If those pages listed in the footer are really important then I would feature them on the homepage with a nice juicy image and enthusiastic description.

Nobody looks at links in the footer.  If these pages merit attention then give it to them properly.

Your title tags will appear as a clickable link in the google search results.

That title should clearly describe the contents of the page that the visitor will see upon clicking.

If you do that and have duplicate title tags then there is probably a good justification for combining those pages.

Don't forget to optimize for some kitchen, wood species,  photos, colors, etc. terms.  The diversity of queries for this type of traffic is enormous.

On a small site, I attack my most important keyword with at least two pages.  My homepage is optimized for this keyword and an interior page is optimized for that keyword.

As you suspect, the homepage is often the most powerful page on the site and can often rank better than an interior page if optimized for it.

I agree with you.  That the homepage might do well if optimized.

Try it and see what happens.

Good luck.

I see quite a bit of flux in the Google.com SERPs that I watch closely.  In retail areas I attribute some of it to the expiration of paid links for the Christmas buying season.  But, overall there is a lot of flux.

Keep in mind that Google is always running test algos and we could be seeing a lot of them.

Everyone knows that google is experimenting with their Panda updates.  Just recently they preached at free hosting to dump spammy sites.  I speculate that they are struggling with their arrows coming down on scrapers and quality which are difficult for their algo to separate.

If that message arrived in my inbox I would delete it.

Read their email... it does not say exactly how they will use your content.

Go to their website.  They do not say exactly how they will use your content.  They say nothing but yada yada yada yada.

What is this  "module" on your website going to be doing?

No way!

Are you preparing this for page optimization or adwords targeting?

btw.... oilfield is two words....

...and nobody is searchin' for classifieds.... maybe you want to consider terms that target a commodity - for example:  "oil field supplies" or "drilling equipment"

The general answer is to do a 301 redirect.

I have a lot of temporary pages.  I delete the files and do a 301 redirects to a closely related page - or if none available to the homepage.

Since I have lots of temporary pages I place the redirect in the .htaccess file of the folder that contains the page instead of in my root .htaccess.  That keeps the main .htaccess uncluttered with temp pages.  I also plan my creation of temporary pages so that entire folders eventually go extinct.   I believe that saves processing time for lots of visitors.

If I inherited these sites and didn't have a boss to answer to I would deindex all of them but one intentionally.

I would then redirect them all to the main site.

"and so they want to get something out of them now."

ha... I would allow them to expire and use the savings to buy beer.   Savings is what you will get out of them IMO.

ha ha... thanks for the laugh.

Competition for that phrase is really really low.  If you have any kind of power in your site you should be able to rank for it.  Plus, if you are located in Virginia and your searcher is there too, that will make it even easier to rank for these terms.

So, it's not worth sounding like a hillbilly to every person who visits your site, just to contrive sentences that put these words in the order of a query that might be used once in a blue moon.

I would not expect any link value from this.

This is advertising that you do for traffic and branding.  Not for links.

Directly to your site from the banner.  I would insist on this and refuse if they will not do it.

I believe that the answer to your question depends upon the type and amount of information that you have for each question.

1. This method would be the best if you have lots of content for each question.  I use this method when I have several hundred words and a couple images for each question.

2. This method is good if you have lots of very short answers - too short to justify a separate page for each answer.

3. This method is very good if you have started with #2 and have so many questions that you can make separate pages by category.

Bottom line... Use #1 if you have lots of content.... or... start with #2 then go to #3 when you have lots of questions.

I urge you  to reread the replies of Jeffrey, Marcus and Tom.

I have placed all of my blogs in mysite.com/blog/

I have also redirected subdomains into folders and the results have been kickass.

Still, its your site and you can do as you please.

I agree.  If this was my site I would place it in a folder.  My blogs are in folders.

I don't know what title tag to use.  Would take more KW research than I am able to do at this time.

The post pages are not being found because your content management system is inserting a bad link.  It can probably be fixed by working the code in your template page.

This site has some good rankings even though there is a lot wrong with it.  If you are getting some good traffic and making a few sales it would definitely be worth the money to hire someone to fix the technical problems.

