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I agree with Marcus...   When you make everything important then nothing is important.

...the designer said he wanted the first page of the website to be a sort of landing page page were the visitor has to click and enter...

It's always best to have a designer who understands SEO, who has experience in optimizing a site for a good conversion rate, is willing to have the site tested and kick to the curb any element that is not performing, and who seeks to first understand the objectives of your business before making any design recommendations.

Most importantly, you need a designer who understands that you own the site and make all final calls.

If you don't have that you will be pulling teeth the whole way and if you get tired of pulling teeth or encounter some that can not be extracted your biz will really suffer.

This type of designer is really rare.  Be willing to pay a lot more for this person.

Enjoyed this answer, Alan.  Thanks!

First... congratulations!  You must have some really nice content to get the attention and an invitation from such an important site.

Now for what I really think about this....

Be    very    careful.

This is a respected and powerful site, yes?

If you give them your content and they publish it then you have just invited a powerful competitor into all of your short tail and long tail SERPs.

You are going to lose some traffic.

How will it hit your bottom line to drop a couple position in the SERPs?

What if your content started being filtered from the SERPs because it is duplicate?

How will it hit your psyche to see them getting links for the content that you authored?

Is that worth getting a link on the butt of the article?

I am not saying that I would NEVER give articles away... just saying that I would not do it for a couple of links way down on the bottom of their pages.

If a site with absolutely enormous traffic (far far higher than mine) offered me a chance to write a syndicated column with very prominent pathways to my site, I might do it and write on topics that are tangent to my vital interests but never congruent.

I haven't received that kind of offer yet and I am not lookin'.

Bottom line... if they are askin' they must really like your content (especially if it is free)... so why not just invite them to link to the great content on your site and you will do the same for them?  Great sites link to one another all of the time.

(Lots of people are going to disagree with me.  That's OK.)

I agree with Ryan... but also think that a forum can impact your SEO if you allow members to run wild.

If you allow them to stuff it full of crap links to bad neighborhoods, allow the bot spammers to hammer it and allow unintelligent eight word posts.. then don't be surprised if your site gets a rankings reduction.

Ideally, we would like to redirect everything and remove the old site entirely so we don't have to pay to keep hosting it. Is this possible?

Be sure that you don't save ten bucks on hosting but toss away thousand in content and the value of a redirect.

I would sniff the entire site for gems of content.  Anything that is better than what you currently have or supplemental to it.  If you can get new pages on your site that target keywords that have been off of your radar that could be a huge win.

Now... just saying what I do rather than disagree with others....  I keep an .htaccess file on that old domain for a long time - meaning forever....  you can do that inexpensively by getting a hosting service that will allow you to place multiple domains in different folders of a single account and redirect them.  Since I don't know exactly how long it will take for search engines to permanently remember I make it impossible for them to miss.

they might have several hundred of these domains. What is the best use of these domains?

I would let them expire and buy beer with the savings...

Then focus all of my energy on a single domain.

I know what you mean....  Getting even poor content out of some business owners is impossible.

Wouldn't the numbers be indicative of quality?

Yes... but not always...

The numbers could be skewed by paid links or other links that were not given on the basis of merit.

Also, the numbers can be skewed by time.  Older content has had a long time to accumulate links but new content - that is superior - is just getting started.

New content that is superior can rank very low but climb the SERPs over time as its quality is recognized.

The perspective above is for two content sites competing against one another.

For retail sites a comparison of "numbers" can be more important.... however, once you start putting desirable, informative, tweetable, likeable, linkable  content on a retail site it gains an enormous advantage over competitors (who do not have that type of asset) in its ability to climb the SERPs.

Rather than looking at these numbers, consider going to the SERPs and look at the pages and sites that you would like to defeat.  Then ask.... can I build better content? .... can I build a better website?

If you can do these things you will have greater success than chasing numbers... and if you have success by chasing numbers but are defeated by higher quality content or higher quality websites then the numbers that you must chase will escalate over time as your competitors gain natural strength.

Most of the search engine traffic that enters my blog comes in through category pages.  It would be a huge mistake for me to block them.  However, depending upon the topic area of your site the category pages might have a different importance.

We are currently producing quite alot of engaging content and although it's industry related, it is sometimes quite broad and not always appropriate for our company blog.

The best place for this content is in a folder on your main website such as.... mysite.com/blog/

It is possible to run to installations of wordpress on a single domain.

If you don't want that content on your own site then placing it on a satellite site would be the next choice.

