You rank as #1 in Google.com for "refund fx " which seems to be the focus of your home page.

The population of Australia is around 22 million. In comparison the world's population is 7 billion.

When you compare google.com.au to google.com it is a completely different ball game. You can rank #1 in google.com.au but not even make it to the top 200 in google.com.

If you wish to improve your ranking in google.com, you need to sharply increase the quality of your SEO. For example, your pages all show the Australian flag in the upper-left side bar. That doesn't seem like a company who wishes to have a strong international appeal.

Google ignores the hash tag when indexing URLs. You can offer your home page with various versions of hash tags appended to the end of the URL and Google will not mind a bit. It will not case any issue for SEO.

A few more notes:

• Hash tags are used in HTML as an onpage anchor. Wikipedia is a good example. Take a look at the following page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar. If you hover over the HISTORY link in the Table of Contents at the top of the page, notice the URL for the HISTORY link is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar#History. When you click the link, you remain on the same page but move to the History part of the page.

If you search Google.com for "Guitar History" you will notice the WIki page is listed first. (see attachment). The URL offered by Google is the page URL without any hash tag. Google does offer the ability to "Jump to History" which includes the hash tag link. That is a benefit to using anchor text on a page. Otherwise Google does not take the hash tag nor anything after it into account when indexing pages.

Rand offers a short video on this exact topic: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-using-the-hash

I am not familiar with the exclamation point (bang) being used after the hash tag outside of twitter. The standard twitter URLs use it.

Summary - the hash bag is not the reason for your recent drop in rankings.

I am unclear what you mean by "Google still has thousands of the old hashbang (#!) URLs in its index." Can you share an example?

google-hashtag.png

Hello Joe.

I have experienced this issue many times. I believe it is a bug in the mozbar. I have often found the bug resolves itself after a period of time. Sometimes if you reload the page it works correctly, other times not.

The most successful way to resolve it for me is switching from Chrome to Firefox browser. I like the SEOmoz toolbar in FF better anyway.

Would I be ruining my SEO work if I begin to publish blog posts for the same keywords that my content pages target? Am I basically forced to find alternative keywords and only target one page per keyword?

In short, yes.

When Google provides search results they need to search trillions of pages to determine which result is most likely to satisfy a user's query. One of the key components of their algorithm is relevancy. If you have a page titled "chocolate ice cream" and then a blog article with the same title, which result should be returned to a user who searches in Google for "chocolate ice cream"?

If you offer multiple pages with the same keyword focus you run into an issue called cannibalization. You can solve that issue by narrowing the focus of one of the pages. For example, the main page on your site is what I would refer to as "evergreen" content. 10 years from now someone can read that page and the information is likely still valid. Your blog often offers fresh content which is more time sensitive. Some possible topics for an article:

Top 10 Chocolate Ice Creams in the world

Lowest Calorie Chocolate Ice Cream

Chocolate Ice Cream Recipes

I would also recommend being very careful when providing content on two similar keywords. It takes a level of expertise to do it in such a way that it adds value to your site. One helpful step is to use anchor text. If you write an article on "Chocolate Ice Cream Recipes" then one time in the article when you refer to "Chocolate Ice Cream" present it as an anchor link to your main page.

**How do we optimize each product page for 1 keyword phrase.? **

You need to be very careful when attempting to optimize pages for such similar keywords. "manual coldsaws", "manual cold saws" and "affordable manual cold saws" would likely best be presented as a single page optimized for "manual cold saws".

I tried a search for "manual coldsaws" and Google showed results for "manual cold sores" automatically with the option to click a link to search for "manual coldsaws". It does not seem worthwhile to specifically create a page for this uncommon misspelling.

I recognize you are trying to target all the various keyword combinations a user may enter as a search query. My recommendation would be to make a single, high quality page which focuses the target keyword but may include content on slight variations as you feel necessary. The content for a single, high quality web page costs hundreds of dollars to create. A single infographic may cost thousands of dollars. Content is expensive! I would suggest not wasting it on variations which do not offer a lot of value to users.

If you use this idea, you can use anchors and headers to divide the page into sections. Wikipedia does this very well. The main page can focus "manual cold saws" but you can have a section on "best quality" and another section on "most affordable".

It sounds like the sole reason you are considering this method is to adjust for search engines. This is where I fall back to the saying you have heard many times...design your site for people, not search engines.

PS. I checked the traffic for "manual cold saws" and was unable to see any organic traffic numbers for that query. I would suggest it is not a keyword worth spending any extra time on for page variations.

I agree with Alan. The standards are demonstrated on the schema.org website. Here is a link using a recipe as an example of how to mark up a page: http://schema.org/Recipe

Would I be ruining my SEO work if I begin to publish blog posts for the same keywords that my content pages target? Am I basically forced to find alternative keywords and only target one page per keyword?

In short, yes.

When Google provides search results they need to search trillions of pages to determine which result is most likely to satisfy a user's query. One of the key components of their algorithm is relevancy. If you have a page titled "chocolate ice cream" and then a blog article with the same title, which result should be returned to a user who searches in Google for "chocolate ice cream"?

If you offer multiple pages with the same keyword focus you run into an issue called cannibalization. You can solve that issue by narrowing the focus of one of the pages. For example, the main page on your site is what I would refer to as "evergreen" content. 10 years from now someone can read that page and the information is likely still valid. Your blog often offers fresh content which is more time sensitive. Some possible topics for an article:

Top 10 Chocolate Ice Creams in the world

Lowest Calorie Chocolate Ice Cream

Chocolate Ice Cream Recipes

I would also recommend being very careful when providing content on two similar keywords. It takes a level of expertise to do it in such a way that it adds value to your site. One helpful step is to use anchor text. If you write an article on "Chocolate Ice Cream Recipes" then one time in the article when you refer to "Chocolate Ice Cream" present it as an anchor link to your main page.

You rank as #1 in Google.com for "refund fx " which seems to be the focus of your home page.

The population of Australia is around 22 million. In comparison the world's population is 7 billion.

When you compare google.com.au to google.com it is a completely different ball game. You can rank #1 in google.com.au but not even make it to the top 200 in google.com.

If you wish to improve your ranking in google.com, you need to sharply increase the quality of your SEO. For example, your pages all show the Australian flag in the upper-left side bar. That doesn't seem like a company who wishes to have a strong international appeal.