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irvingw

"The uploader of the video was contacted, but has forgotten the username/password on the account."

that sounds like he is willing to take it down but doesn't know how to? if that is the case i would work with him to get access to that account and delete it. Even if you have to offer to pay him a few bucks via paypal it's worth it if it's ranking well and getting hits - and it must be if it is ranking #2 for your company name that' huge. Get it removed it's costing you business.

irvingw

They should realize their own filters but I take no chances. Allow me to suggest to specifically tell Google to ignore these parameters in the URL parameter tab in Webmaster Tools.

irvingw

It is absolutely possible, Google is very smart.

a) Remove your external links to any penalized sites.

b) If you have links from penalized sites pointing to internal pages on your site, let those pages 404 and make new URLs for them. If you have bad links pointing to your homepage that is much more time consuming because you'll need to reach out to all the webmasters and have them remove any bad links pointing to your homepage.

c) Submit reconsideration requests in webmaster tools, explain exactly what happened and what steps you're taking to remedy the situation. Include something new that you did in each letter so they see the progress you are making. Good luck! Don't buy or sell links!

irvingw

try this generic code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

Alternatively, try your code but lose the $ at the end of the first line like this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.harrisonlighting.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://harrisonlighting.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

irvingw

Since you already released these out to the wild, I would analyze which search results pages are bringing in traffic and use that analysis to create new category pages on your site. I would certainly block the search parameter in the Webmaster tools and in robots.txt.. Most internal search results pages have little content value and the engines now look at your site as a whole and if a certain percentage of the site is low quality, the whole site will be penalized.

irvingw

It's totally not a problem for SEO.

Just weird from a user perspective when you tell people www.my "hyphen" site.com and type thru traffic.

I personally don't like hyphens for that reason, but i would rather a hyphen and having a much longer available domain name.

What are the two words, keywords or brand name?

irvingw

Personalization probably are you logged in to a Google account in IE?

Use an external checker tool.

http://www.tools4google.com/search-google-position/keyword_tracking.php

irvingw

Totally agree with Ryan Kent. You should write a paragraph of content that is unique to the company featured. The chart is not unique enough and you will get flagged as having a high ratio of duplicate content. You should also look at all the other SEO elements on this page, understand what keyphrases you are targeting and modify the title, meta and H1 tags.

irvingw

Gianluca is absolutely correct. Example one (main site) is much better. Subdomains were used by spammers many years ago and are no longer a good strategy.

For every subdomain you make for each product you're basically creating a separate site too which needs to be put into GWMT seperately, so that gets a little crazy. It's just not a good strategy, even when someone wants to create a blog only for their site I tell them to put it under the main domain for PR and Google webmster compliance reasons, and you're talking about creating dozens of subdomains. There is only downside to doing it that way.

Good luck

irvingw

on page SEO is overdone

<title>**Asia** Travel, **Asia** Flights, **Asia** Hotels, **Asia** Airlines  at **Asia**.comtitle>  <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">keywords</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">**asia** maps, airlines to **asia**, flights to **asia**, hotels from **asia**, travel to 
**asia**, **asia**.com, hotels,airlines, airways</a>" />   One instance only of Asia in the title tag, lose the meta keywords completely they are useless and yours are 
spammy. also look at the sitewide linking. Way too many instances of 
"flights" in this menu. Put flights at the top of the menu and then just the locations below without "flights" in ever single link

irvingw

We have a team of 3 people, located in NJ and do advanced SEO for small to large sites and have more experience than almost anyone you will find out there. Let me know if you would like us to take an initial look at your site.

irvingw

Of course it dropped, you deleted your site. The old site should have stayed up until the new one was rolled out.

There are so many factors that could have caused your drop in a site redesign, without seeing the old site and new site it's hard to make a determination just on a URL, but did the URL structure change and if so did you 301 redirect?

irvingw

I know there are many opinions on how to handle paginated pages. My opinion is to just use a noindex, follow meta tag on all the paginated pages. The thinking is that these pages don't have any intrinsic value of being in the index themselves, but you still want the engines to be able to crawl to all your products from your internal links. I would only use the next and previous tags on paginated articles or galleries. The canonical tag is meant for duplicate pages and doesn't really make sense to use for paginated pages.

irvingw

I disagree. 4 instances of DOG in the title tag and 4 instances of DOG in the meta description is way too spammy.

I would have two instances in the title tag and two in the meta tag at most.

Dog Supplies | Food, Bed, Toys and Treats for Dogs | Buy Online

Featuring a large selection of dog supplies, we carry every major brand of food, bed, toys and treats for dogs of all sizes and breeds.

don't forget using the plural

irvingw

a) Are you geo targeting in google webmaster tools?

b) Is your site regional and does it include things like addresses from that area?

c) Is your domain a .com or a .co.uk for example?

irvingw

Just a title on the page - what is the value of that page to a user - this is ultimate spam and should be blocked

Hope this helps you out! and if it does please mark answered

irvingw

Did Google WMT send strictlygifts.com a email message saying that they detected unnatural links pointing to the site? What makes you think you are penalized, drop in traffic or rankings?

