Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you, Everett,

Nice to see you posting in Q&A.

Look forward to seeing you regularly.

Google knows how to separate the template of the site from the content.   So you have nothing to worry about if most of the code on your pages is the same code that is used on every other page.

I looked at your two sample pages and saw a few things that would concern me...

This page had very little content.  If you have lots of pages with such a tiny amount of content you could have Panda problems.

http://www.jumpstart.com/common/find-easter-eggs

You also have pages like this....

http://www.jumpstart.com/common/recognize-the-rs-view

These have very little content.

I have a site with lots of printable content that is mainly images placed in .pdf documents to control the scale of the printing and the look of the printed page.  The pages used to present them to visitors and the pdf documents were all thin content and my site had a Panda problem.   That cause the rankings of every page on the site to fall and really damaged my traffic.  I solved that by noindexing the html pages and applying rel=canonical to the pdf files using .htacess.

I can't say if this will happen to you but I would be uncomfortable if I had a site with such little content on its pages.

If a host is not delivering super service.  Leave them.  Right away.

Slow service can reduce visitor interest in your website.

That will tank your sales.

Slow service can compromise spidering.

That can cause ranking problems.

Don't work your ass off on your website and tolerate this type of service.

If it costs a few bucks more per month so what... look what you are losing.

A host that has lots of important websites as their customers.  Websites that will move if they are not getting fantastic delivery.

Just sayin'....

Some hosts who offer unlimited bandwidth and unlimited other stuff often find ways to throttle your success by limiting your number of database connections, users online or some other BS metric.

Not sayin' that is what is happening to you here but sayin' that I learned my lesson to host my websites where they are going to charge me for all of the resources that I use.  That way they win when I succeed and not they become defensive when I succeed.

Call 'em up and ask them what's going on?  Bug them.  Tell them that you want a reason why it is so slow.

You work hard to make your site a success.  Don't settle for poor hosting.

The way that search engines have treated subdomains has changed repeatedly over time.  The way that they treat a folder has been much more consistent.

Also, in that video did Matt Cutts specifically state that if you divide your site between a subdomain and a root domain will the power of your site be the same as if they were united?

There are a lot of domains on the web that have many subdomains that are owned by various people.  The ranking power of subdomain A does not influence the ranking of subdomain B on these sites.

Come back in two or three months after you remove the pages and let us know if anything happened.

If this was my site I would place that form under a tab.

If you get rid of the review/ratings page and the email to friend page that will decrease the size of your site by a lot of pages.  That will give you a more compact site with a much higher content value per page.

If I dumped pages like these from one of my sites I would be hoping to see my rankings slowly climb a little higher.

I can't guarantee that... It is what I would do myself and what I would hope the result would be.

Good luck if you try it.  I think that there is upside here and I think that the downside is about zero.

My URL structure would be based upon the composition of my potential content library....  and the composition of my content library would be determined by my expertise and the topics that I believe provide value to my business.

I think that you might be giving way way too much credit to the importance of keywords in a URL and the influence that a lot of pages might have in improving your rankings.

I think that URL keywords and pagecount are tiny tiny factors.

...This section will have several hundred 'personal injury' articles at launch, with 100+ added each month by writers.).

If you are launching a content development program based upon these assumptions you might be really wasting your money.   And when I hear you are going to be adding hundreds of articles per month I think that you are either paying an awful lot of money if you are buying quality or you are buying a lot of BS articles.

Rather than blather out a hundred BS articles a month, I would rather have three kickass articles per month that will be shared, emailed and linked to.  Depending upon the market you are attacking I might raise the number to something higher than three... but I use three to contrast quality with the quantity you propose.

I don't know why your rankings dropped but I think that you competitors have better title tags....

Avalon Pontoon Boats | Highest quality Luxury, High Performance

Pontoon Boat - Get great deals for Pontoon Boats on eBay!

Your title tag is sleepy.

You might get more clickthroughs if you change it.

I think what EGOL means is that switching the domain to your hosting provider means you loose control of certain things within that domain which can be very important to seo. What could be a good compromise here is that you look at putting the shopping cart within a folder on the domain...

That is it.  Some shopping systems require you to place all of your content into their system - your articles, your homepage, everything.

Then they can charge you high fees on all of your bandwidth, limit your ability to install software such as wordpress, use htaccess, have full and complete control over the format of your pages, have formats that require a lot more time to manage, not allow you to run scripts in the cgi-bin, not allow chron jobs.

They all do not have all of these problems.  But some are really limiting and I would not want to marry into something that will limit my options.

I would look for a very flexible cart that allows you to have full control over the entire domain.  Confining cart activities in a single folder would not be bad, but I still think that is limiting because I would like to have the ability to place "buy buttons" on any page anywhere within the site - even on pdfs if I want them there.

