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Once their version is removed/rewritten, resubmit your site to Google in every way that you can.

1. Fetch as Google
2. Change sitemap created dates to current day
3. Change crawl frequency in sitemap to daily
4. Check for proper 301 redirects from old pages, when you moved/modified the site to separate branding.
5. Submit the URL in question to Google, and letting them know that someone has copied your site's content. They should be able to see that your was created first.

Here are a few links to help:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice <<< start there

https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?hl=en

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/find-remove-stolen-content/

http://www.orclage.com/report-remove-stolen-duplicate-content-google/

I don't think so, if anything there is a benefit. The only thing I don't like about press release sites is that you don't have control over where they submit your release. You pay them a fee, write your release and then how for the best.

I haven't seen any negative effects from doing press releases. Just make sure what you put out there is something someone will find helpful or useful.

With having such a limited amount of characters that Google will show in your title, I don't think it makes sense to have the brand name in each one of the page titles (unless the brand name is a large factor in searches, and you are trying to ensure your site gets credit for being the official representation of that brand). Instead, utilize that space for adding additional or secondary keywords phrases that can help bring in additional traffic.

"A specific article would be "How to paint using oil painting | Maleribasen.dk"

This type of format can work well if you are trying to optimize for one major keyword phrase, and your whole focus (on-page and off) is around that phrase.

I'm not sure. It could be that on the other domain the brand name or some similarity existed, and that is what Google is using to tie them together.

Along with using the 410, make sure to place the proper robots data on the page, meaning use "no-archive" so the search engines always keep display the most recent result.

• NOINDEX tag tells Google not to index a specific page
• NOFOLLOW tag tells Google not to follow the links on a specific page
• NOARCHIVE tag tells Google not to store a cached copy of your page
• NOSNIPPET tag tells Google not to show a snippet (description) under your Google listing, it will also not show a cached link in the search results

I agree with Paddy. Did you do a backup before the changes? If so, getting your site back to how it was will be very easy, especially if you are using Cpanel. When you do your server reboots, make sure you are using the "graceful" method.

Here is a video explaining this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PddZ3FwHFZw

He stated that they are ranking well, but traffic is lower. I'm thinking that links are not his issue, but rather some other factor ie lack of engagement, listings not standing out, products not marked up, etc.

A lot of big companies (Engadget, Forbes, etc) handle this by showing the full article, and then stating "This article was originally posted on XYZ.com" and then linking to the original source. I doubt you will see any issues using the same format.

There are two ways to fix this.

First is to redirect all the pages to the proper home page, using a 301. Duplicate pages are bad for seo. Google likes to see one set of content, for each URL. See the webmaster tools article on duplicate content here.

Second is to go into webmaster tools, and set the true URL for this page, using the "URL parameters" function. This way, you can set the proper version of the page, so Google knows what to index. Be very careful when doing this, as you can mess up the way Google sees your site. There is a video on the link, I would watch it, and do a bit of reading first.

You should login to Google Webmaster Tools and do a fetch as Google, if the page returns a status 200 then you know that your pages are working as intended and what your experiencing is just the Google cache service not working, which should resolve itself in time.

Google Cache is not Realtime

It's worth mentioning that the Google cache system runs independently and does not effect the real time rankings of Google and the index. So even if there is no cache, cache errors doesn't mean there is problems with your site or rankings. Simply do as suggested with the fetch as Google, once you ruled out that your pages are not at fault which I suspect they are not (Google's caching service often has problems), then its just a simple matter of putting your feet up and waiting for the Cache system to resolve this issue on its own.

Also should check that the robots for that page is not set to be "no-archive"

"

• NOINDEX tag tells Google not to index a specific page
• NOFOLLOW tag tells Google not to follow the links on a specific page
• NOARCHIVE tag tells Google not to store a cached copy of your page
• NOSNIPPET tag tells Google not to show a snippet (description) under your Google listing, it will also not show a cached link in the search results

"

"After looking at Moz tools we have great results, sometimes even better than our competitors. But we are still not getting or improving on our traffic"

It was an assumption of what he meant, as multiple items are mentioned. I think you know as well as I do that the questions are sometimes not clear on here

From another member in this thread:

"I just did 3 random searches and you were on page #1 for all 3.

