I would use either Joomla or WordPress in a subfolder of your main site. Easyblog for Joomla is great, some work has to be done to get rid of ugly URLs. WordPress would proably be your best bet if you are looking to use it for blogging only.

I also noticed you were still using Joomla 1.5. I would think about upgrading that platform, due to security and it being unsupported by most modern plugins. If you like Joomla, and want to stick with it, upgrade to 3.2 and install easyblog. Their site has a ton of info on setting the URL structure to "simple" mode, which gets rid of the stuff you typically see in poorly planned out sites (/component/easyblog/YOURBLOGHERE/post/etc)

We have used both in the past, it really depends what you are familiar with and what platform you like the best.

True. Could be that you were using a method that required reverification after a Google-determined time period.

"1. Launch of new version of website on June 4th"

Since you launched the new website, did someone check to make sure all the tracking data was moved over as well? If you were using a meta tag, did you insert the same meta tag in the header of the new site? Or if using the file upload, did someone upload the file?

"3. Sudden Increase in number of pages indexed by Google. Unexplained indexing of an additional 175 pages. About 625 pages should be indexed, while 800 are now indexed.

In the last month ranking and traffic have fallen sharply. Could it be tat these issues are all linked? But the strangest issue is the request to verify the site."

If you just lauched a new website, check to make sure you have canoncial links enabled and working. If you are using a cms, and the old site was HTML (or anything static and not database-driven) could be you have a ton of stuff indexed you don't know about. This could also be influencing yoru traffic loss, as Google will see these additional pages as duplicates.

Example:
yourdomain.com
www.yourdomain.com
www.yourdomain.com/home

...could possibly all be showing the same page.

The text replacement for using cufon is done by Javascript. The bots don't run scripts on a page so they will see the original text and not the Cufon modified version. So, Cufon should not affect SEO.

The text is still the text, no matter what it looks like to the end user. Great question tho!

If you would like to see an example where someone tested this, please check out this article:
http://www.aerodigital.co.uk/blog/negative-seo-effects-of-cufon/

"The Problem I have is the links that are shown in webmaster tools are links I have already disavowed but they are still showing as links to our site, so I am unsure if there are any new ones."

True you disavowed the links, but did the link manually get removed from the offending sites? Did you possibly remove some of the good links with the bad? How did you determine what was good, and what was harmful?

Short answer is: you need to analyze the sites that gained in rank, and put you on page two. Run a link profile check for opportunities, look at their on page content and back-end optimization efforts, and check your own domain for errors such as 404's, bad redirects, additional variations of URL's (duplicate content), etc. By just looking at a few metrics and focusing so much on your own past linking strategy you will stress yourself to death trying to figure out how to fix it. With a few updates over the past months, I would NOT tie all of your existing ranking issues to just one update, because of the penalty you just worked your way through.

Weekly sounds about right. Dont forget to take a look at your places listings, and other elements while you are in the mood to update and improve!

I understand how frusterating it can be optimizing an ecom shop or store. Lots of pages, lots of time, lots of typing. Just got done doing a site that had over 3000 pages. Keep your heart in it, and you will see the results you want. I took a look at the site, seemed like you were going in the right direction.

James,

I am assuming you have Moz Pro and are tracking all search engines? You can also look in Analytics to see who is referring traffic to you, and how people are getting there.

In my experience, Bing and Yahoo are a bit more spammy than Google, and like a bit more keyword heavy sites and domains. Of course, you should not go and stuff your site full of garbage, I just wanted to throw that out there.

I think there is some accuracy in that more people are moving to Google, you can see that in this link from Search Engine Land https://searchengineland.com/whos-really-winning-search-war-204651

To answer the question of "Could it be that my customers (largely aged 60+) are moving over to Google?" What you would want to look for is: Did Google take up the slack in the drop, or did you see a loss in Bing and Yahoo with no equal gain in Google? If you lost 20% of your traffic in Bing and Yahoo, but did not see that increase in Google, you may have some other items that need to be looked at.

