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www.mysite.com/ and www.mysite.com/default.asp are both showing up in open site explorer.  How do I make sure that these are not being interpreted as two pages when they are the same page?  (Both in search engines and OSE.)

I just had a page/keyword that had an algorithmic penalty jump in rank significantly.  Once was ranked 3, ranked 80+ since October 2012, overnight it jumped to 31.

Google search is creating 4 sitelinks for a website.  One of these is the blog (blog.website.com).    Webmaster tools allows for site links to be demoted, but there is no way to demote the blog we which we don't want to show up since it is not a "/" extension.   Is there a way to remove it as a site link?

We are getting many crawl errors listed in Google webmaster tools.  We use some faceted navigation with several variables.   Google sees these as "500" response code.  It looks like Google is truncating the url.  Can we tell Google not to crawl these search results using part of the url ("sort=" for example)?  Is there a better way to solve this?

We are considering merging facebook profiles for our three stores.  If we do this, users will not be able to "check in" at a location, but wouldn't it be better to have 4,000 fans on one profile than to have 2,500, 1,000, and 500 fans on the three profiles?  The main site for these stores is also an ecommerce site.

We are doing a "soft migration" of a website.  (Actually it is a merger of two websites). We are doing cross site rel=canonical tags instead of 301's for the first 60-90 days.  These have been done on a page by page basis for an entire site.  Google states that a "change of address" should be done in webmaster tools for a site migration with 301's.   Should this also be done when we are doing this soft move?

We have one keyword that brings our site the most visitors.  This keyword is the brand name we carry.  We have several years of tracking it in Adwords.  For some extended time, this keyword [exact match] has averaged 19 cents per click, 2.7 average position, 4.5% click through, and a quality score of 7/10. We wanted more clicks.   We could think of what was needed to increase the quality score.  Sure, we could change the meta tag title and the adwords title to be the same as the single word keyword, but this would be less informative.  We decided to keep these titles as phrases which include the brand name. First change we made: we increased the bid.  After all, it was profitable for the two ads above us, right?  We increased our bid from .50 to $1.50.  Effect?  Average position increased to 2.3 from 2.7.  Click through increased from 4.5% to 4.9%.  Cost per click went from .19 to .51.   The incremental cost for each sale was......well really really high.....this didn't work. (oh, we rank #2 organically.  Our organic CTR dropped from 3.2% to 2.9% with this change as well) Reversed back to where we were and decided to focus on the quality score.  We realized that the keyword was part of an add group with about 20 other keywords.  This word was important.....lets put it in it's own ad group.  We then made an "exact" copy of the ad and started up a new ad group.  Paused the old keyword.   We very quickly realized that the quality score on this "same" keyword was now 4/10.   That was odd....lets give it a few days......quality score drops to 3/10 and no longer qualifies for first page.   What was different we wondered?   AH!   We capitalized the first letter of the word.  Changing this took the quality score up to 6/10 instantly.  hmmm, we thought capitalization didn't matter?  Seems it did.  We now wait to see where the quality score goes.   Saga to continue....

I am seeing thousands of 404 errors.  Each of the urls is like this: abc.com/abc123/tel:1231231234 Everything is normal about that url except the "/tel:1231231234" these urls are bad with the tel: extension, they are good without it. The only place I can find this character string is on each page we have this code which is used for Iphones and such.  What are we doing wrong? Code: Phone: <a href="[tel:1231231234](tel:7858411943)"> (123) 123-1234a>

Before I started working on Organic SEO, I did Adwords.  Being that I am entirely self-taught with adwords, I am concerned that about what I might not know.  From time to time I have looked for outside advice, but I never got very far.  It seemed that I would be talking to a salesman, someone who knew less than me, or someone who was horrified that I had 7,500 tracked words.  So I am presenting my methods here for comment. Each keyword I have used is placed into an exact match campaign, phrase match campaign, and broad match campaign.  Exact match gets the highest bid, broad match the lowest.  Every week, I cull new keywords from phrase and broad results.  I also create negative keywords each week based on searches that are obviously not looking for my products.  Over time, I get very few searches triggered from broad matches.  Keywords are kept in ad groups that generally have less than 6 keywords.  Acceptable conversion costs are decided based on product category.  I have made an assumption that first position adwords results are too expensive (idiots overpay for them).   I automatically reduce my bid 10% on any ad that has an average position of greater than 1.5.   I automatically reduce my bid 10% on any ad that has a conversion cost greater than my target.   I delete keyword that have a CTR below 1%.  I generally require 300 clicks to make a determination. All ads have been endlessly split tested to the point I don’t split test them much now.  I judged ads for both click through rate and conversion rate. End result:  After 4 years of doing this, conversion costs are below target costs.  Not sure what else I could do to improve it, but looking for ideas.  Management of the system is pretty easy now, as well. Anything I am missing?