"pearl+beads" position 4
"glass+beads" position 9 (wiki is at 7!)
"shambala+beads" position 9"

Seems his ranking is doing ok. What we really need to see would be the before and after rankings, which is why I stated he should look at his analytics, and compare time periods. Keywords, entry paths, exit pages, referring sites, root domains, ranking position, all that can be found there, and used to make an assessment of where they went wrong.

Backlinks. Anchor text. Find people that will link to you using the words you want to rank for.

"Their site has no purposeful SEO in it, there is barely any text on the homepage at all and none of the text are the keywords it is ranking for."

The above statement is concerning. If they have a good budget, as their SEO and design advisor I would say what needs to be said. Text can be added in a stylized way to help improve the SEO of any site without taking away from a good design. Google likes words, not CSS and images. Without a reference, it's hard to judge what can be improved, and how you should go about suggesting it to your client. You also mentioned rankings, but what do those rankings look like? Are we talking page one, or top 3?

If you use cpanel for hosting, it is super easy.

http://docs.cpanel.net/twiki/bin/view/AllDocumentation/CpanelDocs/ReDirects

If not, the same basic principle applies. If you want to send me the new url where you want it to go to, I can code you a redirect function that will work.

Two solutions:

1. Redirect all indexed pages to the proper pages on your new site using a 301. Resubmit sitemap, and do a fetch as google on all the new pages to get them showing up asap.

2. Make sure all the old pages return a 404 error. (home page will not be an issue). Once they are returning a 404, submit a url removal request for each old url.

IMO, option 2 takes a lot longer, and you are at Google's mercy on how long they take to get to them all. Option 1 would be your best bet, as you will retain some page rank and weight from the old URL.

I have seen similar tactics in the local SEO industry lately, so I share your confusion.

Looking at MOZ's tools, we see that our main competitor has a huge amount of spammy links pointing back to their site. Our backlink profile has been very stringent, only submitting to or accepting higher quality sources. They still out rank us, even tho their content quality score is much lower. I am looking into this now, and will provide an answer or opinion soon.

A few questions:

How many pages back in a site search do you see these? Meaning if you do a site:www.yourdomain.com how many pages back do you see these appear? If it's like page 10 or more, I doubt a user would ever see the URL's at all.

Second, I am curious as to why you have an image sitemap, and went to that length to include images in your submissions, but didn't name the images in an SEO-friendly format? For example:

http://www.elefant-tours.com//gallery/keys-hotel/07_img_0949triesx.jpg

...is a young woman sitting at a table, getting served a drink. I would think that the image could be named "hotel food dining" or something of that nature. Just an idea, probably not a huge deal, but every bit counts. You have no idea what a user might type in to get to a site. Someone might skip web results altogether, and go straight to Google images to find what they are looking for, especially in the hotel industry. They will be looking for what appears to be the most relaxing, and luxurious experience.

You could always disable the plugin, and make one big image sitemap. The sitemap URL you listed shows the image son that particular page. In a "all-in-one" image sitemap, you would list out the images and image location (URL) individually. Might work out better for you, as Google would get the big picture (pun intended) all at once.

Hope this helps!

Google has stated that duplicate content will be penalized, if it is deemed that the content is meant to manipulate search results. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359

"In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results."

If two pages both have the same content, even with a canoical url Google will choose which one to index most likely the newer version of that page.
"Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a "regular" and "printer" version of each article, and neither of these is blocked with a noindex meta tag, we'll choose one of them to list."

I would not recommend having duplicate content on your site if it can be avoided. If it can't, set one of the pages you dont want indexed to "no-index".

I agree with DJ on covering it separately, but only from a paid search perspective.