Running two different sites in the same niche is not a sin... and most hosts will give you a second IP address for a very small fee.  Ask them about it.

Who owns the URL where the blog is located?

If they own it then they are being paid by you to build a brand that competes against you... and when you stop paying they will own a share of your business SERPs.

If you own it then you simply redirect the content to a folder on your own site and tell them to continue promoting.

Going back to the situation of them being the owner....  I think that you need to let them know that the content and promotion that you are paying for will be immediately redirected to a folder on your primary site.

Why should there be a penalty?  This often happens for important pages - they are linked to more than once because they appear in the persistent navigation and also in some on-page links.

Although a lot of people think that only the first link counts, I would consider this a sign of page importance.

First...... before you do anything...

Run analytics on both versions of the homepage to see how much traffic they are bringing in, where it is coming from and if it is converting.

Only then are you in a position to decide what to do.

If one page has very different traffic than the other you might lose more by redirecting than improving the page and running it separately.

Link to your category pages... Or a good idea might be to prepare pages by topic that feature (and link to) some of the most informative and popular threads.

260,000 threads?

How many inbound links do you have to hold all of that pagemass in the index?

If you don't have lots of high PR deep links into the site the spiders will visit obscure pages infrequently and will forget about them.

You need to link deep into these pages at multiple points with heavy PR.  That will force a continuous and recurring stream of spiders down into the mass and require them to chew their way out.   I think that you need a few dozen PR5 links at least for healthy indexing.

lol... funny question...

The activities of blog commenting and Q&A answering are very different.

Blog commenting is like "water cooler conversation" that sometimes is educational.....

...but Q&A is "helping someone" and that is always rewarding.

Big difference to me.

I would hire someone else.  This guy is stinking up your brand.  He is also defacing other websites.

Your question is intelligently worded, reads easily, perfect spelling and more.  I bet you have some really nice sites.  So, you would probably be irritated if someone posted illiterate crap all over them.

If I was planning to spend $6000, I would not spend it on press releases or blog/forum spamming.

You asked which would generate more traffic and which would contribute more to domain authority.  I think that press releases and blog spamming are wastes of money for both of those purposes.

WIth $6000 to spend I would rather spend $2000 on really comfy chairs for the content writers, $2000 on a new camera/lighting equipment for the photographer, $2000 on licenses to Mindjet or new a graphics program or other productivity software.  I'd also chip in for a fancy coffee machine and cold drinks for the refrigerator.

These are "sharpening the ax" at the most basic level.

Yes, and no.

If you are gunning for a commercial product then the adwords cost of keywords might be an indirect indicator of the competitiveness of the SERPs.

However if you are gunning for an informational SERP then it could be irrelevant.  For example... there are no ads in the SERP for "periodic table" but the organic competition is relatively high.

When I am gunning for an informational SERP I use keyword research tools to learn about volume.  For competitiveness I examine the content of the top sites and decide if I can beat it.

Attack their content, not their links.

I believe the Adwords tool.   Because lots of people are using it to plan their spending on Google it is in Google's best interest to provide useful data.

The caution with using their tool is to understand what the data means - such as know the difference between exact match and broad match.

New pages often hit the SERPs quickly and rank at a higher level than expected.   Some SEOs call this the "new page bonus ranking".  Those pages often fall to a more deserved ranking within a few days.

Also, some new pages will appear in the SERPs, disappear for a day or two and then return at a lower ranking.

I used to have some big sites made with databases.  The challenge with sites of 100,000 pages or 1,000,000 pages is having enough PR to get then into the index and hold them in the index.

If you have a big site you need to have a regular flow of spiders into and out of every page or google will forget them and they will fall out of the index.  Even if they stay in the index they will be poorly competitive.

One of my sites had about 150,000 pages and to get and hold it in the index took a lot of links.  Today I bet that you would need at least 30 PR5 links that connected deeply into the site to maintain an adequate flow of spiders for healthy indexing for a site of that size. A site with a million pages is going to require a lot more.

So, in addition to creating this site you are going to need some powerful link sources for indexing.

best get sculpting I suppose

lol.... yes, I better get busy 

I see some of my competitors starting to pop-up in the rankings for Christmas merchandise.  I think that they are buying links.  I think that this is a risky strategy, but as you see, it can be effective.

A few years ago, internal links and anchor text were extremely powerful for moving different parts of a site in and out of the SERPs with each arriving season.  However, the ability of a webmaster to do that with his own site has greatly diminished - at least that is the effect that I see on my own sites.  I don't think that this is a risky strategy, but its not as effective as it was a few years ago.