"So, if these guys don't even have their own queries nailed down then they either are not very good at this or the cost isn't worth it even for them."

Sounds legit. This seems to be a bait and switch service directed at those unfamilar with seo to get them intrigued. Gotta love those pesky seo emails selling dreams every day! We get quite a few of them here. Most go straight to the trash folder. Wonder what they tell the client when it doesnt work and they don't show up in auto suggest? lol

I have tried both options before, and tend to see the CSV document be the more reliable of the two. I have seen the same thing as you, where the PDF seems like it leaves out information. Unfortunately, a manual check would be required to make sure that all are included.

I always have the team download them first, double check for errors, them email them from our company email address. Makes it a bit more personal that way, rather then it being emailed directly from analytics.

We went around and around with this question when we rebuilt our site. The conclusion we came to was: We shoud link out to our social profiles and citation links, since they link back directly to us from a trusted network. It was also determined that linking could be helpful, since Google may not have discovered your social network. This was used to jumpstart the discovery of the profiles we had created and further help Google to validate our location and services.

Followerwonk is a great resource for this. Also, I remember an old MOZ post about guest blogging, definitely worth a read. Full article here: http://moz.com/blog/five-steps-to-finding-the-right-guest-blogging-opportunities. Might open up a few new paths for you, or at least spark an idea. Hope this helps!

This will not hurt your site if done correctly. We have done something similar on our website. Instead of locations like you are trying to do, our page is sorted by category.

http://www.webdesignandcompany.com/seo-resources

We have left most of them to "follow", as I don't think it hurts you as much as people may say.

What you don't want to do is just have a huge link directory page, that looks like it doesn't have a purpose.

I have seen a lot of sites that tie in main keywords closer together not rank as well as ones that use them in a more natural fashion.

We have done our own tests with this, and while it can take a while to find the right combination, the payoff is well worth it. When you construct the title, make sure the content, description and keyword list are all consistent.

On of the formats we have found to be successful for titles is to use the main keyword as the leader, and then be more descriptive in the secondary part of the title.

Example: Cane Beds | Boogie Beds Shopping Online Store

Keep in mind this is only an example, and could be polished better than this. If possible, use subpages to rank for additional terms or keywords rather than packing them all into one page and hoping for the best.

I have always hosted blogs in a subfolder. The reason is I want all the traffic to stay in one place, along with all the link juice. True, a blog on a subdomain may get viewed as two separate entities, and therefore have multiple chances to show up in Google, but I like to have the look, and PR all attached to one specific place.

Personally, I have never seen the benefit of having a blog hosted on a subdomain. It always made more sense to have all your eggs in one basket and to keep feeding your TLD instead of spreading out your efforts.

Here is an article I generally refer to for advice: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/subdomains-or-subfolders-which-are-better-for-seo/6849/

Like EGOL said "If you want your blog to be treated as part of the domain then put it on the domain.  If you want your blog to be treated like a separate domain then put it on a separate domain."

Glad I could help. I really hope you get this all sorted out. Good news is, you found the problem and are working to fix it, which is much better than most people would have been able to do. Have high hopes!

"the two pages they've copied are really important sales pages (remortgage and first time buyer) so for us, it's a massive shame. "

There is still a way to promote those pages, just not using Google organic to do so. Modify some of the content, create a press release, promote that page using social networks, and drive interest to that page and your site the old fashioned way. PPC is always an option as well. Remember, there are many ways to get traffic, don't lose hope or the vision.

On a side note, is this your company? 
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+TurnkeymortgagesCoUk/posts

I can add you to my circles, so if you have any more issues or need additional help just let me know.

Yikes! Sorry to hear you are having this issue.

Site B most likely had something that was affecting it before the merger that caused it be be doing so poorly. I would begin in

1. Webmaster tools. Check for manual penalties, linking domains, crawl errors, crawl history.

2. Check your redirects to see if they are all working from site B to site A. make sure they are all linking to relevant pages, and not all to the home page. Google may get suspicious if you suddenly gain 1000 links to your site, from a domain they were possibly already looking at strange.