Lots of people come to these forums saying that they can't do one thing or another because of their shopping cart.

The best guest authors are generally people who have a message to get out or a story to tell.  They provide the best content and the message/story is their sole motivation.  They want it on your  site for visibility, nothing more.  They contact you personally and not through a PR company, publicist, marketing group or other type of promoter.

I have read arguments that putting your cart within a sub domain is not a good idea because any clout of the pre-existing domain will not be shared with the  sub domain; that they will be treated as two separate sites.

I agree with this.  All of my sites are done this way.

I have also read that using a sub domain is a good idea being that the content focus of the main domain (marketing and blogs) is different form the focus of the sub domain (product sales), and that the two components would benefit form earning their own rankings undiluted by the other.

This is BS from an SEO viewpoint.  Although some snooty marketing people might recommend it.

You can have unique banners for the store and promote it in tasteful ways that make this distinction for your  visitors.

It's not about how it is hosted (subdomain vs folders)... it's how your navigation presents it to visitors and search engines.

And, I have also read that search engines are getting good at being able to deduce that an eCommerce sub domain is legitimate extension of a content intensive main domain, and that they treat the two components as a combined whole.

Where are you reading this stuff?

Have the cart as a sub domain of my main site, or move my existing domain name to be hosted by the cart provider...

The day that my sites get hosted by a shopping cart provider is a day that you can bet big money that I am dead and under.

I want my pages to be finely crafted arrows.  I don't know if I am going to get that from a shopping cart system.

Someday you will probably decide to leave that shopping cart provider... it will be a lot easier to make that decision if you are not completely married to them.

That's good.  Just tossing out a possibility.

My understanding is that pagerank flows into every link on a page.  If the page has a nofollow link then the pagerank into that page is lost.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVOOB_Q0MZY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl0MBeKDXLY

These pages are not needed for the visitor either.  One click less if the form is placed under the review/ratings tab that leads to them.

Thanks.

If people don't see what they want immediately after landing then they will leave.  If they have to think they will leave.  And, I am pretty sure that will drop your rankings.

Let's say that you do have superior backlinks but your site bounces traffic because it has a busy format or people don't "get it" or the landing page does not provide what the visitor is expecting.

Could that be the case?

Could a design change result in a spectacular increase in user engagement and cause more people to use domain queries to arrive at your site - because they know that YOU have what they want.

Every day I work to produce new content that will expand my keyword reach.  Every day.

That would evaporate a lot of pagerank.

I would place the form under a tab to reduce that loss.

Ask the people who answer the telephone at the business office of this website.  They usually know the crazy ways that people ask for the product and the many alternative names used for them.

I have a blog with over 150 active categories plus my persistent navigation on top of that - about 70 more links and outlinks in each of about 30 blog posts on every page.  It ranks great.  Great.  But it is a very healthy site with lots of spider activity.

Now, if you have a site with a huge number of links on the page, a huge number of pages and this site has very little power - then you are going to have a problem.  (big ecommerce sites come to mind)

A few extra links on a healthy site should not be a problem.  Check to see if your deep pages are getting into the index, staying in the index and have competitive strength.  If that checks out then don't worry.

These kinds of questions are not easy - even if you work on the site every day, know the content, know the traffic and know the business objects and understand them completely.

I struggle with this type of question for a site that I have worked on several hours per day for the past 8 years and have written almost all of the content and determined the current URL structure.

If you don't understand what you have, how people use it, how you make money from it and what you want to make it into it would be very easy to bolt a chicken coop onto the West Wing of the White House.

Have  you drawn a map of what you have and what you want it to be?

Then ask, will it work for the visitor and the webmaster and the bottom line?

I think that Keri is talking about nice advertorial that gets loaded with a ton of spammy links.

It's not about the quality of the content.  It's what people are trying to use it for.  (Getting your site to vote for their site in ways that Google doesn't approve.)

Once you leave Moz there is a lot of bad advice out there.

Don't do this stuff.

''How many word'' to included in the content.

As few as possible if you want to be cheap and don't care about success.

As many as it takes to do a good job at explaining the subject matter if you want to have a chance at success.

My retail site has a blog on the same domain.

I write how to use products, how to select them, how to maintain them.  Those pages link to the relevant product pages and the product pages link to relevant blog pages.

The blog pulls traffic from the SERPs and some of that traffic goes to the product page and buys something.

I value the blog posts based upon the number of conversions that they produce.  When I see something that works I make similar posts.

If I had a site with thousands orphaned pages I would be attacking them with an ax in both hands.  If they serve no purpose they would have been redirected the same day they were orphaned.

