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Unless the layout was changed or things went wrong, no. I've migrated maybe 50 websites over the past year with no ill effects. Any that did, occurred because something went wrong (htaccess issues, extended downtime) or because there was a design change. In the case of the latter, rankings return any time between a few days to a few weeks. (Assuming the markup/content is still good)

Sounds like the best solution is to alter the template & eCommerce system you are using to allow for that functionality. Anything else would be a hacky workaround that violates the 'Is this for search engines, or users?' rule.

Looks like you are running an ASP-based solution. I'll be of no help there

Quality at a value doesn't really work out, if you're looking for an agency. (The pick one: cheap, good, fast concept applies) Agencies may provide great ROI but they have a high initial cost, and we aren't sure what your budget is.

Without giving a budget and more information on the project, it's impossible for anyone to help further than sharing personal experiences. On that front, I'll share mine: consultants are generally the most cost effective. Finding them is easiest if you network among your local business chamber. A good candidate will list a few references of businesses they helped similar to yours, and make sure you follow up by calling each of the references.

Get a contract written, of course.

Yes, it displays pricing information in your listings as seen here.

If you are asking if it's worth doing it, ROI wise, then yes. It makes your listing stand out more. There is the argument that competitors might have a lower price listed in the meta data, but organic listings aren't really used for price comparison. That's what apps / Google Shopping is for. You'd be surprised at how few online stores are even showing this meta data, anyway.

In addition, Google isn't the only service using the meta data. You will also get included in shopping apps that crawl this data.

As far as hard numbers, I don't have that or know of blogs that have published similar data. Including meta information overall has increased CTR in my experience, though.

Yeah a page like this should be noindexed. You can do that in robots.txt, which you should be able to modify within your CMS or at the very least upload via FTP.

Nofollowing the links will not doing anything for you.

Pagerank sculpting is long dead. Technically you can still do it through some creative JavaScript, but the real issue here seems that you need to noindex these pages. What kind of pages are we talking about here?

Are you using a CMS where you can easily edit permalinks? It's worth reviewing the longer ones if so.

This is intended functionality in Magento. It's supposed to help the user experience, as a user can navigate to a page even if they aren't sure on the casing of the words.

Of course that's bad for SEO. You'll need to put in the concept of canonicalization. Here's a free extension by Yoast:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/canonical-url-for-magento.html

Cheers.

Update: seeing your response, your solution of putting in redirects wouldn't be possible. You'd have to cover all combinations of caps/non-caps, and well, that's more work than you should want :). As for why this happens, the uppercase character is being lowercased when checking if something in the database matches the URL. Again, this is intended functionality.

You make connections with editors any way you are able. Following them on social media websites, commenting on their blog, and in this case you'd be very interested in this:

http://www.wired.com/services/feedback/letterstoeditor

Of course, they probably won't appreciate spam. Only get in touch if you are genuinely sure what you want to promote is worth their time.

It's more of a proactive cause, than retro. Don't expect the editor to add in a link post-publishing unless it's critical.

The idea of promoting your website is not spam. Often the method you take to achieve this goal is.

Are you stuffing keywords into copy? That's spam. Are you building a large amount of long-tail exact-match links for those terms? Yeah, that's spammy too.

Honestly those numbers are too low. You should be focused on more broad keywords, and then if you're still concerned with local rankings by the time your domain is authoritative, rank for the city (cities?) where the business is located and nothing more.

A notice is just a notice. If it was a warning or error, that's when you start getting worried.

There is nothing wrong with the amount of links in your navigation. In fact, it's perfect. You can do a lot worse.. I've seen big names have well into the thousands of links per page because of navigation items. (This, too, is OK because of their higher authority)

So at this point you have nothing to worry about: notice or navigation-wise, anyway.

In my experience, yes, these are still valuable links. Although for BOTW I first check the subpage, because their entire directory isn't always indexed.

In general, any directory that has a good index rate, a good link profile, and visibility for the subpage you'll be listed in is an excellent purchase. It still takes some selective choice to weed out some bad eggs, but you'll still find great value from directories.