3. Look for differences in site A, and why it was successful. Could be that by adding poor quality items or links from site B is affecting site A.

4. "Weed out thin content and stick with the merger? " pretty much. You have already merged the domains, and undoing that would just confuse the hell out of the search engine. They would not know where to look, and for what. Reindexing can take a while, and fixing this issue will require some patience and due dilligence.

Definitely agree with Rand. When you submit your requests, send Google a note saying that the person is trying to get you to pay to have the links removed, possibly even including the email/text that stated he wanted you to pay. I doubt it will take them long to respond. I would NOT pay the person a dime. Submitting the request via the clients webmaster account should take care of the damage.

"That still leaves the issue of returning keyword rankings back to 'normal'. I'm still wondering what effect physically removing the links (and coughing up the cash) would have versus submitting a disavow file for all low quality directories in the client's profile."

Google's disavow tool is made for this. Otherwise, a competitor could submit your site to as many bad places as they wanted, and there wouldn't be anything you could do about it. As long as you submit a complete report of all the links in question, you should be fine.

"We can pay this ninja $800+ to have him/her remove the links from his directory network, and hope it does the trick."

Ninja? More like a clown, lol.

Unless the brand name is more popular than the style or type, I would only use the brand name where it makes sense. For the URL structure, personally I would use the style or color rather than the brand. If you do a few searches in Google, I'm betting you see a lot more results coming up for styles and colors.

I like the way that Sheena has described how to do the URL's, as it makes sense to flow from first major category, and go down from there gallery-flooring/manufactured-flooring/PRODUCT

With the way Google has been changing up their results, I'm betting if you had a lot of really nice optimized pages for "manufactured flooring", you would not need to really go into very specific details

EDIT* I thought I would add why I think this way. We do a lot of ecommerce seo for clients, and optimize every page on the site. Even with the individual product pages being highly optimized for one given thing, we often see the main level category pages ranking higher, even if your query is for a specific type or style.

I'm not so sure I would rush into anything without doing some research first.

Run a backlink profile in Open Site Explorer, and look at the domain authority. If the linking domain has a very high authority, and the content is not an exact duplicate, then I would leave them in place. People should use the disavow tool with care, as it can potentially do more harm then good if you are not careful.

You can also do a check for blacklisting on the linking domain, to ensure that it has a good track record.

"jQuery is a fast, small, and feature-rich JavaScript library. It makes things like HTML document traversal and manipulation, event handling, animation, and Ajax much simpler with an easy-to-use API that works across a multitude of browsers."

Using JQuery can allow you to load in galleries or product options/variations into a page, without actually having to have a unique URL for each item. This would be done through coding, and display on one of the category pages to help your users see available flooring options. I'm not outright claiming that this would be great for SEO, as the items often are not "crawlable", but merely suggesting a few different options that may help your users navigate a larger site.

Sorry if you thought I was mentioning PHP or dynamically changing URLs

Well, if someone is searching for "need help" you should rank really high. Excellent!

Just kidding. Since your site is a forum, isn't there a way as an admin to go in and manually change it to display what the topic is about?

Second, is it going to drive that much traffic to yoru site by changing these, that you should invest the labor in changing 1000's of page titles? You should know your audience and incoming traffic enough to decide if it makes a difference.

The content is different on each page, so I wouldn't really get stressed out about being penailized for duplicate content, BUT you arent doing the site any favors by having duplications of the first thing displayed in search results either.

Agree with others. We have seen 3-6 months depending upon the size of the site. I would cover all the basics first, meaning:

1. Sitemap submission
2. All pages set to fetch in GWT, Bing WT
3. Updated crawl request of your site and all linked pages
4. Cleanup of any and all backlinks to old site domain, including social profiles
5. Updated sitemap crawl frequency (daily vs weekly) just to spur Google along
6. Manual search for broken backlinks or old 404 pages

Hope this helps!

Google can read Javascript, but only certain types and implemetations. Is there a way you can set this swap out to happen on the database or server side? That might be the best way to get the live text readable, as most likely the javascript is being rendered and displayed after the initial crawl of the page. Even if it is a milisecond later, Google might not allow/catch it.

