I'd tend to agree. It won't harm you to go over, but since no one's going to see it, what's the point, generally. Now, if you feel thinks are being cut off arbitrarily (like the name of a product) and those keywords should be included somehow, fine - go over the limit. You can potentially rank for those terms and they may show up in other places. Some directories, social networks, etc. read the title tags, too.

If it's just ego, though, like a long brand name, I'd suggest letting it go. Unless you're a really big brand, it's not going to matter that much, and you're likely to rank for your brand anyway. If the brand is getting cut off, then name recognition won't help your CTR anyway.

Usability research definitely shows that people pay much more attention to the front of a headline, and even just the first two words, so even if a longer title "makes sense", people may not care or even see it. So, sometimes, I think we obsess over getting something just right that may not end up mattering that much, practically.

Personally, I'd pick a different battle with the client, and maybe just keep a few long that are critically important.

Yeah, I'm somewhere in the middle on this one - as Richard said, an off-topic domain with low authority isn't going to buy you much. If you want the domain for the name or something, great - but don't expect much SEO benefit. Google has gotten pretty savvy about ignoring this stuff, as buying and redirecting domains has been heavily abused. I doubt you'd be at much risk here, but you'd probably see very little benefit.

Google is officially supporting some emoticons. I talked to one big-brand SEO last week who has tested it with a fair degree of success. A couple of warnings:

(1) Testing the impact on one title tag is a fair amount of work, so it really has to be a high-impact SERP. This isn't something you want to spend days on across thousands of results.

(2) Make sure the character/symbol really is relevant. People focus on the first two words of a headline, and that emoticon may well take the place of one of those words, so make it count. I wouldn't do this just because you can.

(3) Not all characters render properly on all OSs and devices. Make sure to test.

Unfortunately, "can" and "will" are sometimes two different matters. Google is pretty CSS-savvy at this point, and I'm 98% sure they can index those images. If it's a background image, and depending on how it's set up, they may choose not to, but that's a bit trickier.

Weird question, but do you want it indexed, or not?

Asking around to see if there are any image-SEO experts who can provide a more data-driven answer.

I'm having trouble getting hotme.ca to rank for anything competitive - I can get it in #1 for "Toronto sex toys", but here you've got a strong local SEO impact, which could easily over-ride a lot of standard organic signals.

In most cases, it's not that they're hiding anything in their link profile, but one of a few explanations:

(1) Other sites have inflated PA/DA due to spammy links. We've just introduced spam scoring recently, but keep in mind that PA/DA are generally measures of overall ranking strength, and they don't account for quality/spam. In an industry where spammy is common, and especially when you've got tons of sites in the 20s and 30s, these numbers can leave out a lot.

(2) We're not crawling a lot of the weaker or lower-quality links. We tend to take a quality-over-quantity approach in MozScape, but if an entire industry relies on low-quality links, Google could be seeing more than we're seeing.

(3) Other factors are over-riding these link signals, as Massimiliano says. On-page is definitely one, technical issues is another, and local factors (as I mentioned above).

When someone is masking a link profile, what we usually see is that they're 301-redirecting other domains to that domain (and we aren't seeing those links directly). Typically, though we'd see those 301-redirects, and I'm not seeing that for hotme.ca.

Truth is, if they are doing something unethical, there's almost nothing you can do about it, unless it's flat-out illegal. In SEO, chasing your competitors bad behavior is almost always a completely waste of time - believe me, I've done it for clients (and it was a colossal waste of time and money). You have to focus on your site and what you can do.

So, I've got you around #43 for "adult sex toys" (just to pick one), and PinkCherry.ca around #11.

It's tough, because there are a ton of sites in the first few pages with DA/PAs in the 20s-40s. This is a tricky range that covers a lot of sites - it's not particularly strong, and it can be easily skewed by bad links or hurt by technical issues.

I don't see any evidence of an outright penalty situation. I see a lot of small technical issues and sub-optimal on-page (such as the internal linking mentioned on Massimiliano's comments) that could make a difference, but it's hard to say how much of a difference.

At first glance, I do tend to agree that the link profile is dubious. I see a ton of free directory links, for example. They range from ok to things that look outright spammy, like:

http://seolinkcloud.org/Society_/Sexuality/?p=15

Now, any one of these directories by itself is no big deal, but if you have a link profile built on this stuff and a lack of a strong core to offset it, you can end up seeing your site devalued. Unfortunately, when you're in that 30s range for DA, this is a common problem - the strong links aren't strong enough to offset the moderately spammy links.

