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Back in March 2011 this conversation happened. Rand:    You don't want rel=canonicals. Duane:    Only end state URL. That's the only thing I want in a sitemap.xml. We have a very tight threshold on how clean your sitemap needs to be. When people are learning about how to build sitemaps, it's really critical that they understand that this isn't something that you do once and forget about. This is an ongoing maintenance item, and it has a big impact on how Bing views your website. What we want is end state URLs and we want hyper-clean. We want only a couple of percentage points of error. Is this the same with Google?

We were ranking on page 2 and number 4 for the key word motorcycle tires.  Google was ranking our home page jakewilson.com; however, we have been adding new content to our site and doing some internal linking.  We pointed some links about motorcycle tires to http://www.jakewilson.com/cl/52/Motorcycle-Tires and now that page ranks but on page 3 not 2.  Any thoughts?

We are trying to rank for the key word Motorcycle Parts.  We have moved up to page 2 over the past couple months; however, google is ranking our home page not our http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/s/49/61/Motorcycle-Parts page that is for motorcycle parts.  We are working on internal linking to help point the right signals too.  Any other thoughts?  ( we have new content written to put in as well we just have to wait for an issue to be fixed before we can put it in)

We are trying to figure out why google is ranking the wrong page for the key word motorcycle tires.  We have a few ideas but are not sure yet.  If you do a search for Motorcycle Tires you will see site on page 2 or top of 3; however, the page will be going to our dirt bike tires page (http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/t/44/86/176/742/Dirt-Bike-Tires-All) not our Motorcycle page (http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/t/49/-/181/750/Motorcycle-Tires-All) any thoughts? We think we know why but want others opinions too.

On our site we have some similar pages for example in our parts page we have the link to all the electrical parts you can see here http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/53/160/Electrical  and we have a very similar page going from our accessories page to electrical here http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/72/221/Electrical  We are thinking about putting rel="canonical" from the accessories electrical page to the parts one.  We would do this for several pages not just this one. Thoughts???

I have read some like http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mission-imposserpble-establishing-clickthrough-rates  This is over a year old now and http://www.marketingprofs.com/chirp/2012/8504/paid-vs-organic-search-are-ppc-ads-winning-the-google-click-wars-infographic Please let me know of some other good studies that have been done that show how the CTR continue to go down on commercial terms for most searches cause google is putting in more stuff.

We are having an issue with getting Google to rank the page we want.  To have this page http://www.jakewilson.com/c/52/-/346/Cruiser-Motorcycle-Tires rank for the key word Cruiser Motorcycle Tires; however, this page http://www.jakewilson.com/t/52/-/343/752/Cruiser-Motorcycle-Tires is ranking instead and it has less links and page authority according to site explorer and it is farther down in the hierarchy.   I am wondering if google just likes pages that have actual products on them instead of a page leading to the page with all the products. Thoughts?

We are submitting a press release today for a contest we are doing and it is actually news worth compared to a lot of things on PR web.  Our question is PRweb.com still worth using?   If we use them should we put an anchor text in it?  We have one link to our home page and one to the contest page and we were going to have one link to a different page.  But will linking to the third page with an anchor text be to much?

I recently started working here and I have noticed that google is ranking some pages over other for the main key word. Example: We are ranking on page one for ATV tires for this url http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/t/43/81/165/723/ATV-Tires-All I thought google would pick http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/81/165/ATV-Tires since it is higher up in the folders. I Have a couple reasons why the are picking the other one.  Mostly from link signals from one other site and footer link..  Any other thoughts. If we want google to rank the second url instead what would you suggest?

Right now our site is using ajax and we need to change it so all 200+ products will get crawled not just the first 52 on page first page.  We are looking at doing the rel=next/ rel=previous or doing it so we have a link going to the View all product page.  Or maybe doing the rel=next/ previous and using the canonical to point to the view all etc.  I have read http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663744 and http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html about  it. Now we are trying to figure out what is the best option.  Thought. Here is our site. http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/t/49/-/181/750/Motorcycle-Tires-All  Also if we do not do the rel=next just make the view all items as a link that google can crawl is there a way to still have our current url be the one for view all items but only show 52 item unless the click view all items and not have it look like cloaking? Hope this made sense.

I know it is important to fix server errors.  We are trying to figure out how important because after our last build we have over 19,646 of them and since google only gives us a 1000 at a time the fastest way to tell them we have fixed them all is to use the api etc which will take time.   WE are trying to decide is it more important to fix all these errors right now or focus on other issues and fix these errors when we have time, they are mostly ajax errors.  Could this hurt our rankings?  Any thoughts would be great!

I just started working at this company last month.  We started to add new content to pages like http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/t/49/-/181/1137/Bridgestone-Motorcycle-Tires.   This is their main site.  Then i realized it also put the new content on their sister site http://www.jakewilson.com/t/52/-/343/1137/Bridgestone-Motorcycle-Tires.    the first site is the main site and I think will get credit for the unique new content.  The second one I do not think will get credit and will more than likely be counted as duplicate content.  We are changing this so it will no longer be the same.  However, I am curious to see ways people think we could fix this issues?  Also is it effecting both sits for just the second one?