If you are clever enough with your on-page content writing, and page titles/descriptions/keywords you should be able to cover both relatively easily. Optimize a bit more heavily for the stronger search query, or the one that has the most searches. This can be found using the Google Keyword Planner.

People are not going to want to read two separate pages of lawyer and attorney worded info. Could also get you into trouble with Google if the pages are similar to one another.

When was the last crawl report run? Could be that GWT has only crawled less than half of the pages since it was submitted, and therefore giving you that result (80k is a lot to crawl). As to data vocabulary vs schema, schema is becoming the standard. Even though you are using data vocabulary, it looks like the markup is working according to the rich snippet testing tool. Schema also has more extensive vocabularies

GWT is not perfect, there will be errors in the reporting. If you can see that its working, more than likely it is.

Yes, unless you have a compelling reason to change them. By changing the names you are just creating more work for yourself. Was there a reason you were wanting to name them something different?

Changing the name (if you choose to do so) of the sitemap is not going to have an effect on already-indexed URL's. I dont see any reason that you should modify the names unless you are trying to organize them better

"Do I need to include all of their references and would that be duplicate content."

Do not include large sections of content from the source, have the sources quoted at the bottom of the page as links. I would imagine you are putting your own spin on some of the information contained on those sites? You can make each one be its own line, and have a few links related to each section. Here is an example:

http://moz.com/blog/illustrated-seo-competitive-analysis-workflow

If you look at the bottom, she links out in a very organized fashion, so a user can find the source link they are looking for easier. You can also link out as you mention certain sites, or subjects.

For better distribution, use a few less costly press relesases to judge how well the article will be received. Once you see it gaining traction, or the attachment rate with users, then I would possibly look at doing a larger PR.

For your infographic, show a lower resolution version on your webpage, both for fast loading times, and also to have the full image downloadable as a file. This will allow you an extra URL where the image is hosted, and you will be able to track users that come to read and view the graphic, and also those that want to download what you display. This should give you some extra insight if the infographic is truly successful, and people find it useful. You could also add this as a destination URL goal in analytics.

If you are wanting to do that, just create a redirect from one page to the other.

However, you could also create new content for the new site, and have 2 chances to rank rather than just one. If it was me, I would leave the old page alone, and dedicate the new url to all new content targeted just at singing lessons (since you have the exact match domain, I mean, that is what you purchased it for correct?)

The new domain should be all about singing lessons such as: cost, class information, different types, pretty much anything you get asked in person when people are interested include that in the site.

If the current page does not rank at all, you can consider redirecting the page, although I don't really see any benefit to doing so. Even though you have an EMD you can still brand the site visually so people know its you.

Webspam comes from so many sources, I would highly doubt you are going to see a negative effect from just one URL. If you are really concerned about it, check the server settings, enable Spam Assasin, and country IP blocks. We have seen the worst cases of spam come from Russia, Ukraine, Thailand, India, and China.

If you dont trust the URL, see if there is a page where your link is listed, and create a disavow request in Webmaster tools.

If it's possible, can you combine the products with variables into on page? Using the store's cart and checkout function, I would include a gallery of all the different colors/options, then have the selected options available through a dropdown menu. This way you have one page for a product, with selectable options rather than a large number of pages based around one thing. This may also help with on-page user time as well, since they will sort through the options to find what they are wanting.

One Site To Rule Them All

*sorry, I had too, lol

Wouldn't be worth doing, as it could have the opposite effect of what you are wanting. Instead install a markup plugin for opencart like this one.

I understand you don't have a lot of reviews, but if you can get the images of your products showing up, or even any kind of product data to make your links in the SERP stand out more, it couldnt hurt

If your current site does not support php, add in another file directory, and install a wordpress or blogging site there. This could be something like:

Yourdomain.com (in root public html folder)
Yourdomain.com / blog (/blog being a subfolder in your public html folder, that contains the additional WP or CMS installation)

I dont see a SEO benefit in having your blog hosted externally. True you can have it link back frequently to your main domain, but in reality the more you post you are just feeding the blogging platform with additional pages rather than your own site. I do not see a benefit in using Google's blogging platform such as feedburner or blogspot having any additional benefits either.