Google can have a really long memory for orphaned pages - years for some that I have seen.  So if these pages are thin content, or duplicate content I think that they would be putting a drag on your site if they are not causing a Panda problem.

If possible, I would also be putting links in the pdf documents that point to the homepage or a more relevant page of the website.  Then any linkjuice that flows into them from your site or from other sites is put to good use.  For pdfs that you don't own and can't edit I would be looking for a way to provide the same information where linkjuice can flow back.

I would also be after those review form pages, getting rid of them for a form on the product page under a tab.  Those pages are linkjuice sinks, trivial content, duplicate content.  I would get  rid of them ASAP.

Here is an example

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/product/ProductRatingRequest.jsp?product=ANH-GL2400-24

That's what I see in a quick look.

I own a lot of EMDs and the keywords that they represent range from very easy to extremely difficult.

EMDs will still rank extremely well if you have a nicely optimized website with a few pages that is in the google index and the level of competition is very low.  You don't need a lot of links, you just need to get it in the index.  Lots of people say that this does not work in google any more but I can tell you for a fact that it does.  I have #1 rankings with sites like this.

This will work until some competition arrives.  When competition arrives the value of the EMD is tiny compared to the value of links and other assets.  Then you have to earn your rankings just like any other website.

Should you use EMDs as a business model?  Probably not.  If you have a website of reasonable strength you can simply add a nicely optimized page to it and quickly rank above an EMD in a low-competition SERP.   I do it to EMD competitors all of the time.  

I see lots of people coming into forums crying... "That spammer with an EMD is beating me  Wah!"   I chuckle at these because I have EMDs that get their asses kicked all of the time.   If an EMD is above you that webmaster has probably earned it unless there is no competition in your SERP and you have a website with zero strength.  Get off of your butt and get working.  You don't deserve to rank.  The EMD is a tiny advantage, if you are pissed off about it then just call the guy up and offer to buy it from him.   Then, a week after you take over the domain another weak site will move above you and you will be cryin' again.

Thanks,  most bloggers quit after less than a dozen posts.

I have started and abandoned a few blogs myself... but the good one is still out there and doing nicely.

If you have six different people you will have six different styles and six different levels of motivation and six different quality standards.

These might not mix well.

So, at least for the start I would put them on their own blog and they can support one another by being a commenting/discussing audience (it is really hard to get this type of audience and such an audience can do a lot to help a blog attract a following).

The lesson that they will get out of this is that different topics have different levels of success, different styles have different levels of success and they will have six opportunities to learn instead of just one.

The day that one of them decides... "I want to start over again"... then that is the day you have personal growth.

You can do it yourself or hire someone who will do a good job.

Who does the writing is less important than the quality of the description, its ability to convert the buyer and its viability in the search engines.

I write all of my own descriptions... but I am really familiar with what I sell and would not trust it to anybody else.

The guy who rewrites everything to produce substantive content will have a nice advantage on everyone who is using the standard descriptions.

If you want the advantage you do the work.

I might not advertise.  I would go looking for him/her.  I found an awesome author writing a personal blog in my topic area.  I got to see that the person was a prolific writer of very high quality material with great photos and style.  The articles were placed on my website where they would yield the highest value.

I ran an ad on Craig's list for a person who held a degree in English with honors and newsy writing experience.  I was really surprised by who applied.

Good luck.

Take your pick.

When you put these pages on the web they might be there for years so the small amount of time needed to make a decision can payback many times over with increased traffic and increased conversions.

I am trying to advice on best practices to maximize your return, not give you quick and easy.

whether most common or least common would be better for SEO

I use a lot more thought than picking the most common or the least.  I consider the ones that best represent my product, the ones that I think people are searching for and the ones that I think will elicit clicks.

I also consider the power of my site and how I think it will rank against competitors for those specific keywords.

The google keyword tool is good for prospecting  but when you combine it with a little knowledge of people, search engines, the power of your site, and your competitors you can get better performance.

Determine the exact date of your traffic drop if possible.  If your traffic tanked on a specific date that is valuable information.

You might have a Panda problem which is from thin content or duplicate content.

You might have a Penguin problem from links that Google does not like.

There are other penalties that could have hit your site.

I would go here.. take the quiz and see if you can determine if it was Panda, Penguin or something else.  http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/

If this is an important site I would hire someone who knows how to diagnose and recover penalized sites.

We are telling you that we think you will make a lot more money with more knowledge.

We can't teach you the full scope of SEO in a forum.  And we don't want to give specific advice on a site when we are guessing.

So, you can improve your knowledge or get assistance and probably make a lot more money.  Or you can be satisfied with making less money.