Again, this has been my experience (even recent!). I see Mr. Andrews' opinion but I'm not sure if that's just an opinion he's heard or experienced firsthand. Maybe he can chip in

Giving away free SEO is a bad idea. You should never really give anything substantial away unless it's a non-profit organization receiving the 'donation.' If you want to go this route, the most I would do is give a free consultation (these cost around $1k where I'm from, so it's good value) so you aren't bound to a project you aren't getting paid for.

My opinion would be that giving money or credit away is bland. Why not brand something and give away a lot of them? For $250 you could give away small branded items to many followers, and now suddenly many people have a reason to remember you.

Just some thoughts. Best of luck.

If someone wants the content, they will get it. You can't stop them without making your content uncrawlable or severely limiting the user experience.

As long as you are publishing the article first, I don't see a problem with the situation. Duplicated content is a problem, sure, but for those that duplicate it. Unless Google has a problem finding the original source, you're fine. This has happened in the past but is rare.

Have you noticed a measurable difference in a controlled study?

I think you're looking for Microsoft Excel

You might try an issue tracker like Redmine. Beyond that, no, sounds like you would want a custom tool, since there isn't enough demand for this kind of thing.

Check the subcategory you'd be listed in, personally. Does it have PR? Is it indexed? Any backlinks? Then yes, it's a good spend of money if the price isn't too bad.

Honestly I'd even be fine if it was only indexed and didn't have the other two qualifiers. Google really came down on directories, but only the SEO directories that only existed to boost rank. An easy giveaway was that all these directories used the same script and appeared to be the same markup, with minor differences.

The directory has good stats. I'd say go for it.

It's not a penalty, but rather an algorithm change.

I'd be interested in hearing about your link building / anchors. You came out on top in the end - broad keywords are better in the long run.

Are you able to change any of the current links with pertinent keywords to the inner page? That's a good first step. The real solution would  be link building to the inner page for relevant keywords. Adding a couple more links from the homepage to the inner page would also help if done correctly.

As a quick fix, you can do two things. The most logical would be to show a flyout advertisement-like block that links to the inner page from the homepage. This will make sure anyone looking for Arabic interpreting will at least be able to get converted in the mean time. The alternative would be to get referrer data and automatically redirect, assuming referrer data is available (it may not be, in the majority of cases).

It'd help if you gave the URL for more specific advice.

Your categories shouldn't go more than two levels deep if you can help it. Cabelas does a good job of this, considering they have many thousands of products (http://www.cabelas.com/)

Category pages should be paged in some sort of manner, showing 20 products by default. Any links from filtered navigation aren't bad, those are mostly ignored.

Cabelas has 458 links on their homepage, so it's not terrible to get in the higher range. It's just not recommended, because you are splitting up the authority so many different ways. In their case, Cabelas also has extremely high domain authority, so they can also get away with it more easily than smaller guys.

http://pingomatic.com/ is a very popular one. Keep in mind that many platforms such as WordPress do this automatically for you.

If you need a larger list, you should write your own script to do so. Pinging a list of URLs would be very easy to do. Ping O Matic should do the job, however.

As far as using a browser addon, why would you need that?

Correct! I show a teaser preview from the actual content on the homepage. The excerpt I write as a brief summary of what the article is about. Best of luck!

You don't have to do what I did. I have websites that don't do this, and they are just fine.

I'm not sure what your current setup is, but if it's not a lot of work for you, it's definitely worthwhile to do my method. It won't make or break you, but it'll help for sure.

I've never understood the argument that category pages should be noindexed. They have always been an excellent source of traffic for me, too.

It's said that it could be considered low quality content. If you treat your category pages as just another page in your website (a healthy category introduction/description does wonders) it can be a nexus for broad search terms.

As an example of where this works very well, I have one category in a computer networking blog I have about TCP/IP. It's part of a series that explains the protocol, and the category page essentially is the 'guide' page, linking to each step in the guide to learning TCP/IP. I have the excerpts used only in category pages, so each category page also has unique preview content for each post.

Your specific worry is that you have posts in multiple categories. The thing is, there won't be the same posts in every category page so there will be a mashup of content. Some duplicate content is not bad. In addition to the category description, you'll be fine so long as you don't have synonymous categories.

You're fine in keeping them indexed. I would think you are crazy if you did otherwise

You're essentially asking if sitewide links are OK. Yes, they are.