You don't need to remove the links pointing to your main site you just need to nofollow them BTW

irvingw

Google's take is you're not supposed to do it.Also,

a) make sure the domains are private registration so no one knows who owns the sites

b) put about 2000 words per page on the site, you can get away with a two page site just make sure both pages have tons of unique content

c) link to your site from the web and let Google find the site on it's own, don't submit it to Google's ADD URL tool - some claim that doing so tells Google that this is a new site, if Google finds it on it's own it doesn't make that determination (again can't be proven 100%)

d) this strategy only sometimes works for some reason, don't count on them all ranking.

irvingw

I would take out your branding to trim this a bit - it will hardly ever show in the SERPS anyways. You can use your meta description tag for the branding.

irvingw

don't add folders just for the sake of getting keywords in your URL. keywords in your filename are better for SEO anyway. If anything I would recommend you rename your pages for better SEO accompanied with better optimization on the pages themselves.

that being said, you won't get penalized just for adding a folder it's a combination of overdoing that keyword in your pages that could trigger a penalty

irvingw

Absolutely can cause a penalty. I would take down the dupe site immediately.

Also two sites are against Google TOS. Instead of having a second site, create city/state pages for your main site and get those ranked instead.

irvingw

No you need less instances of keywords, also need to look at the anchor texts on your site and anchor texts and types of links pointing to your site. The combination of these three things being overdone usually results in specific keyword phrases that you were pushing too hard for to get suppressed in the rankings.

you can PM me here at SEOmoz!

remove your links on sites like these, luckily i don't see a ton of incoming links so you may be able to fix this issue a little bit easier.

http://www.buildyourownhouse.ca/links.htm

http://www.qsl.net/vu2sdu/reci.html

irvingw

If the client isn't ranking well for the terms, then it's highly unlikely that making this minor change to the URL will really help out. If the client ranks well, then I would for sure not mess with the URL and risk the loss of any PR. Bottom line is that I would look for other areas to optimize and make the URL change as a last desperate attempt.

irvingw

Your temporary excellent rankings is called a "hello world" ranking algorithm that allows a brand new site to rank for a brief period after it is launched and then it's straight to reality with poor rankings after a couple of weeks, and you need to work for it. Your keyword change most likely had nothing to do with it, a two week old site needs to build up trust in Google and that can take some time.

if this helped you please thumbs up or mark as good answer thanks!

irvingw

that doesn't sound like significant enough changes to cause a 4 position drop, could just be fluctuations.

careful with the directory site link building! don't link to the homepage if possible.

why is the traffic higher, are the visitors going to any specific landing pages that are well optimized?

I would look into noindex,following the tag and category pages, install the yoast SEO plugin for wordpress and it will automatically do a lot of that for you.

https://www.google.com/#q=site:supereyes.com&hl=en&tbo=d&ei=Q0T4UOzGFsOOrgeciIGwDA&start=70&sa=N&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.41018144,d.bmk&fp=86d36ab695df5dc2&biw=1920&bih=937

a little bit of stuffing in the footer, i would remove that:

irvingw

Minimum of 500 words on a page. If the page is informative and not repetitious you can make it as long as you want you'll never get penalized for adding too much good content. Some wikipedia pages for instance are extremely long.

But the reality is if you're not a site with user generated content

a) who's got that amount of time to dedicate to every single page

b) overly wordy pages on a commerce site kills conversion rates

c) chances are that much content could be broken up into a few pages which all target different keywords better

irvingw

I would use the latest version of the code. Google has updated the code so it loads quicker and runs asynchronous.

I quote Google:

The latest version of the Analytics tracking code offers an improved way to track website visitors with Google Analytics. It takes advantage of browser support for asynchronous JavaScript to enhance the speed in which the tracking code is loaded. With the latest version of the tracking code, you can also place the Analytics snippet higher in the page without delaying subsequent content from rendering.

Although asynchronous tracking uses a different Analytics snippet and a different syntax for tracking calls than the traditional snippet, it supports the exact same tracking customizations as the traditional snippet. In fact, the asynchronous tracking syntax is also more flexible than the traditional snippet. For more details, see the Usage Guide.

irvingw

Run don't walk from that offer. They're going to spam on your behalf and probably get you penalized. Also, they could be talking sitewide numbers. One link in a blogroll on a blog with 50,000 pages is technically 50,000 links but Google discounts sitewide links.

If curious ask them to build 10 links for you on a trial and see what they come back with.

irvingw

this tag has been dead for a while. don't waste any time on keyword tags. if the tag is stuffed, includes words not in the page content or has intentionally misspelled keywords because you are trying to be clever, it can cause a drop in rankings.

welcome to SEOmoz, remember if someone takes the time to help you out and gives good advice, give them a thumbs up or mark it as a good answer!

irvingw

Did you update any navigation lately?