I hope that this isn't a client site.

How big are these mega menus?

If you have thousands of links then you better cut 'em back.

If you have a couple hundred on a powerful site that has great rankings and spider flow then I would not worry about it.

I have seen those warnings for my site.  According to them my site has way to many links but I am happy with it and the site does great.

You are rebuilding a site and that is a great time to kick your SEO up a notch and make a lot more money.  That is how it should be done.

You seem to be putting a lot of work into keywords and meta tags but I am not sure that you are focusing on the right things.

Have you considered spending a nice block of time improving your knowledge of SEO before making this move or hiring a pro to map out the changes that will kick the performance up nicely?

That's what I would do.  I often get advice from other SEOs before making big moves.  It pays.

I would be a bit cautious.

If your domains were just a couple years old I would say "go for it".  However, I had an EMD that was established in the SERPs and held #1 for ten years.  I moved it to a better domain with a 301 redirect and lost the #1 ranking.  This was a site with an established audience and was getting a few thousand domain queries per month.

I didn't get the #1 back until the new domain was recognized and accepted by its audience and again getting a few thousand domain queries per month.

In my opinion, the more established your domain the greater the risk of the move.

Your situation is a bit difference since you will be uniting two sites and they might each bring assets to the merger.  If there is very little overlap between their link profiles you might gain a lot by merging.  But if there is a lot of link overlap then you merge them and the new site is not much stronger than either of them as freestanding sites.

I place a lot of value on the mindset of the webmaster because that determines how hard you are willing to fight.  If you are doing this as an offensive move and have a plan for big promotion of this new combined domain then I would say that this might work out for you.

However, if you are doing this as a defensive move because you are getting your ass kicked everywhere, I'd say that the writing is on the wall for the future and you better get to work competing against your enemy.

I am not using the method.  I would rather spend the time creating an asset for my website.

I understand your concern.

If I had the domain for a similar size town in the USA where I lived I would give it a shot.  In addition to directory pages I would have a lot of local content and it would grow over time.

Maybe they were hit by Panda or Penguin or another penalty.

Lots of sites have been hit in the past couple of years.

I would have the site reviewed by someone who knows a lot about those types of penalties if you are going to pay serious money for the domain.

And... lots of sites have PR that drop after the domain is sold and the former owner takes down his links.

Nice domain.

Have you thought about  turning the domain into a local directory with pages targeting the various types of service businesses, stores, churches, schools, sports, etc. in your area.

Your own page could be at huddersfield.com/web-design/

If you can do that and produce good rankings for the business niches then those store, service, church, sports, etc. pages would be a great launching pad for your clients.

You might also be able to sell advertising on the site.   And, the site would be great advertising for your biz.

How about for software hosting?

I would write the Software Hosting Bible.   Kickass better than anything anybody anywhere has already done.  That would help educate noobs and bring them back to your website.  Then who will they think of for hosting.  Every page of that Bible would compete in the SERPs for relevant queries and you would have house ads on every page that lead visitors to your signup.

Before you invest in a product you could get some information.

Lots of people post generic description of products / services here and members will provide their opinions about them.   We will tell you if the box is full of crap or gold.

I think that the methods will vary depending upon your product.

For blankets and pillows you have probably heard stories, usually about kids, that attest to their attachment to a blanket or pillow.  If you could get a nice group of those stories that would be a start.  Ask people to contribute their favorite story... if they contribute they will share it.  Offer a prize for the ten best stories that the author gives you permission to publish.  Kids stories and pet stories get shared like crazy on FB.

Google "I love my blanket" and similar searches "favorite blanket"  to start gathering ideas.

I am fighting for rankings in a very competitive vertical.

OK.... then why are you  fighting for metrics?    Take the fight directly to your competitors.  What can you do that will have a direct and immediate impact against them?

Can you attack them with superior content?

What do people in your niche need to know that nobody is talking about?    What are the misconceptions?   Where is the beef?

I am also starting an aggressive initiative to blog more and try to attract links through guest posting and HARO (Hep A Reporter Out).

Why do this?   Take the fight on your domain and direct it straight against your competitors.  Get into their SERPs with something competitive.  Get into SERPs that they have ignored with something that will pull traffic.

Why create content that will put these guest blog sites into your SERPs as competitors.  Build assets for your own domain with that same effort.

So, I assumed finding small gains in DA could be beneficial to the site's rankings and traffic

Attack things that will directly improve your rankings and traffic.  Attack the root, not the numbers.

How can you improve your website?  Make a list of actionables that you can build to impress your visitors.

I was wondering if our very low PA pages are bringing the overall DA down?

Do something about those pages.  Improve them.  Get them into the fight against your competitors in a meaningful way.