Marcus makes a good point: if any of the pages are poor in quality, you'll notice a decline in value. Your priority should be ensuring all of the pages are high in quality, or at the least noindexed. The problem with WPMU was that they can't control the quality, so they just took the links out. Sounds like you are in a position to keep the links, but do a bit of cleanup.

For my content websites I only show ads to users coming from search engines and direct traffic.

You really don't want to show ads to social media and Wikipedia referrals. Wikipedia has strict guidelines and will definitely remove external links with too many ads. Those coming from social networks (Stumbleupon, a big one) are less likely to read your content if it's laden with advertisements.

Yes, too many ads is strongly correlated with poor content. So don't overdo it even for your direct/Google traffic users.

It won't impact SEO. They add links via Javascript snippet after the DOM is loaded. Google will not index the links.

The service is more for putting in links in relevant spots, so that users will be more likely to click a link. $4.7M is quite a bit IMO, as this certainly isn't a new concept or product.

So in short, great for affiliate and advertising campaigns. Not relevant at all for SEO.

No. It wouldn't make sense for Google to penalize a website based on an IP address' C Block.

Can you post a screenshot of your Analytics? What's the time span these correlated drops occur? Could it be coincidence?

Yes this is a potentially significant problem. The easiest way to troubleshoot is to do the 'site:' command again, and go to the last page of results. You should be seeing pages that aren't in your sitemap. Very likely duplicated content.

If you are having a rough time troubleshooting, post a link and I'll be glad to take a peek.

The virtual host is what tells your web server (Apache) basic details about your website. Where to find it (path), where to store error logs, the domain name, and so forth.

Unfortunately you will need a developer to do something for you if you aren't too sure about how to go about the process, and especially if you aren't familiar with Linux platforms.

I'm not suggesting to get a hosting account for every domain -- addon domains are perfectly fine. Just make sure you are redirecting correctly (whether through .htaccess or through cPanel config). I had well over 100 addon domains many years ago when I still used cPanel

You should have both. Keep the paged navigation at top, but keep the infinite scroll. Now you have the best of both worlds.

Although, I don't think the infinite scroll would end up 'delinking' thousands of pages. How often do you see store.com/category/page/6 in results, anyway? If it's a popular term, it's going to be for the main category landing page.

Serving up different content to Google is always a bad idea unless you have a good reason. This problem doesn't qualify.

Paying with a social signal is a great idea, but only if you give alternative means of getting the product. Ask for a minimum donation price or the like/tweet/etc and visitors will think they are getting a bargain by helping out your social media campaign.

Obviously this doesn't work out too well if you aren't actually selling anything. In that case I'd argue against giving access to content for a social signal, as that is extremely annoying and many will stop visiting your site because of it.

So in short, make sure users will want to tweet/like in exchange.

I'm assuming you are using cPanel? You are able to enable redirection within your panel. (I haven't seen this issue outside of cPanel)

Ideally, you are right, you shouldn't have mirror content up. If you can edit the virtual hosts on the server directly that would be another option.

You won't shoot yourself in the foot. I saw Matt Cutts comment on this once in a video years ago. The reasoning is that if you have hundreds of domains all registered in your name and on the same server, with little value, then yes Google will likely flag that as suspicious.

I have around 10 large personal websites for years that do well on the same IP.

If you can get an IP address cheaply and easily, sure why not. You'll be fine either way, though.

You'll need to create the link on DOM load with Javascript. Google won't crawl a dynamically loaded DOM.

Pros

Shared hosting is cheap. Really cheap.

Shared hosting is manged - you don't need to be a trained systems admin.

Cons

You don't have much control over the server environment. Some applications won't run, others might not run to their best ability. Did you hear about how cool node.js is? Too bad, you probably can't sandbox it.

You have no control over fixing downtime. You put in a ticket and hope someone takes care of it soon.

The server will be slow when anyone on the server hits a peak in traffic.

Support is generally subpar for shared hosting providers.

If the host hasn't secured the server, there could be security issues where others on the server could get access to your root directory or database.

Scaling? Ha, more like, when you grow you have to find a new server to migrate to and hope the process is fast and smooth. (It probably won't be)

Inevitably, many cost effective hosts will not be in your time zone. Or those near yours.