There is also a lot of potential to improve your conversion rate.

Good luck with it.

Just saying a few things that what I would do if this was my biz...... These are just starter suggestions from a quick look.

I would start with making a decision between using cvcsports.com and buildyourjacket.com.  They look like duplicate sites. I would redirect one to the other.

Also cvcsports.com uses the buildyourjacket.com domain in the title tag.  That looks like a switcheroo to visitors.  I don't know what Google would think of this.  My guess is neutral to negative.  I would move to consistent branding.

I would create

that includes "varsity jackets".  I see that you have an

but it is commented out.

http://www.cvcsports.com and http://cvcsports.com are splitting the linkvalue for this site.  I would use .htaccess to merge them. You can use the research tools to discover which one has more link value.  Redirect to that one.  This should increase the overall power of the site.

The server seems to be having page load problems.  I did a few dozen pageviews and saw connection three connection resets.  This might be confined to the www.  I would have someone who knows more than me about servers and .htaccess than I do check into the site, merging the domains and unite all of your assets.

The jacket designer is cool... but title tag is worthless on that page.

Blog is on a subdomain at blog.buildyourjacket.com.   I would get that into a folder on the preferred domain.  The title tag of the blog has no SEO value.  Also post pages of the blog are not found.

This site needs a lot of work.  I am surprised that you have "letterman jackets' at #1.

I agree.. The marketer's methods are ineffective... and the OP's methods are ineffective.  And, they are at odds with one another.

However, he says that he prefers the school of hard knocks.

In my opinion they are wasting client money until they come to an agreement and develop a genuine plan for marketing and SEO..

Before I build a site, or when I do SEO on an existing site, I do keyword research to find all of the terms that I think will be important for my business.  Important means: keywords that will bring in valuable traffic.

Then I develop a content plan that will produce one or two pages for every one of these important keywords and at least two pages for the most important.  These keywords match to products that we sell, services that we offer, information that customers might need, general information that anyone interested in our topic niche might be searching for.

In a small niche the goal is to get pages into every important SERP.

Then there is the long tail.... for that I try to develop detailed articles with substantive content that has a diversity of potential search terms and images that could go into image search.

What can you do for the dealers that will make this a situation where you, the dealer and the customer all win?

How about fantastic product support PDFs that they can post on their website which contain a link to the manufacturer.

=======================

I think that you have a good opportunity here.  Putting myself in the position of your dealers... do you sell retail and compete against them?  If the answer is yes then your request for all of them to link to you might not be appreciated.

I am a dealer and none of my suppliers ask me to link to them.  Instead they are linking to me to support my efforts - even when I also sell their competitor's products.  They link to the page on my site that features their product.

You say that you are a beginner at SEO.  That's honest.

However, you are jumping in with keyword research, registering domains, building landing pages, giving sites a diverse appearance.

I don't agree with a lot of your strategy.

In my opinion, it would be a good idea to put on the brakes.

Before you sink more of your time into things that are probably not going to work well it would be a good idea to increase your knowledge or hire someone who can get you moving with a solid plan.  Your team  might also need a referee.

I have not seen any detailed information from Google on how they assess social media activity.  (IF anybody knows of some please let us know.)

** (which gives me a nofollow-backlink from facebook - unfortunatelly in most cases hidden for googles eyes)..**

Google can see these.   They are not supposed to give you pagerank benefit.  Initially google was not counting these links in the denominator of the pagerank equation but then they decided to add them into the denominator and didn't say anything to anybody until after the fact.  So, when Google says how they do something I use that information with great confidence for a very short time and aways suspect that they could have changed their mind.

If you think that getting likes on facebook is beneficial to your rankings (I think that).... then the most powerful thing that you can do is give visitors content that they will like.

I used to be an ebay powerseller, an amazon affiliate and then an amazon vendor.

I am really careful around those domains.  They are really powerful and can throw brand new pages high into the SERPs.  So, if you make a listing there for your purple widget you could wake in the next day and the amazon page with it is above your bread and butter site in the SERPs.  If you place your whole inventory there you just invited the wild hordes into your SERPs.