The good news is that I think some small-scale link clean-up, a focus on stronger/better links, and some technical changes could actually go a long way for you. I'm not seeing a smoking gun here (and admittedly Q&A can't replace a full audit), but mostly a lot of small things that may be adding up to harm the site.

I'd tend to agree that the top menu is spreading link equity far and wide - I'm seeing something like 800 internal links from the home-page. It doesn't give Google any sense of hierarchy and could really be harming the top category pages from performing well.

This home-page size is also huge - I know that's not uncommon for an e-commerce site, but you've got something like 1MB just of Javascript and multiple 200K images. This isn't penalty-level stuff, but it can really weaken your ability to rank, and generally isn't great for conversion either. The giant scrolling banner images would be an easy thing to lose - I don't know of one UX/conversion person who thinks those are good for sales, and they just take a huge amount of code and load-time.

Could you provide a sample of a couple of phrases where you're popping up below these competitors?

In the case of Pink Cherry, there are many ways to operate a .com and .ca site without it looking like duplicate content to Google. If the sites are properly targeted, and Google doesn't think they're trying to "double dip", so to speak (rank two identical sites in one country), they can operate two sites in English without any penalties. There are risks and trade-offs, but it can certainly be done successfully.

Our data in OSE can lag a bit, but I'm concerned that you're seeing the same thing in Google. Is it possible to provide an example URL?

When you say "Google is still indexing the old URLs", can you tell me exactly how you're measuring that (I find "indexing" means a lot of things to a lot of different people). It's not uncommon for both the old and new version to be stuck in the index for a while, and that's not always a bad sign. It can be, but it might not be (I realize that's not terribly helpful).

Have you double-checked some of these redirects with a header checker? It's amazing how often a redirect is supposedly in place but isn't working properly, is producing multiple hops, etc.

I assume these are pretty deep in the site structure, so I don't think those "links" being reported are very powerful or important. Some people claim that, since PageRank is recursive, you don't want to cut off paths, but when the paths are deep I've rarely seen any evidence to support this. A big, bloated index full of thin content, especially content available on other sites, is a much bigger danger.

I would not recommend using both a NOINDEX and a rel=canonical on these pages. It's a mixed signal, and that can cause Google to ignore one or both signals (and at their choosing, not yours). I think NOINDEX is fine here. I've built structures like this for things like event websites (where we index the main event but NOINDEX all of the cities/dates, because they change so often) and have never seen any major issues. Actually, in one notable case, even before Panda came along, the site's rankings improved measurably.

Blocked pages are generally not going to pass internal link equity, but the impact of this depends a lot on your site structure. If these were deep pages at the end of paths and your site nav covers major/ranking pages, it shouldn't matter too much. If these pages were in the middle of paths, you could be causing serious problems.

There's also the question of whether these pages themselves (the blocked ones) were getting inbound links or were themselves ranking for some of these terms.

Unfortunately, at this scope, it's really hard to speak in generalities. Can you give us a sense of what these pages are and why they were blocked? How large is the site overall?

Glad you got it sorted out. If you're 301-redirecting a lot of domains, I'd suggest doing it gradually or maybe holding off on the lowest-quality domains. Google can see a massive set of redirects as a bit of a red flag (too many people have bought up cheap domains and 301-redirected to consolidate the link equity). If the domains are really all closely related or if you're only talking about a handful (<5) then it's probably not a big issue.

Google seems to be indexing 30-ish pages, but when I look at the cached home-page, I'm actually seeing the home-page of http://rfprototype.com/. Did you recently change domains or 301-redirect the old site? The cache data is around Christmas (after the original question was posted), so I think we're missing part of the puzzle here.

I can't imagine why any CMS would be designed that way or, why, from a coding standpoint, it would be hard to remove. I try not to second-guess third-party providers (because I've been in their shoes), but that sounds like borderline BS to me. "Can't fix it" is far too often "Don't want to fix it".

My gut feeling is that Google will ignore a standard port 80, and will only index the port if it's non-default or if the entire site (including internal links) is explicitly using the port. By adding that canonical, though, you're definitely sending a mixed signal, and there is risk. I've never seen this actual situation in play, so I can only speculate.

Is it possible to remove the canonical tags on these pages and using 301-redirects or some other approach? Unfortunately, a lot of this depends on how the pages actually resolve and what other signals are in play. It's a bit tough to tell without looking at the specific site.

Yeah, I'd have to concur - all the evidence and case studies I've seen suggest that rel=canonical almost always passes authority (link equity). There are exceptions, but honestly, there are exceptions with 301s, too.

I think the biggest difference, practically, is the impact on human visitors. 301-redirects take people to a new page, whereas canonical tags don't.