Suggestion

Shared hosting at the major hosts isn't too bad. If you can't afford the money (remember, this is tax writeoff material) then stick with them.

If you actually need the performance and such, find a way to pay for the upgrade to a VPS or a dedicated. A good dedicated server will be $100/m. You'll need to know basic sys admin stuff, but just knowing Linux in general and being familiar with the services you run (apache, mysql, postfix, php) and how they are configured is suitable.

Also if you are using a panel like cPanel.. your goal should one day to admin your own server without it. You'll be intimidated at first, but quickly find that you are more quickly able to do anything you need over command line.

That's great! I just wanted to let you know I'd personally be wary of clicking a listing in Google with the word 'expert' in the title. I'd mention certification in the title, personally.

Not necessarily unproven.

The Google Webmaster Tools help article on URL structure still says to use dashes instead of underscores.

Matt Cutts' article from 2005 is dated, but also mentions to use dashes.

By definition an underscore is used to link words, and hyphens are used to join words or break them apart.

Why anyone would use underscores is beyond me, personally.

All seem wordy to me.

I personally don't like duplicating a phrase more than once in titles. The SEOmoz suggestion bot does say to include the keyword phrase in the title, but in your case I would shorten it to make sense somehow. Oasis and Allure of The Seas  or a variation would have my preference.

In addition I would work in a call to action into the title so users viewing the SERP feel compelled to click your listing. I would focus on discount related words, and also use consultant or planner in place of expert. Anyone that calls themselves an expert automatically trips my BS alarm.

Good luck

This has always been common for me over the past five years. It's definitely nothing new. I've never seen anyone from Google acknowledge this phenomenon or explain why it happens.

It's likely something technical with the algorithm that won't get explained. Perhaps the next time there is a QA session with Cutts one of us can ask him for a simple explanation

Perhaps the better solution is to check referrer data in the header of your new domain, and show a brief note at the top of the page if it's from your prior domain. This has the benefit of not annoying your visitors with a wait time (a big deal) and you don't have to count on a workaround being fine with Google.

Simple to do in any web language, let me know if you need help.

I'm not familiar with Joomla, but you should be figuring out how to get serverside caching enabled. Looks like they have their own implementation, so you probably don't need an extension.

If you aren't familiar with the code found on this page, you should probably hire someone qualified to do it.

An increase in monthly payment that high, for 2 gigs of RAM? Ouch.

To answer your question: yes better hardware always means better performance. But often the problem is with code or lack of optimization. Google Chrome has a great developer tool (Press F12!) that has a Network tab that logs requests and the time it took to serve them up. This can help troubleshoot some performance issues. Now switch to the Audits tab -- you'll get some more helpful tips to speed up your load time.

Also make sure you have some form of serverside caching enabled. Even the slowest of all servers can serve up a page in under a second with proper caching and a method of priming the cache.

If you are asking that question, the best way to get started is to look at what your competitors are doing. Find every backlink they have in Open Site Explorer (group by domain, external links only). Usually you can find a lot of gold, like awards and sponsorships you weren't aware of, that your business can apply for. Do this for every competitor.

Beyond that, link building is often done through link baiting. You can get some traction through a small amount of comment link building and directory listings at some of the major directories. Guest posting is probably the most actionable form of white-hat link building you can do.

Once you feel comfortable enough, you can start contacting related websites about adding a link to your website. This might come about as an incentive (a discount in your store, if you have one, as an example) or be paid outright. You can get these for free, I've found, if you engage the website owner in conversation first.

Here is a good post on contacting website owners:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/outreach-letters-for-link-building-real-examples-14902

Emphasis on keywords in the domain name was actually reduced. You definitely don't want to switch domains, as that alone comes with a lot of SEO problems.

I would instead suggest focusing on keywords that have less competition than 'fabric.' You can still focus on the keyword while doing other campaigns. You'll find as you build more links ranking for the tougher goals becomes much easier.

If you Google your brand name 'Beverlys' and look at the cached page, and then switch to text view, you see that a lot of your homepage content is links. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but the lack of content is working against you.

How are you handling link building? I didn't look at the OSE data, but just using PageRank as a quick metric, the #1 result for 'Fabric' has a PR8, while you are PR3. Look at OSE data for ideas on link building, as well as looking at the link building section of the SEOmoz blog.