Looks like your dev didn't block the dev site while it was being created. That sucks.

This is easy to fix. Make sure you have an updated sitemap file with recent change dates, and all the final URLs added. Also, go through Google's webmaster tools and fetch each new URL that has been added. If you still have a dev directory or folder on the server, block this with robots.txt.

Sitemap example:

<url><loc>https://DOMAIN.com/subpage/</loc>

<lastmod>2016-09-26T04:14:14Z</lastmod></url>

<priority>1.0</priority> (or whatever priority you want to set for the URLs)

<changefreq>Daily</changefreq>

Think about it like this:

Your meta description is a condensed version of what your page is about, including keywords.
Your opening statement is usually about what your page is about, including keywords.

Sometimes you can modify them a bit to add in additional keywords, or to make them more focused on a given topic. To answer your original question, yes it is fine. It is NOT considered duplicate content.

When Matt Cutts is talking about duplications, he means dont have multiple pages with the same ones. Not to avoid having onpage content the same as meta descriptions.

""The way I think of it is you can either have a unique meta tag description, or you can choose to have no meta tag description, but I wouldn't have duplicate meta tag descriptions," Cutts said."

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2308339/Matt-Cutts-Create-Unique-Meta-Descriptions-for-Your-Most-Important-Pages

This one has my vote. You have to allow them access in order to see that you don't want the pages indexed. If you block them from seeing this rule...well they won't be able to see it.

Take a look at the pages that are indexed. Chances are that since it is a cart or CMS-based site, you just need to use robots.txt to block out some areas you don't want indexed. You also need to look at your indexed pages, to see if any of them are duplicates, meaning you have 2 or more url's that display the same content.

"It's an ecommerce site but i can't see any issues with duplicate content - they employ a very good canonical tag strategy. Could it be that Google has decided to ignore the canonical tag? "

Could be that your cms or cart is not forwarding all the pages to the canonical version. Again, check to see if you can access multiple versions of the same page. Ecom and CMS sites always have these types of errors if you dont keep a close eye on the URL's since they are database driven, vs static HTML. Look for www or non-www versions of pages, url's with and without index.php, etc.

Once you target what the offending url's are, use redirects to forward them to the proper and search engine friendly version.

They only use that as a guideline, not to establish ranking. Your content will speak louder than any webmaster setting as to where you are located, along with the rest of your citations.

From search engine journal:

"For blogs, I prefer a subfolder (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/) because the link juice which is sent to that blog is going to be naturally distributed to that main domain, and other subfolders under the domain.

Futhermore, the forum/blog will default logo, home page and other links back to the subfolder. If you set this up with a subdomain, by default, the links in the forum/blog itself will all point back to the subdomain. So, with a subfolder, both the inbound and internal linking structure favor the entire site.

With a subdomain, the forum or blog will be listed as a separate entity in the Google search results, which is good for owning the results and one’s reputation management. However, Google and other engines will generally not list more than two of these subdomains in the search results, unless those subdomains can prove to Google that they are independent and relevant entities."

If you don't know htaccess, redirecting the site to and from the subdomain can be a nightmare. If not setup correctly, your subdomain can cause you all types of duplication and strange URL complications.

Hope this helps!

You could redirect the whole site, but I wouldn't.

If your exiting site ranks well, you should forward those pages to the proper pages on your Magento site. By doing the whole site as a redirect to the other, you will most likely lose rank and authority by doing so.

Are the sites on two different domains?

"I would first offer a simple suggestion whenever someone says, Google doesn't or Google does... Ask them where they read it or saw it."

I agree with Robert here. Chances are the person you heard it from tried it and did not implement it correctly, and therefore because it didnt work for them, means it wont work for you. Lol.

