows your page ranking relative to other websites. You get 50 free extra keyword checks per week.

Primo,

The more focus you can place on the keyword for a particular page the better (to a point). Moz has a GREAT tool for that, its called the on page grade. This tool will focus like a laser on the submitted url with feedback on every aspect that the search engines find appealing. If you don't grade an A on this test, I would invest time in improving your score.

Improving your score involves doing things like you are trying by changing the URL, but here is the caveot! Any link juice that you may have built up under the old URL is instantly lost, along with other errors this could bring by changing the address. here is a short list:

404 error for the old address. Did you remember to also change other pages that may have linked to the old address. Loss of link juice from old address. Sitemap.xml file is out of date.

Phew, lots of things to consider.

So here is what I would recommend: Create either a 301 redirect for the old page address, or a Canonical tag. THis will preserve any link juice. Remove the page address from the Sitemap.xml so spiders no longer are directed to look for it. Include the old address in your robots.txt file as Disallow (so you don't end up with a 404 error). Check your back links to see if other websites forward to the old address, and get those corrected (helps in the long run).

Some folks call our SEO work snake oil, but as you can see its just plain old hard work and good practices

Rachel,

Ready for some bad news? It means that the spiders crawling your site have found links to your site that are from low quality (trust) sites. Hence if you have low quality sites providing links to your site it could bring down your trust.

We both hope that these are not your doing. What that means is that just going out and soliciting links to your site, without first checking out the domain trust, content, and page rank of the site you are trying to receive a link from, you may just be asking for trouble by accepting just any old link.

So if that inset bad enough here is even worse news! Rouge websites could possibly provide a link to your site just to do evil deeds to your site. Its worth checking into where the links to your site come from. Here is where the link disavow comes into play.

I am not saying that is what happen in your case, so please check it out instead of ignoring it, and hoping things will improve in the future.

Wish I had better news for you,