Here is a particular link building with eCommerce article I enjoyed:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/creative-link-building-for-ecommerce-sites

As an addendum to that, focus on getting customers to build content for you with reviews. Decide how to create a community around your niche and build it. You would be surprised at how willing customers are to give you free content.

Mr. Thomas is correct - BMR was no better than any other article marketing service.

They didn't do spun content, but they let anything through the review process. They also had extremely poor support for creating an article with any type of media or custom styles -- they set themselves up for disaster. And their special 100-word  blog post service was by definition a grave SEO mistake.

I canceled my membership six months before they bit the dust because they ignored my suggestions to fix these simple items.

To add, I also would not call this a private network. Anyone with $67 could get into the network. That isn't very private is it?

So is article marketing dead? No. You just have to focus more on guest posting unique content and participating in networks that require quality content. Even Unique Article Wizard was hit but isn't completely dead. They still practice spun content though, so I'd suppose it's not exactly still a long term solution (although they got through panda just fine)

The owner of One Hour Backlinks made a comment a few days back about his service, recommending it as a supplement to your link building campaign. Maybe commenting on auto-approve blogs worked for him, but I'd strongly recommend staying away from this.

SEO is quickly becoming synonymous with marketing, building PR, and networking. Rand did a post on this not too long ago I believe.

I wouldn't slow the crawl rate. A high crawl rate is good so that Google can keep their index of your website current.

The better solution is to reconsider your hardware and networking setup. Do you know how you are being hosted? From my own experience with a website of that size, a load balancer on two decent dedicated servers should handle the load without problems. Google crawling your pages shouldn't create noticeable overhead on the right setup.

Yes. It should always be practice to noindex any vhost on the development and staging servers.

Not only will duplicate content harm them, but in one personal case of mine, the staging server was outranking the client for their own keywords! Obviously Google was confused and didn't know which page to show in SERPs. In turn this confuses visitors and leads to some angry customers.

Lastly, having open access to your staging server is a security risk for a number of reasons. It's not so serious that you need to require a login, but you should definitely keep staging sites out of SERPs to prevent others from getting easy access to them.

For comparison, the example I gave where the staging server outranked the client, the client had a great SEO campaign and the staging server had several insignificant links by accident. So the link building contest doesn't always apply in this case.

The first might not be ethical. You could try your tactics on a website you are associated with, and already is an established domain. As a personal example, I created a Magento extension to handle administrating category attributes. For my own case study I wanted to try out, I pointed links at the Magento Connect store that hosts the plugin page instead of a blog post or store page I developed. Some probably have ethical problems with this. One downside is you don't have access to Analytics, but tracking keywords shouldn't be tough.

The next is to grab up domains and start testing away. This is how I got started back in SEO around 6 years ago. Grab whoisguard to protect others from seeing domain registration information if you are worried. Personally, I wouldn't be. After all, who really cares that you are testing SEO out on a domain that no one cares about? (Although, I will say, your guinea pig websites often graduate testing status and become worthwhile websites without you intending)

Hope that helps. Maybe others have more ideas.

What Schema data are you referring to? Different microtags will apply to different pages. Generally, anywhere you can use a microtag, you should.

Is it the same article? If not, syndicate away. If so, personally I would only publish the author tag on my own website, and delay syndicating it until Google indexes it. Assuming of course, syndicating the exact article is mandatory, and unique content isn't possible.

Copy and pasted what, exactly? If it's specifications, that's perfectly fine. If you are really worried about it (I would not be, I have clients that post specifications like this), you could always include the specifications in a PDF and offer a link to that. That's less helpful to visitors though, and they are really who you should be targeting first.

If it's a product description, then yes, that's definitely no good. Write your own description. Include a staff review. This paired with the ability for users to review/comment on the product will give you enough unique content to shine.

Look at big e-retailers if you want to see how others are doing content. Cabelas has a Q & A section, for example. Show widgets like Amazon does ('Customers Who Bought This Also Bought..) and provide short descriptions for each product tile.

Include video content if you can, or relevant how-tos. MidwayUSA does a good job of having supporting content.

Use microtags for everything you possibly can.

That should be enough work to last you a year! Cheers.