Keep in mind there are no "seo benefits" from having a blog. High quality posts and content is what makes a blog valuable. Just having a lot of extra pages won't do anything to help you rank higher, or get your site seen as an authority on any given topic by Google.

When you say winning, do you mean ranking higher, or getting indexed instead of your store's pages?

Chances are your blog posts are targeted directly at certain questions and information and have links pointing back at them. Do your store pages have the same? Most stores have an area when you can add information to the landing pages.

Can you provide a link to the store, so that I may have a closer look? It's difficult to give you a accurate answer without seeing how the store/blog is set up.

Did you keep the page URL structure the same on the new site? If so, you can do a simple htaccess rule that will forwards all traffic from one domain, to the corresponding pages on the other domain. If not, then you will have to go through and check each one manually.

Have all the steps been covered? Did you resubmit a new sitemap? Specify in "fetch as Google" that all the new pages on the new site be crawled? If you are using a CMS, did you check to see if multiple versions of a certain page exist, and forget to redirect those?

Lastly, even though you still see references to the old domain, do the 301 redirects work? Once clicked do they send a user to the new domain?

Take a look at the image index rate, and see how many are indexed and showing. 20k images is quite a bit, and I would want to see if Google actually indexed them all before I started creating redirects for that many items.

If they are indexed, see if there is a way on your new site's sytem to have the images named the same. That way you would only be creating a redirect for the image paths, and not the images themselves. Example:

oldsite.com/image/25/coolpicture.jpg
newsite.com/images/awesome/25/coolpicture.jpg

All that would be needed would be an HTACCESS rule redirecting from one directory to the other, using the image name as a variable. You could probably redirect most of them using only a few rules than 20,000 separate redirects.

Is it worth it to redirect? I think that depends on how many are indexed, and if the images bring you a significant amount of traffic.

No problem! Glad I could help. Once you get an idea of how your campaigns work and how people search for your business, this can in turn help you figure out how (and what to focus on) organically.

Think of it like this: Google says "We could show them the search terms for free in analytics"

Intern says "But, we could make them pay for the data, possibly through adwords"

Google says "Brilliant! Promote this man."

Sorry denverish, I have been really busy lol

Point number 3 refers to "pinging" your website, to let the search engines know your site has been updated. There are a few spammy ones out there, but I would try using:

http://pingomatic.com/
or
https://pingler.com/

Pinging is a process by which you can inform major Search Engines and RSS direcotries(Google,Bing,Yahoo,Technorati etc) that you have updated content/URL's in your blog/Website. Pinging can also help in getting website changes indexed quickly.

I dont think 404 errors hurt your site. If you have that many pages, they are most likely crawling your site a lot anyway. Have you set your crawl frequency in your sitemap? On bigger sites that get frequent updates, we set the crawl frequency to daily rather than weekly.

If possible, try to see if there are any top level items you can submit a URL removal request for. Hopefully this can speed up the process fo getting the URL's removed. This process can take a long time for Google to take care of. After changing websites we still had 404 errors after 6 months, even after submitting the URL removal request.

Another option is to have the page render a 410 rather than a 404. A 410 states to the search engine the page is gone, and will not be coming back. If you are using some form of cart system or cms there might be a way to apply the code to a large number of pages at once, rather than trying to manually code 100k pages.

"410 Gone
The requested resource is no longer available at the server and no forwarding address is known. This condition is expected to be considered permanent. Clients with link editing capabilities SHOULD delete references to the Request-URI after user approval. If the server does not know–or has no facility to determine–whether or not the condition is permanent, the status code 404 (Not Found) should be used instead of 410 (Gone).  This response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise."

Worse case scenero, you could set them to no-index, or just leave them be. Even if they dont lead anywhere logically, they could still bring you traffic. Or redirect them to the closest thing that is on the site currently.