On ebay the more items you place into a category the more powerful that category becomes.  Linking to items on either of these sites can be like waking the wolves.

I am not selling on these domains now because of the labor involved and the high fees.  No regrets.

As you can see, duplicate content was the least of my worries - but in this Panda environment that makes these domains even more problematic.

Original. Worthy of tweets, likes, any type of genuine sharing.

Thumbs down from me on that splash page.

301 page-to-page for directly relevant content?  YES, unite the clans.

I would give them a normal link.  The better they rank the more traffic you get, the more power they have the more they send back to you.

As long as these links are useful to visitors and in places that they will see with the content I don't think that the fact that they are recip is important.

Great websites link to other great websites every day.

When I am up against the heavy hitters I go to wordtracker or adwords keyword research tool and type in my primary keyword "plastic bins".

That would return terms such as.... large pb..... stackable pb.... clear pb..... colored pb.....  p trash b..... p toy b.....corrugated pb

There is a treasure trove of traffic out there of people who are one step closer to a buy decision than the people who are simply searching for "pb".   When I would wake up in the morning the fight bell would ding and I would be hammering to get massive amounts of good quality demonstration content, video, etc up on the site for all of those terms.  There is enough keyword depth there to keep me busy for months and months.

I am not talking about yada yada yada yada pb yada yada yada pb yada yada content. I am talking about substantive idea-generating content that would inspire people to buy a plastic toy bin even if they didn't plan to buy one when they arrived.  I would be trying to sell 'em a bin for their cat and pet raccoon.

When I looked at the keywords for plastic bins I was surprised to see that they are very very deep and very very rich.  I would be after top rankings for all of those terms.

I understand how it is to see this type of site at the top  

I don't worry about them.  I am old enough that it doesn't get my temper pumping and have been watching the web long enough to see lots of these sites disappear completely overnight.

If I was in this SERP I would be hammering at the secondary keywords and the longtail to the point of keyword cannibalization.  I think I would be making good money at it.

I'd be getting my YouTube stuff out to the front and center.  If you have that kind of asset you want to show it off instead of putting it in the footer.

There are some heavy hitters in those SERPs.

walmart, usplastic, uline, target, grainger, officemax, rubbermaid, homedepot

These big brands are hard to beat.  Those kinds of domains just have so much authority that you need a huge load of links to beat them.  You're site is all about bins....  Keep hammering for links.

If this was my site I would be saturating the secondary keywords and the long tail.

Good luck!

(I see a small display problem using firefox on a PC.    I see a "we're live should you need assistance" and a "x" box.  It might be a box that is supposed to be displayed above your design that is breaking".)

I agree...  If you hire somebody to get links for you... the week after you pay him he can go to one of your competitors and acquire a similar load of links... then you get a message from him.... "Need more links?  :-)"

Thanks for that info...

Assuming that your competitor is sitting on his butt doing nothing.... then you should have him beaten in six months or so - maybe sooner.   From my experience good links take effect quickly.  I have seen my pages move up in rankings within a few days after getting a really good link.

Good luck.

That depends upon....

- how many links you are building

- the quality of the links

- who you are competing against

Some SERPs require nothing more than page optimization... others have strong, well established competitors with millions of links.

To move up you have to be building more links / higher quality links than the people above you.  There are markets where you could build a lot of links every month and see lots of sites passing you.

Is your forum a genuine source of news or is that simply BS?

You are correct.  Linking to the blog post directly is best.  More people will see your excellent work that way.  If you link to the homepage you are not delivering them to what you want them to see or what you have pitched to the visitor.

Linking to any page on your site will pump up the importance of your entire site - however the most power will go to the page that the link connects to.

Now... for marketing the blog post off site.  It is best to target bloggers, facebookers, webmasters and others who will have a high interest in your post and market directly to them.  But, the next time you are ready to create something go out first and decide where you want your links to come from and create content that is better than what they are already linking to.  That will give you the highest probability of obtaining a link or a like or tweet or whatever.