"City" pages are one of the most effective ways to drive traffic for additional service areas. We have used these multiple times with great success. Having individual location pages with a exclusive URL, page title, content, meta description and links can help you rank in areas outside your major competitive areas. For example:

Lawn care guy serves St Louis. We set up pages for surrounding areas. Focus on St Louis for main site content, while mentioning the other areas. For the city pages, we only focus on that one area. All content is unique for each page (important) and we see how we can include certain details that are specific to that one area. Images, links, alt text are all named appropriately to that location. You can always include wiki info, maps, images or other media to help a user (and search engine) immediately understand what the page is about. Set up a variety of tracking methods as Robert stated to further help users decide that the service provider is "local". People will be more likely to call a local number for service showing their area code than a 800 or 855. Tossible digits has them for cheap, or you can use Google voice. As stated before DO NOT USE VIRTUAL ADDRESSES, or a UPS suite. You want to add to the value of your site, not hurt it.

Rather than focus so much on your competitions sitemap, I would run a backlink profile check on their domain. Google is giving them extra authority with users, and I think that is a good place to start looking. Could be that they have a ton of great backlinks, citation sites, blog posts, etc linking back.

Try it out, and see what you find. I would analyze both the domain your are referencing, along with your own, then compare results. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

Hope this helps

"Quality over quantity wins"

All day, every day. I agree on using the main blog to grab the attention of users and search engines. The only way I can see the effort being rewarded on setting up additional blogs on the other domains is if they speak about something very specific that doesn't fit into your main blog.

Whatever route you decide to go, make sure you are setting up canonical URLs and the proper SEO structure from the beginning. It's much harder to correct later on down the road.

As much as most people hate to admit it, exact match domains can get a ton of favor in Google's ever evolving quest to provide "relevant" results.

How long has the other domain been around? If it's an oldie (6+ years) along with being a EMD your are going to need some killer backlinks to validate your site enough to bump them off. Also, there whole site is based upon just that one keyword, whereas your site is based upon many different keywords. They are focused on just one keyword, that can constantly be repeated on page because it's their name. Not only that, but I'm sure every citation profile link is also titled something like "Boiler Hire" since again, that is their name. So they have possibly hundreds of links that specify they provide boiler hire, where your site most likely has your name. Do they rank for any of they other keywords your are competing for? Or just boiler hire?

The way that we approch these situations is to get creative in reaching more people, and think of ways that you can get backlinks from high ranking sources. Is there any big publications or resources you can get links from?

I was looking at your URL's, and many of them don't specify the exact keyword you want to go for. Might be picking at straws here, but it's just an idea.

http://www.allseasonshire.eu/lease-or-buy.php

• does not list the word boiler once in the content, page title, or url. This is under the boilder dropdown menu...
• H1 and H3 together

http://www.allseasonshire.eu/boilers/boilers.php

• could modify url to include "hire" rather than repeating keyword twice
• H1 has an H2 right under it, with no content between them
• Description is not based around a conversion "Boiler Hire & Emergency Rental | Electric, Containerised & Mobile Boilers | 22 kw – 1.2 MW | Bespoke builds | All Seasons Hire | 0800 082 8001"

Site design looks great. Just wanted to throw that in there I think with some minor on-page tweaks to increase the density without being spammy, and a killer backlink strategy you will be good to go

Not that I usually recommend doing this, but they also have the areas listed on the page. Could be that Google is putting two and two together, and targeting the site to those areas?

Make them pretty to look at, and informative. People love articles that are well laid out, pages that are pretty to look at, and helpful / fun to read. If you make your articles snore-worthy, your user response will be.

Also make sure that your users can easily share the articles. If you rely on a user to manually copy and paste a link to share it, you will be waiting a long time. For marketing, think of what audience would be searching for your articles, and where they would go looking for it. Putting content in place where users are actively searching for it = blog success.

I would keep them the same.

We did a study on mobile vs desktop over 5 different sites, and found that when a site was properly optimized, it came up in the same position in search results for both desktop and mobile. This was regardless if location targeting was turned on. Proper content and seo is the way to go, and will rank the same on desktop, tablet, and mobile.

I would not create a separate SEO design for mobile, unless you had a compelling reason to.