I would NOT replicate this linking pattern for your client's websites. In the long run, it could do more damage than good. I will save you the long explanation, but it's just not a good long term strategy. Do the things you know are right, and not the things that could pose a risk in the future.

For small businesses, the easiest way to combat companies that use BS linking strategies is to look at the TOTAL health of one of your client's websites. This would include keyword density testing, a complete citation profile analysis (using Moz Local or Yext), domain choice, on-page health, page load speed, etc. Basically everything that Google says matters, and do it to a "T".

Beat them with quality quantity, not by replicating the same tactics.

Do you have access to the root folder of your site? Try adding this into your HTACCESS

#Redirect your Homepage from HTTPS to HTTP

RewriteCond%{HTTPS} on
RewriteRule^$ http://%{HTTP_HOST} [L,R]

If that does not work, try adding this below the Rewritebase line:

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (?!^(index.php/?|..css|..js|..gif|..jpe?g|..png|..txt|.*.ico|)$)^ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=302,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteRule ^(index.php/?|..css|..js|..gif|..jpe?g|..png|..txt|.*.ico|)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=302,L,NC]

If the canonical link is not set, its possible you will get additional pages indexed for the same content especially if you are using a CMS. The best course of action would be to do a site search for your domain, and see how may pages are indexed. If you know you have 200 pages on your site, and you have 2000 indexed, you most likely have some duplicates showing up. We wrote an article about avoiding duplicates through htaccess earlier this month. Might be worth a read if you have not set any of those rules for your site. CMS's (Wordpress, Joomla) can be tricky to get duplicate pages under control.

*edit Looking at your indexed pages, you are showing 122,000 links indexed for your site. If that isn't the case, you should look into assigning canonical links for all your posts, and if they are already indexed, processing redirects. You can also use Google's URL parameter tool to help, althought this tool should be used with caution if you don't know how to use it.

Sounds like you have a good awareness of where to start looking. Without seeing what you have it will be difficult to diagnose. Can you PM me the URL? Could be another external factor besides the links that is causing the ranking issues.

"Should the 301 redirects map the canonical URL on the old site to the corresponding canonical for the new design . . . or should they map the non canonical database URLs old and new?"

Any URL's that are indexed should be redirected to the correct version. For example if you have both a database URL and a canonical URL both indexed in search results, then they both should be sent to the correct version.

Also, having only canonical URLs in your submitted sitemaps will help to remove a lot of these, even without redirects.

Google has not stated anything saying that is is harder for new websites to rank quickly, and I doubt that they would implement something like that into their alogorithm. The reason is it harder for a new website to rank is due to the lack of backlinks and ciatation sources. Without a history, it's harder for Google to see if a website is better or worse than others. This is why they place such a high  prioroity on backlinks, as it tells them a broad picture of how trustworthy a site or domain really is. This is one of many factors, but its an important one to consider.

You stated that you have backlinks, have you checked to see if all of them are followed? If the link is not followed, it will only help to direct traffic at your site, not pagerank or weight.

I know a lot of people say this, but focus on laying out your page in a way that will help the user. Moving all your text higher up on the page will not make a magic improvement in your ranking, and I fear that you will spend a lot of time modifying and not get the results you want. Spend time creating really nice listing pages, and having other sites link back to them. Focus on gaining high quality relationships with real estate sites that have authority in the eyes of consumers, and in search engines. Look at large sites that are already successful in search results, and see what you can learn from them. We wrote an article a while back about analyzing your competitors SEO strategy. Might be worth a read for you. Focus on the content of your site, improving the conversion messages, improving the keyword density, and your overall message.

Thats where I would start

If all the pages are not indexed, then yes I would assume a penalty. One of the more common reseaons a site gets penalized is due to improper linking, either inbound or outbound in nature.

If you do not yet have access to webmaster tools, there are still steps you can take. This is something you are going to have to do anyway, once you figure out what the penalty was for.