Are pages still properly tagged with analytics?

Have you seen a spike in 404 pages?

Are visitors coming from the same places, or are you getting unqualified traffic?

irvingw

If the site is indexed and getting crawled Google is constantly looking at your site and ranking it based upon what it sees.

submit new sitemaps and whatever else you need to do to show google your new content and remove your old content.

irvingw

Yes that huff post page is indexed, it is PR4 and the link is a SEO friendly do follow link

<p><img src="[https://s-s.huffpost.com/uploaded/favicons/s/h/shiftins.com/favicon.ico](view-source:https://s-s.huffpost.com/uploaded/favicons/s/h/shiftins.com/favicon.ico)" align="<a class="attribute-value">absmiddle</a>" height="<a class="attribute-value">16px</a>" width="<a class="attribute-value">16</a>"><a target="<a class="attribute-value">_hplink</a>" href="[http://www.shiftins.com/](view-source:http://www.shiftins.com/)">Cheap Car Insurance California - Shift Insurancea>p>

irvingw

Yes target the homepage and category pages, good internal linking with proper anchor texts. Look into the rel prev and rel next tags instead of canonical as a way of dealing with duplicate content. Make sure all title tags and meta tags are unique. Add enough unique identifiers to ensure uniqueness.

irvingw

if they have any pagerank from links poiting to them you might want to consider 301ing them to the most appropriate pages/section instead of 404ing them.

If you are 404ing them (that is a lot of pages to 404 though) then you can request removal of those URLs in WMT

Make sure you don't have any dead links on your site pointing to these old pages. run a broken link checker to find all broken links on your site and fix them.

irvingw

Oh without a doubt delete them. If you nofollow them you're safe from a linking perspective, but it's still throwing away that page juice, just not passing it to the site.

If it's a sponsored theme you're using there is a possibility that it's an encrypted footer that will break the template if you try to edit or remove the link and you might need to do a little detective work on how to work around that, if that is the case.

irvingw

Good for SEO if the site gets a lot of visitors and you get real engagement and comments. Bad if you let spammy comments slip through, also is very time consuming to sift thru all the spam that gets posted and awaiting approval.

irvingw

Did you get a message from Google warning about unnatural incoming links? Are you sure you were penalized or think you might have been?

Contact the webmaster, it's owned by one entity and have them remove the links. Don't disavow unless you have been penalized.

irvingw

subdomain or different domain it's still an identical site. it would be better to have it on a co.uk domain, i would convince the client to do that - why do they want it on a subdomain?

Anyway, subdomain, main domain in a directory, or different domain. Google will be fine with it as long as one site is geo targeted for the US and the other site is geo targeted for the UK. Duplicate content is filtered not penalized, so it is getting properly filtered this way. One site showing in the US and one showing in the UK.

irvingw

While the engines may be smart to realize it's one of the same, all SEO gurus seem to agree that it's not worth the risk and you should use the htacess to standardize on either using the slash or not. Once decided, make sure all internal links are consistent with your decision.

More discussion can be found here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/trailing-slash-at-end-of-url

irvingw

is the onpage SEO as tight as it can be in terms of targeting? how many words are currently on each page approximately?

irvingw

yea it's fantastic. good work guys! why does my font look different when i type now though?

irvingw

If they were paying attention to WMT they would have seen a "critical" message that the site was blocked right away. Forcing a crawl (crawl all urls) should result in the site getting indexed extremely quickly. Rankings should return to where they were before.

irvingw

The good folks at Yoast created a Wordpress plugin to deal with this very issue:

http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

irvingw

What is your reasoning for wanting to do that?

Your homepage is your highest PR page so you should 301 redirect it to the new homepage and users will get to your site without having to click.

irvingw

I agree, i would ask the company if they have a plug in or some work around. if this CMS doesn't support it, maybe it makes sense to look at a CMS that is more up to date

reviews are in (also microformatting rich snippets will show the stars in search results) - testimonials often seem fake, anyone can write and post anything on their site. with reviews you can see where it is coming from so lends credibility.

irvingw

you always will see differences between analytics tools. it has to do in the way they calculate their metrics. for instance unique visitors are based on how long the cookie lives. Omniture and GA will have different expiration times and therefore report differently. it doesn't matter which you use, just choose one for main reporting and stick with it, since omniture is an enterprise solution and you pay a lot for it i would use omniture for main reporting if i were you.

irvingw

canonical the page to to widgets.php and address the page=all parameter in GWMT URL parameter handling section.

use the rel prev/next tag for paginating pages not the canonical.- but the main widgets page should be canonicalled to itself to prevent this from happening

irvingw

they're linking to casino sites so I would not link to them or even want a link from them.

http://www.myteetimesonline.com/make-your-bets.php

Also, reciprocal links are dead, one way links pointing to your site is what you want.

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irvingw

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