I am working on a site redesign and re evaluating concepts I haven't thought about for a few years. I generally see site navigation that is either "top-down" or "left bar". Top down navigation normally uses the left nav. for search refinements. The benefit of top nav. is that it clears up the center of the page for non navigation content. The drawback is that you can't fit as many categories in a top nav. Left side nav. can hold a long list of categories, but subcategories are often in the center of the page. In the past, I have preferred to use left nav. with a multi level scroll over search refinement.  I believe this allowed users to get to their destination page with fewer clicks.  (I have always believed that every required additional click causes lost customers).  I also believe that this has caused me to get more juice flowing to deeper pages on sites and better long-tail conversion.  This means I have had pages with a LOT of links. With this method, I have tightly controlled my categories.  What on other sites are often dynamic search refinements, are on my sites additional categories. I am considering making a site with a top down navigation system.  I like the additional screen space in the center I get to work with.  Is my assumption about pages created by search refinement wrong?  Is it ok for SEO to have a left nav that has a bunch of search refinements that are dynamically created?

We use Twitter, Facebook, a blog, and Google +.   Currently we create unique content for each.   These platforms have the ability to "cross-post" (Where what you put on your facebook or blog gets tweeted, for example). Is it important to keep this content unique?   Or can we duplicate across these platforms?

When I look at my back links in OSE, I see two landing pages on my site that are really the same page.  www.mysite.com/ and www.mysite.com/(affiliate code here) These show different inbound link characteristics and page authority. The page in question has a rel=canonical tag. Am I doing something wrong?

Our Client owns two ecommerce websites. Website A sells 20 related brands.  Website has improving search rank, but not normally on the second to fourth page of google. Website B was purchased from a competitor.  It has 1 brand (also sold on site A).  Search results are normally high on the first page of google. Client wants to consider merging the two sites.   We are looking at options. Option 1:  Do nothing, site B dominates it’s brand, but this will not do anything to boost site A. Option 2: keep both sites running, but put lots of canonical tags on site B pointing to site A Option 3: close down site B and make a lot of 301 redirects to site A Option 4: ??? Any thoughts on this would be great.  We want to do this in a way that boosts site A as much as possible without losing sales on the one brand that site B sells.

Is there a way to find out what domains a competitor has 301'd to their main site? I am wondering if a competitor has hidden back links using a 301'd site.

I have a few years experience optimizing PPC text for click-through and conversion rates.  I don't see many web sites that are using these methods for their organic listings generated from meta tags.   Why is this? So many meta tags seem to be either keyword stuffed or auto generated.   From my research, it seems that keywords in meta tags mean little to search engine optimization other than the fact that vertically aligning keywords from search phrase to listing to landing page is important.  (Just like it is in PPC). Now that I am personally doing more than just PPC, I have begun rewriting meta text for increased conversions.  The search results look to me like My web site is the only one doing this. Is everyone missing out on something, or am I missing something?

I often have other websites link to my website.  They will do this with an image that they pull off of my website.  (actually my website continues to serve the image).  These inbound links are great, but they don't have alt text.   Is there a way for me to attach alt text to the images, or is this something the other website needs to code themselves?

I thought that the important factor in the value of a link was how many outing links a page has total.  Some tools seems to tell me that the important data point is how many EXTERNAL links a page has.   Which number should I be paying attention to when looking at pages I want to get linked from? (Yes, I know there are many other factors that are important)

I have a handful of e-commerce websites that overlap each other some in the same niche.   I have already heard that it would have been best to make just one website, but this is not practical for me.  Our business model goes back to a time before the internet.  We have relationships with manufacturers where they refer business to us because we brand web sites which will not switch customers to competing brands.  Our agreements make it ok to link to other websites so long as we have branded websites that focus on the specific manufacturers. For SEO, what is the best way to link these sites? Site wide links in footers.? Single links at on homepages? One way links from the most powerful site? Some other method? We have been wrestling with this question for some time.