First place to start: links.
There are a wide variety of backlink tools out there. Here are a few you can try:
http://raventools.com/marketing-tools/link-manager/
http://moz.com/researchtools/ose
https://ahrefs.com/

Start looking for the spammy or paid links. How can you tell? Simple. If a link has a domain like rankmehighingoogle.com or something like that, chances are it's a bad or paid backlink. The example given is a silly domain name, but you will see some like that come up. If you are unsure of a links quality, manually visit the sites to see what they are all about. If the home page has a 0 or a ? for pagerank, chances are the linking site got hit with a penalty and you should disavow that linking domain.

Another way to test is to search for the linking domain in Google. If you search for a web directory site or linking domain specifially by their name and they are nowhere to be found, Google most likely hammered them for some practice they were using.

Since you dont have access to GWT yet, this would be a good way to see what is going on with this site. You stated that you just started doing the optimization for the client, so you most likely havent had time to research the domains history yet. Once you have access to GWT you will be taking a look at links anyway, so while you are waiting for access be proactive

Why not use JQuery to load all the images in one page, in one gallery? Depending upon the coding of your custom CMS, I'm sure there is an HTML or simple gallery that you can integrate fairly easily.

301 Redirect and forget it. The only other thing to watch for is if the "admissions" page has multiple versions or URLs. If it has a login function, or is in a CMS I would double check for duplicate or alternate versions of that page.

The 301 redirect is the fast way to get rid of a page. The slow way that actually deletes it from Google and their index is to do a URL removal, and add a 410 rule for that page URL. 410 tells search engines the page is "gone" literally. This generally takes about a week for Google to notice, but can potentially take longer.

There is a way you can report the offending sites to Google if you can prove your content was created first.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en

If you are using a CMS, check the publish dates of the articles.

Like it has already been stated, do a search for some of the content by doing a search in Google for a section of content, surrounded by quotation marks. This tells Google to search for something exactly as it is entered, and return exact, not relevant results. If you see exact phrases that are duplicated word for word, you could contact either the site owner, or look up who hosts the site in Whois, and contact the hosting provider.

I would think of it this way:

1. What URL format would give you the most amount of beneficial (unique) URL's?
2. By using this structure, do you have the time/resources to optimize all newly created URL's?
3. Looking at the BIG GUYS in the flooring industry (Lowe's, Home Depot, ETC) what URL format do they use? Can this format be downscaled to work for your needs? Would that format make sense to use on your site?
4. What does the Google keyword planner suggest for being the most heavily searched for terms? Is there a way to include these terms in your navigation and still have it make sense?
5. Judging by your goals, does it make sense to have all the URL's be unique to each product, or would it work better for your gallery or product options to be loaded in a JQuery or "outside of content" format on a second level category page?

That should help you narrow it down a bit

Always link by page and subject matter. If you have an article about red widgets, you should link back to the page you have about red widgets. True you can build up your home page with a lot of links, but this hurts your user experience by making them have to go through the entire site to find what they came there for.

When you send all your links to the homepage, you are suggesting what page is the most important to search engines. This can often be seen where you have sites that never have any subpages ranking or showing up in search results, only the home page over and over. Sounds great doesnt it? But you can limit the exposure of your site in the long run. By directing links at your subpages, not only do you increase the chance that they will eventually rank higher, you also can get more specific with your linking text.

Direct keyword linking to the home page is more risky. With your subpage links, you can get closer or even use exact keyword phrase links because the content is more specific. In reality, use whatever link phrase that a user will click on. A bunch of keywords might not do that job as well as a conversion statement. If you are worried about getting people to your home page, change the way the subpages are set up on your site, so that users can go to the other relevant areas of your site with ease. It should be easy and simple to direct them where you want them to go using graphics or styled text.

Wow, lots of info here lol. Lets begin with the basics.

It sounds like you have had a lot of domain changes, edits, moves etc. Does Google know that your site is the "final and latest" version? Have you resubmitted the site in every available fashion (sitemap, 301 redirects, URL fetching) to Google?