First, I would not bet anything on Alexa data.  It is based upon a toolbar that very few people use.

If you are interested in what a forum does to your search engine rankings then start tracking your Google rankings with the SEOmoz rank tracking tool.

Now, can a forum damage your rankings?  I can imagine two situations where it might.

1. lots of trivial content, duplicate content or trash content is posted in your forum

2. forum members flood your threads with links out to spammy sites, manipulative sites, or sites about topics that google does not like

EGOL----you mention a lot of your spammy links are gifts from blackhat....is there a way I can prevent this from happening to my site or is this unavoidable?

I don't know of any way to prevent that.  I know some people who try to block all robots except the good ones but that is only partially successful and still does not block other types of link hunters.

I do not believe that these links are harmful.  Instead they are natural and almost every busy site has a lot of them.  Google knows this and I don't think that they will penalize you for it.  Some of these links might be very slighly helpful.

I bet you are looking at one of my sites.

When I go into Google webmaster tools it has over two million links!

Guess how many of them are spammy?  About two million.  Honest.

These are gifts from the blackhats.

You can't always assume that the links to a site are intentional.  In fact most of the links to all of my sites are junk links that I have had nothing to do with.

I'm trying to be a good girl with Google and focus on creating a great site.  My hits per day are increasing slowly

You are on the right track.  Hang in there!

I recently was adding 4 keyword phrases per title (and one or 2 per URL) to many of the internal pages of nlpca(dot)com. Some of the keywords were a little off topic, but most were OK. Before I could continue and add the same keywords to the H1 and content, we got dropped from a 4 to a 3 in pagerank and we slipped 20 positions for our main keyword 'NLP' and others as well.

I very much doubt that this would cause a drop in pagerank.  Pagerank problems are usually associated with link manipulation.

You say that you were adding off topic keywords to page titles.  I believe that google imght consider that a small sin.  I've never heard of google reducing pagerank for something like that but you never know what google will do and not tell people about it - but a visible pagerank drop is a warning.

Did you get any messages in webmaster tools?

Using off-topic title tags is a cousin to cloaking.  It conveys to searchers that you have that off-topic content on your page and then when they arrive and you don't have it they are not happy.  They feel like they have been spammed.  Google might detect this by bounce rate or some form of report from searchers.  They might also detect it from during a automated review of your content.

One experience that I had was with a group of about 80 pages.  I published them to see where they ranked then edited all of the title tags, see where they rank, edited the title tags and see where they rank, and then did it again.  Those 80 pages all took a big hit.  They stayed down for about a year before recovering their original rankings - which were quite good.

That's all I can say.  Lots of the above is not "hard evidence".  Just what looks to me like cause and effect and guesses at what google might do.

Several things can cause a drop in page rank of the homepage

-- loss of links to the homepage or any part of the site

-- important sites that link to you loose some of their links and thus have less pagerank to pass on to you

-- changes in the links that important sites have up to you - changing the code so that they do not pass pagerank - these could be connections through a script

-- changes in the linkage structure of your site that change the flow of pagerank through it

-- periodically google recalibrates pagerank (If they didn't tons of sites would be making it to ten.  This is a math adjustment similar to adjusting for inflation.  If your site  gains PR at a lower rate than the web average your pagerank could go down

-- adding a ton of pages to your site could cause a drop in pagerank as pagerank flows out of your main site and into those pages - similar to adding a new wing onto a swimming pool and then connecting them to allow water to flow in

-- (some people will disagree with this one    -- adding a lot of links to your site that connect to other websites

-- doing something naughty that makes google drop your pagerank as a warning or as a punishment

-- if your site just recently earned four, maybe it was a very low four, now your site is showing as a very high three, this could just be flux in the calculations and rounding... keep earning links and four will return soon

I have two wordpress blogs and category pages are where most of my search engine traffic enters.  Some bring in thousands per month.  Most of my post pages bring in very little traffic.

If you are not having any problem with duplicate content at present maybe it would be a good idea to allow indexing of the main page, the post pages and the category pages.  They if you do have a duplicate content problem you can remove from the index the pages that bring in the least amount of traffic.