We are looking into getting the google Trusted badge.  We meet the requirements and now just deciding if it is worth the time to do it now or later.  Has anyone noticed a difference in your organic rankings or PLAs with it.  What about conversion rates?   Any input would be great!

We have an eCommerce site.  We have noticed several of our competitors are moving their text to the top of the page.  How much of a difference to you think it makes in googles eyes to have the text at the top above the products vs bellow them?  Here is an example of how one of them moved the text to the top http://www.motorcycle-superstore.com/119/MNGR/Motorcycle-Jackets.aspx

We recently did a build to our site and after the build the build one of the softwares that we are using changed.  This caused our server errors to go into the thousands.  right now google webmaster tools gave us a list of top 1,000 pages with errors and we fixed them all is there a way to see the rest of the errors?

If you look at this page http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/t/49/61/185/730/Batteries.  You will see we have a vehicle filter on it.  Right now  you only see a picture of a battery and some bad text that needs to be updated ( We just hired a copywriter!).  Our question is when google crawls this site will thy just see this or will they see all the products that appear after you pick a "machine type"  "make" "model" and "year"  Any help would be great.  Right now we think it just sees this main page how we have set things up; however, we know that the crawler is also crawling some ajax.  We just want to be sure of things.

We have collected a lot of reviews and we want to use them on our Categories pages. We are going to be updating the top 6 reviews per categories every 4 days. There will be another page to see all of the reviews. Is there any advantage to have the reviews static for 1 or 2 weeks vs. having unique new ones pulled from the data base every time the page is refreshed? We know there is an advantage if we keep them on the page forever with long tail; however, we have created a new page with all of the reviews they can go to.

We have collected a lot of reviews and we want to use them on our Categories pages.  We are going to be updating the top 6 reviews per categories every 4 days. There will be another page to see all of the reviews.  Is there any advantage to have the reviews static for 1 or 2 weeks vs. having unique new ones pulled from the data base every time the page is refreshed?  We know there is an advantage if we keep them on the page forever with long tail; however, we have created a new page with all of the reviews they can go to.

After reading this article http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/anchor-text it talks about how only one link per page counts if they are going to the same page.  This is what i had learned in the past; however, my understanding was if it was a in the main navigation as a child or grandchild or in the side navigation and then in the main body text, the link in the main body would count/ be held higher than the other options.

I started working here recently, they said the footer links were to help with navigation of their most popular products.  I am curious after reading http://www.seomoz.org/blog/internal-linking-strategies-for-2012-and-beyond  if having these footer links could hurt the ranking of those key words after the penguin update.  I am looking more into the analytics, and have not seen a negative impact yet.

We trying to find out if there is anything to make it so google does not keep returning errors cuase of our ajax urls.  Is there any other option besides creating it all in a HTML format for google to read? Any tips or help would be great!

We just did a build to our site and our server erros went up to over 9,500.  After looking into it, it seems like google is crawling the ajax urls and coming back with the errors.  Here is one example http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/productDetail.do?navType=type&vehicleId=1423&webTypeId=68&navTitle=Drive&webCatId=9&prodFamilyId=29660 If you know of any good articles on this please send them my way.

I have two examples below where we want it to rank for the targeted page but google picked another page to rank instead.  This is happening a lot on this site I just recently started to work on. Example 1 Googles Choice for key word Motorcycle Tires: http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/cl/50/Tires-and-Wheels What we want Google to choice for Motorcycle Tires: http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/49/-/181/Motorcycle-Tires Other pages about Motorcycle tires: http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/d/12/Motorcycle-Tires We even used the rel="canonical" for this url to point to our target page.  http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/50/-/181/Motorcycle-Tires Example 2 ATV Tires We want this page to rank http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/81/165/ATV-Tires however google has decided to rank http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/t/43/81/165/723/ATV-Tires-All that is acutally one folder under where we want it.

This is our main Motorcycle Parts page.  In my opinion there are to many links on this page.  They have put links to all the top brands after products. Do you think having all these links could be hurting our rankings/ ability for google to crawl the site efficiently?  The links are good for navigation, I just think there are way to many there like over 200. Here is the page you can see what i am talking about http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/s/49/61/Motorcycle-Parts

I am wondering what is the best way to show google that there is duplicate content on the page.  for example on our product pages they are unique content except we give the same guarantee and promise on every product providing some duplicate content.  What is the best way to fix this issue?

I just started working here the other week and one of the big issue is that a lot of the product pages are not getting index in google.  We have an xml.gz site map they submitted a long time ago.  My guess is it might be something with not enough content on the pages?   Here are a few example of pages that are not getting index in google. http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/p/43/-/439/716/-/33097/Alpinestars-Dual-Motorcycle-Gloves http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/p/47/-/201/803/-/28948/Camelbak-Blowfish-2013 http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/p/46/-/203/836/-/6996/MSR-Head-Case http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/p/44/54/208/764/80/1220/Galfer-Brake-Pad-Sintered-Metal There are 100's that are not indexed just trying to figure out what we need to do! We are working on new content to them all  but we have over 5000 products so it will take a long time.  We also have the reviews on the pages and are looking at starting a Q&A on page to help get more unique content.