Also, since you have changed to domain, any of your other authority may have been lost, especially since you state that "with all associated urls (.uk, .net, etc...) and subdomains shutdown. I've allowed all the old spammy pages (thousands of them to 404)." Some of the other sites may have had weight or authority, even if they were a bit spammy. I doubt they were being as harmful as you think, or you would have gotten a warning / penalty.

Now you are in the position of essentially starting over fresh, with little to no links, or mentions. Even if you get good "seo scores" your competitors have years of links and mentions under their belt, not to mention domain stability. Here is a starting point:

1. See if any of the old domains had domain authority or pagerank. If yes, 301 redirect to your new site.
2. Look for any pages that are indexed highly for the old domains, and 301 to the appropriate places on the new site.
3. Look at any and all social profiles connected to any of the old domains. Make sure to update to include the new URL
4. Same with directories and citations. Makes sure all display the new URL. Also look for new citations and backlink opportunities. You need to create a push of new trusted (not spammy) link to send a signal the site and URL exist.

**Also wanted to add that sometimes you can see an initial spike in rankings after launching a new site. Generally, the real results will come at arount the 30-45 day mark, once things have had time to settle, and Google has had time to fully recrawl your site.

It seems like you are actually asking 2 questions in one. Let's approach them both separately.

Should you include index.html or not in your structure? Personally, I think the cleanest URL structure works the best. Get rid of any URL parameters that do not offer any benefit. Cleaner URLs not only look better, but are easier to read and share. Who really wants to share DOMAIN.com/fishing.index.html vs DOMAIN.com/fishing. It may seem petty, but in the grander scheme of things it will just work better. If you do this in one area of your site, keep it consistant through the whole site

As to making sure that Google only indexes one version, this can be done through the URL parameter redirects on your server. You can create rules where the URL automatically strips out any additional URL items, and redirects to the proper version. Once you create your sitemap, make sure to only include the versions of your URL you want indexed. One thing I have found in my entire SEO career is this: The easier and clearer you paint a picture for Google about your site, the better your results will be.

I wouldn't go about restructuring the whole site. Keep in mind page authority is a part of having visits and links coming to that page. Since they are both important pages of the site (terms and privacy) chances are you link to those pages more than any other, thus giving them a higher PA.

You could link off of those pages to other internal pages, or create another menu at the top that points to them. In this situation a 301 is not required, as you wouldn't gain any benefit from redirecting them. For example: redirecting a privacy page to another page you want to rank would most likely have the adverse effect of what you are trying to accomplish since the pages are not relevant to one another.

Google likes simple, keep it simple. You can still add the links at the top without doing any redirects. I would expand where you are at now with new content and pages, rather than get rid of or redirect what is already working for you.

- D

Wanted to get the communities feedback on this.

WDAC is designing a new section of our site. This new section is aimed at helping small businesses that want to get SEO help, but are not in a position financially/do not want to pay an agency for help. The page can be viewed here: http://www.webdesignandcompany.com/expert-seo-tips

The page is called "Expert SEO Tips" and we are going to promote other authors content that focuses on high quality articles around SEO tactics, methods, tips, tricks, etc. There are a few articles listed on the page based around what we have shared in the past, but you can see that the page/section is still in its infancy and may change to a new layout/design in the near future. The section will summarize the article we are linking to , and provide a link to the authors Twitter/G+ profile, depending upon what they have setup.

We have reached out to a few places in the Google+ communities asking for articles and submissions, but have had little success. Strange due to the fact that we are providing outgoing links without requesting one back...hmmm. Anyway, what do any of you think would be the best way to get people to respond?

Also, does anyone see any issues with adding this type of content to our site using followed links, specifically since we are linking out to relevant articles related to our own services? Does anyone see any potential pitfalls? Does anyone have any articles they think would be a great addition or provide help to business owners? All input and insight is appreciated! Looking forward to hearing your input.