I might use the keyword difficulty tool to determine which jobs I would not want to accept  -  due to lack of time and staff - to attack a brutal, maybe impossible target.

I might also use it to get some idea of how difficult a job might be.

However, the best data that you might have is a chart that compares keyword difficulty of your previous clients, their relative starting point in the SERPs and the amount of money that was required to produce whatever result was achieved.

Then a variable that only you can answer is your relative effectiveness in different niches.  If I was given the job of competition for "hydraulic jacks" I might know exactly how to approach that and have industry knowledge, quick resources and allies at hand - these will enable me to jump right up the SERPs.  However, if I get the job of attacking "easy chairs" I might be really challenged because I don't have the same level of knowledge and support - plus the competitive landscape will be very different.

Natural backlinks are links that are created to your site without you doing anything to request or buy them.  They could be in content, in sidebar or anywhere on the linking site.  These links are usually EARNED but sometimes the linking site is scraper that does not wash out links.  Natural links are usually high quality but they might not be.

Quality backlinks are links that might provide traffic or help your site advance in the search engines.  They can be high PR links on relevant sites but they don't have to be.  A link from an obscure page on the Pope's site might not be relevant and might not be high PR but I bet it would help your Google rankings.

I had a call from an SEO firm the other day offering their services, and stating that they had worked with a competitor of ours and delivered some very good results. I checked the competitors rankings, PR, link profile, and indeed, the results were quite impressive.

I don't think that I would buy his service because you will be his next demonstration site.  Pretty soon he will have a ton of people participating in this link scheme and the bigger it gets the brighter it will be on the Google radar screen.  I'd stay away from this salesperson and his methods.

Are you trying to use automation to put your images into pinterest or grab images from pinterest?

I don't think that automation will be effective at generating the buzz needed to drive pinterest traffic to your site.  For that you need enthusiastic humans.

I get some nice traffic from pinterest but that is entirely a result of people who I don't know or have any relationship with pinning and liking our graphics and photos.

To facilitate sharing of your images you can use the addthis.com social share buttons next to them.

I just wanted to know if this can affect my seo efforts negativele?

If your website is all about green widgets and you say... "Hey, I'll pay you good money for referring buyers to me!".... there might be quite a few extremely smart people who own strong websites decide to take you up on the deal.  They then add lots of pages about green widgets to their website - absolutely saturating the keyword spectrum - and tomorrow morning when you wake up their pages will all be above yours all over the web. 

Don't underestimate what one affiliate can do.  He could own six powerful websites that are somewhat related to you.  Just adding a page to them about green widgets could be enough to out rank you.  And if he uses all six of those sites you are bumped - overnight - from page one to page two.

So, in addition to "working for you".... affiliates can "compete against you".

I rank above my affiliate program sites for their main keywords.  Do they think its a "negative"?....  I don't think that they like my site above theirs - but at least I am selling their widget and not the other guy's. 

Lots of domains on same ip with identical biz model

http://revip.info/ipinfo/119.82.150.40

That's my bet.

I can't tell you what is wrong.  But if you answer these questions you might figure it out.

we have lost all our big keywords, for example, a keyword that was generating 40 organic clicks per day a year ago we receive no traffic for now,

Did your rankings drop for these keywords?

Last summer they got a new website with a blog.

Did they change the page URLS of mess up the page optimization?

Tossing this idea out for discussion....

One way that google detects manipulation is the presence of links that point to entirely unrelated websites - especially if they have optimized anchor text.  A link like that could paint a small target on either site.

Is it worth the small risk?

I agree.

I help a couple people with their websites and I don't feel that their sites are:

1. related enough to mine to send valuable traffic through a link...  or...

2. relevant enough for that link to be an important "vote" in the eyes of google.

A link on their site to mine would produce an unpleasant odor for their visitors.

=========================

Think about this... one way that google detects manipulation is the presence of links that point to entirely unrelated websites - especially if they have optimized anchor text.  A link like that could paint a small target on either site.  Not worth the risk.