This used to work superbly until about 2003.  Then google was able to identify these sites and would drop all of the pages except one or two.

Cookie cutter pages are no longer useful.

I don't know where your data is coming from so it is difficult to give a reply in context.

So, let's assume that you have data from google webmaster tools.

Keyword A has CTR of 19% and 3000 monthly searches

Keyword B has CTR of 0.7% and 20,000 monthly searches

When I look at that data my conclusion is that KW A ranks highly - maybe in the top three... while KW B might be on the second page.

I would reoptimize the page a bit towards KW B if I thought that it would yield valuable traffic.

Always keep in mind that there is another step in the calculation... that if the 19% of people who click through KW A have a 0.1% conversion rate but the KW B people convert at 10% then that could alter any decision that you might have.

Google crawlers are unable to determine if you are offering a "valuable service".

However, if you have a program crank out a million pages that all look like this.....

"yada yada yada LOCATION yada yada yada SURNAME yada yada yada yada"

"yada yada yada LOCATION yada yada yada SURNAME yada yada yada yada"

"yada yada yada LOCATION yada yada yada SURNAME yada yada yada yada"

.... Google will probably index them and display them in the SERPs for a few days.... (and you might make a little money)... but then you will see the number of pages in their index decline rapidly as they figure out that these are cookiie-cutter-pages and toss them out as duplicate content.

However, if you have the resources to write a million pages of absolutely unique, non-duplicating content then you might make a lot of money from this site.

I don't have a google profile as I post anonymously and they don't allow anonymous profiles (those dummies!).

I own a website where most articles are written by staff and no author is listed.  (guest content does have author information)

I have thought about creating author pages on the site and pointing author links to them with rel=me.  However now it seems that google wants their Google profile pages as the target for rel=me links.  (what a way to demand links!)

Eventually, if I see that people are getting definite ranking benefits from Google profile pages, I will create a real profile page on Google.  I have tons of content that I could point to it.

I agree with irvingw.....

....and I also have a personal hypothesis that google will not value your pages as highly if you are making frequent changes to your title tags.  This isn't anything that I have put to scientific testing... just a personal opinion based upon a limited number of observations that I don't want to repeat for reasons that you might understand. 

Thank you for this question.  I think that it is interesting from multiple perspectives.

I think that we have a technology perspective in... "How will Google handle this?"....

But we also have an employer perspective in... "What do they think that they own and what will they permit?"

As an author I would like to think that I "OWN" the simple fact that I authored an article.  The employer might own the article, however, I would like to have credit for writing it.

Some employers would have no problem linking to my profile page with rel=me.

However, other employers might insist that they paid me for the article and "own" all credit for it - since they funded the time that I used to produce it.  Some will not want to display a link to my profile page because they worry about losing visitors through it... or PR through it....  and other might allow a link to a profile page but insist that the profile page be located on their domain.

This is a mucky problem, made sticky with issues of ownership, ego and more.

I think that the only solution for authors who write for multiple websites is to be sure that your expectation of a credit link is made very clear when you make a contract for work.  That will at least establish your expectation formally but there is no guarantee that a IT person, designer or an SEO will remove your link or the rel=me at some time in the future.

If you are an established author you might be able to explain how the link to your profile page will benefit the websites where your articles appear - as the search rankings for your articles might benefit from your personal authority as an author.... and if they want to control the benefit then they should be the buyer for all of your work.

The best solution (and my personal favorite) is to write only for your own websites where you have total control.

One of the most overlooked concerns is the navigation links that will drive power and anchor text into the product pages.

These could be from category pages, related product pages, article pages, homepage, blog pages, sitemap and more.

If you want your product pages to be vigorous in the index you need to drive some linkjuice into them.  In addition, on-site text links can work magic for your rankings.

Related links on product pages can also lead to increased sales and larger shopping carts.

Just not my clients??

Maybe.... But, I would avoid all possible problems by having copious visible text and all important links on the site in easy-to-spider HTML.

Will my SEO efforts be wasted?

"Wasted" probably isn't the best word... "fractionally effective" would be better.

** It's in Flash and in 3 years only 3 pages of say 50 are indexed.**

It sounds like one of two problems:  A) spiders can't cross your links.... or.... B) you don't have any inbound links from pages already in the search engine's index.  Most likely A)

Should I redesign the site in an SEO friendly language?