Everyone talks about over-optimization of on-page content. If you are seeing a penalty, I highly doubt it is from something as simple as over-optimized H tags, unless you are just literally repeating the same things over and over across multiple pages.

Having the page title being the same as your H1 is fine, as long as it is well written, and highlighting what you are trying to rank for. We have even used our opening sentences as meta descriptions before. If the content is good, then you can use it wherever you like. Don't get so caught up in the finite details, that you overlook what is really causing your site not to rank / drop in rank. The rules of SEO have not really changed that much, except in the way that now Google looks much more closly at external factors to determine the rank and authority of a site. Read over what you have for your content. If it sounds spammy and unnatural, it probably is.

Without having a link, its hard to see what you have going on, or where your site could be improved. Based off of your description, this is the best answer I have.

After looking at the site, and hearing you say there was no manual action, I think your troubles lie elsewhere, as in Google just doesnt like the site anymore due to on page/off page issues.

I'm guessing your site wants to rank for "chiropractor in pickering" or "chiropractor pickering"?

Let's get started (cracks knuckles):

The home page currently has 4 versions.
http://www.drkevinfinn.com/
http://www.drkevinfinn.com/index.html
http://drkevinfinn.com/index.html
http://drkevinfinn.com/

You have duplicate home pages, and need to process a redirect in cpanel/htaccess to prevent this. Here is the code you need to put in place in htaccess after the # RewriteBase /

force www

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.drkevinfinn.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.drkevinfinn.com/$1 [R=301,L]

remove index.php within the URL

RedirectMatch permanent index.php/(.*) http://www.drkevinfinn.com/$1

remove index.php at the end of the URL and change to /

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ /./index.(php|html)\ HTTP
RewriteRule (.)index.(php|html)$ /$1 [R=301,L]

Remove index.php from root URL

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.(php|html) [NC]
RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.drkevinfinn.com/ [R=301,L]

#end code

Keyword selection:
The keyword selection on the pages is pretty jarbled, and could use a bit of cleaning up. For example on home page:
name="keywords" content="DR. Kevin Finn,Chiropractor Pickering,chiropractor services in Pickering">
could be changed to: (DC is the abbreviation for "doctor of chiropractic", CA stands for both Canada, and for Chiropractic assistant, a double benefit!)
name="keywords" content="chiropractor, chiropractic, care, clinic, service, pickering, CA, Dr Kevin Finn, DC, doctor">

Site meta description: Also, the description for the site is not very.....descriptive:
name="description" content="Chiropractic Dr. Kevin Finn offers chiropractor services in Pickering.">
let's elaborate a bit further, based off of your services page:
name="description" content="Dr. Kevin Finn is a chiropractor clinic in Pickering, CA offering chiropractic care and services to clients suffering from back pain or injury.">
On page copy:
On page copy is a bit thin. Your headings list the main keyword and location, but the body copy does not. From the homepage:

"Chiropractors are experts in the diagnosis and treatment of injuries or conditions related to your nerves, muscles, bones and joints and how these conditions may impact your overall health and ability to work, perform and enjoy life.

People most often think of  visiting a chiropractor for back pain or neck pain and headaches, but chiropractors can help with problems in the shoulders, elbows, wrists, knees, hips even your feet! Research studies have demonstrated that chiropractic treatment provides excellent relief for these conditions."

^^^^^^^ NO LOCATION LISTED!! Also, the phrase "chiropractors" is used often, but not chiropractor, chiropractic, etc etc and anything else you want to rank for. Many pages only have 2 short paragraphs, which limits how often and where you can link to.

No Interlinking of pages in content.
Google hates dead end pages, and users dont spend much time on them. Add in additional copy, and link using anchor text to those related pages as you talk about them.

No authorship or markup:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http://drkevinfinn.com/index.html

Click-through ratio is probably getting hit hard because of this. You have the google+ page linked in the footer, so what is stopping you from creating the markup? Also, does he have any reviews? I'm sure one or more patients would be happy to write some reviews, and them you can add in aggregate review markup and make the indexed links shine. Don't know how? here you go: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/get-started-using-schema/

Start looking objectively at these areas of your site. I dont think you are being affected by the hack, as much as areas of SEO that need more attention to detail. If the hack was a major factor, you most likely would have received a message from GWT saying that malware was on the site.

Best of luck, and let me know if I can help with anything!

I agree with this to a certain degree. Page views and user behavior tell Google everything they need to know. No one at Google is manually looking at your site unless you are doing something horribly wrong.

A large amount of page views could signal to the Google bot that the site is popular. Page views combined with long on-site time and low exit rates can tell the bot that the page is not only popular, but also very well put together. (engaging)

If the majority of your page and back end seo is optimized around the subject and the area, I doubt changing the header tag to look more natural would hurt your seo. I understand what you mean, as we have done local pages for the majority of our clients. It is difficult to make it not appear to be what it is: a page designed around ranking for a local area.

On a sidenote, this may not be such a bad thing. If people are looking for PLACE, in CITY, and the first thing they see when they hit the page is PLACE serving CITY, state...might be that they say "This is just what I was looking for"

As an seo, its hard for us to understand what a consumer expects to see when they get to a webpage since we are so involved in the process of making it. I dont think most consumers don't look into it that far, and simply see a page on a site that offers what they searched for. This could change based upon your target audience, and intelligence level.

The MOZ tools are just that, tools. They offer a way for people to see basic optimization tips for ways their site can be improved. Don't take everything they say to heart, since they are just a guideline. We have pages that are a perfect A+ super 100% in MOZ tools that dont rank on page one. For more advanced seo practices, you could potentially hurt your ranking by changing certain things, based upon what you said your target keywords were.

Looks like you have some redirect issues to clean up. When constructing a new site, often you will find better ways of doing things, and items (such as URLs) will change. Since you have so many temporary redirects, see if your CMS has a 404 error handler installed. If so, these plugins will redirect 404 pages to the home page automatically.

Have you resubmitted everything via webmaster tools? (Google and Bing) Fetched all the pages in GWT? Submitted an accurate sitemap of the new site? In addition to the redirect errors, it feels like the search engines do not have an accurate roadmap and description of the new site. Try doing a site:www.YOURSITEHERE.com in google and clicking through the links to see what is actually out there indexed, and where its going.

After you fix the above, it will take time for them to reindex and re-rank your pages.

PM me the site link. I'll take a look. Yes, you will want to have a very distinct page title for the home page, I thought you were trying to assign a tag to the home page, which would add that into every page, my mistake.

Also, make sure you have your home page menu item and article set to default. Here is an article that may help you:

http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=328473

I would set up the location targeting at the city level. For example, set up an ad group that only targets one location, and has ad text directed at that location. Do this for the three areas that they serve.

This allows you to target the specific locations. If they have "city pages" (pages that are setup to target only one service/location) set up on their website, then create multiple ads based directly around that location and link back to that specific page. This will not only target the ads directly at people in that area, but also give your ads a much higher quality score due to the direct targeting. If they do not have city pages setup, either create some or link back to the page that lists the service area in a nice landing page style/conversion page layout. Pay special attention to the layout of the pages, as the pages you link back to will want to have some type of dominant conversion area or call to action.

Hope this helps!

Chances are, that due to the different copy that surrounds your listing (URL structure, surrounding copy, additional navigation, etc) across the different ecom platforms you will not see any negative effects. I will add that due to the popularity of Amazon and Ebay, your product, if searched for, will appear in search results on there instead of your main website.

Ideally, I would use the different platforms to try and rank for additional variations of your product keyword phrases. Switch up the wording slightly to include more information, or similar information for each listing.

I have a disagreement about this to a degree. True, buying a link isnt a good practice, but buying the ability to have a citation profile that creates a link for you can be. Think of sites like the BBB, Chamber of Commerce, Business Journal, etc. These are trusted resources, that I highly doubt Google would penalize.

Facebook can be next to useless for a business unless your potential clients seach for services or use that service frequently. We have done many studies on this, and LinkedIn seems to be a better fit for service-based business, and Facebook better for product-based services.