That's what I would do.  You can still have some flash on the site.  But it would be flash elements rather than the entire design.

Or, if I build out a huge link building campaign it doesn't matter if I am in Flash or not?

Flash and a lack of spidering are probably the problems.  Fix them.

Search google for "internet archive".  Click on first result.

I have an answer.

Less than ten in any industry niche.

Why that number? That is how man fit on the first page of Google and everyone else - even if they do SEO - is not getting much out of it.

I agree.

The focus of your post is on numbers.

Put the focus of your efforts (and expenditures) on visitors.

The owner of the website is the person who is best able to diagnose  a traffic decline.  Anyone else is guessing.

The thing that you need to do is to check the analytics and determine.....

--- did you lose traffic for specific keywords?

--- did you lose traffic to specific pages?

--- did you lose traffic from specific sources?

Information like the above is the only way to diagnose a traffic loss.

Get into your analytics and see what happened.  Then an action plan can be developed.

The owner of the website is the person who is best able to diagnose  a traffic decline.  Anyone else is guessing.

The thing that you need to do is to check the analytics and determine.....

--- did you lose traffic for specific keywords?

--- did you lose traffic to specific pages?

--- did you lose traffic from specific sources?

Information like the above is the only way to diagnose a traffic loss.

Get into your analytics and see what happened.  Then an action plan can be developed.

I think that the answer to this question is highly related to the value that Google would place on

--- hotlinked images

--- domain mentions

--- social media "likes"

Just seeing what others think of this.

What isn't so clear is that 2 years down the road this may be a really bad decision that was made just on budget.

I agree.

You never know how google is going to treat a subdomain.... but I have very few doubts about how they are going to treat a folder on my site.

So, if I was in the situation that you are in... I would move hosts,  or change developers,  or find something besides Shopify... to run a website that has the highest present and long-term probability to be as highly competitive as possible.

I work really really hard to compete for rankings.. I am not going to let a host, a shopping cart or a developer screw it up.

It's pretty easy to find new hosts, new developers and new shopping carts when you compare that to the huge job of getting 500 new unique domains to link to a store.  We are comparing issues of convenience to those that are jugular.

Just me sayin' how I look at this.

This coverage could bring a lot of visitors to client's website. I would encourage client to have lots of additional information there that is easy to understand, easy to print and very easy to share via social media.

I have one concern.

There is a big difference in ranking potential between store.domain.com and domain.com/store/

With domain.com/store/ the pages in the store benefit from the authority and linkpower accumulated by the main website.  However, with store.domain.com the benefit is much less.

That alone would have me reject a solution that requires moving the store to a subdomain.

You might also serve the exact same page to everyone but read the environment variables of the inbound visitor to determine which prices to show.

Or... serve same page to everyone and simply have  a dropdown menu or radio buttons for the visitor to select proper pricing.

One problem that you will have is... some people from country A will be buying the service for a location in country B.   Lots of transactions on US websites are made by people who are working in or visiting other countries.  You might be surprised at how often this happens.

If NearlyKeyword.com has a lot of links that do not duplicate the links of Keyword.com then I think that you will increase the linkauthority and domainpopularity of Keyword.com.  I would expect to see a rise in SERPs across the entire site.

I would expect the same thing to happen in the opposite direction - if Keyword.com redirects to NearlyKeyword.com...... but I would put my money on Keyword.com as the stronger site to receive the redirect.

What percentage?  I don't know.

What does a keyword.com bring to me?..... The most powerful thing.  It makes me feel like "the man" in the keyword business and gives me greater mental energy to work on the site. That is a powerful force.

We do see some trashy sites linking to our sites.  Nothing we can do about it and they often are scraper sites.

I don't think that inbound links from trashy sites will hurt you.

However, we don't do link exchanges and when we link out we only link to sites that are better than our own.

Linking to high quality sites is a good way to earn trust from Google.

Linking to trash is a good way to lose trust and be penalized.  Trash can be defined by content but more often by who they are linking to.

PR, DA, PA, etc are irrelevant.

Nice reply... thumbsup!

When we have a group of products that have very similar descriptions we display all of them on one page.  This allows easy customer comparisons and gives you a page with very substantive content.  Also, sometimes google will say in the SERPs...  "6+ items".

I believe that reducing the number of pages from six to one helps you run a more compact site that will compete better in the SERPs.

As for your title tag... you might be able to be creative and communicate that you have a nice selection of rings...

Milgrain Wedding Band:  White/Yellow Gold, Palladium, Platinum