To the original poster, if you are looking to build domain and page authority, begin by creating as many trusted citation links as you can. Yellowbook, Yelp, Patch, CityGrid, Axiom, FourSquare, Google Places, Bing Local, etc etc etc. We have a list we call the top 40, and that has been extremely sucessful for our local clients.

Blogging can help if you are typing things people will want to read and share. You can easily perform a search to find popular dog and pet grooming topics, or simply base the blog posts off of questions customers ask you everyday. Chances are, thats what people will want to know, and might have searched for before they even came to your location.

"Each site has about the same authority including the group site."

Since they are already setup and working/ranking, why do you want to get rid of them? I'm curious as to how that will help you save money. If the main site links out the the sub sites in a natural fashion, and helps the user find a location closer to them, I would leave it alone, especially if it is a driving factor of business.

Having the sub sites I think will work to your advantage, as you will be able to specifially optimize around that location and geographical area, including all sub towns and local areas.

I am guessing you are trying to increase the authority of the main site by combining them all into one? Perhaps the solution is to leave the sub sites as they are, begin to expand the main site, and link out to the others where it makes the most sense. There is nothing stopping you from expanding the main site just because the mini sites exist.

Another think to think of is the local factor of the mini sites. Each one can have its own LBL (local business listing) tied to it, and linking out or embedding that info on that site. Might help the mini sites have a bit more authority that you might lose be combining them all into one mega site.

"What else can I do to improve on its position in the SERPS?"

Backlinks, backlinks, backlinks. Validation, validation, validation. There are a ton of citation sources available, and I would submit to as many of them (that are reputable) as you can. One thing to remember is: don't only link to the homepage if you want the subpages to get some good ol' Google love.

"Would a hyphenated domain make any difference at all?"

If you already have a good domain in place, I would not go changing that. The existing domain name probably has domain age and history, along with backlinks in place. Only if the existing domain had a spam or penalty issue would I change the domain.

Be patient. The changes will not come fast. Google has to validate your new information from each source, and that can take a while. To speed it up a bit, link out to your social and ciation sites (using a nofollow or not, up to you) as they will link back. Once you have the new links in place, submit the URL with the outgoing links in GWT using fetch as Google. If it is a legit business, submit to major data providers such as Axiom, since Google uses them for data validation. You will need a tax ID and some other information tho.

Most SSL providers provide the same exact service. The difference in cost is from the levels of insurance, brand name and provider of the SSL, and trust factor of the badge. For example, you can buy a SSL from GoDaddy right now for around $70. As far as I can see it offers no insurance against identity or infomation theft. If you want a SSL from Verisign, its around $1000 and offers a $1,250,000 warranty. Most people know the verisign badge, and trust that their information will be encrypted and secure. When you purchase an SSL from them, you also get daily malware scanning and other features.

It really boils down to what are you getting the SSL for, if you require the additional insurance, what other features you would like to have, and if you think the badge will be the deciding factor of conversion for your users. If I remember correctly, the more expensive SSL's use a different bit rate. For example 128 bit vs 256 bit.

Hope this helps!

A few ideas for url and titles:

Repair link

YOURDOMAIN.COM/san-diego-driveway-repair

Installation link:

YOURDOMAIN.COM/san-diego-driveway-installation

Also for the home page title:

San Diego Driveway Company | Driveway Repair, Installation, and Maintenance

By having your pages separate, you can optimize more effectively on each given term, in a way that does not offend the user. Most often, when a search is done for that particular keyword, the user will come directly to that page, not even aware the other pages exist.

I would revisit your on page content, and explore additional backlinks to boost your domain authority.

In addition, you may look at a way to include backlinks to your site, based upon who chooses to use your services. Your competitors have a larger link profile, which I'm sure contributes to their ranking and exposure.

What types of marketing have you already visited?

One of the things I noticed, is that the linking sites, even tho they are not related, and blog comment spam, have a high domain authority. I wonder if that plays a part in this at all.