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I think your plan is sound.  Having quality content pages with the newer images with appropriate alt and title text is a good start.  Then you'll just have outrank the other images like you said.

You could also try contacting some the webmasters of other sites whose images are ranking well, and ask them to update their image with the new third generation image, if that image is just as appropriate to their content as the first generation one.  For example, if their post or article is about the product in general, they could update their image of the product for you.  If their post or article is about the first generation product, it wouldn't make sense to update it.  This is the same as when you're link building, and you ask the author of a post or article to change the anchor text of the link they're using to your site.

Also, if your client is very interested in having people see the new images when searching for them in Google Image search now, you can run ads in Google image search.  These ads use a slightly different format than both display or search ads, in that they include an image along with text alongside it.  It's still pretty new, and I think a lot of advertisers haven't tried it yet, so the clicks are relatively cheap for search advertising.

Setting pages to 404 should be enough to remove them after Google indexes your page enough times.  Google has to be careful about this, because when many sites crash or have site maintenance, they return 404 instead of 503, so Google wouldn't want to remove pages from their index until they're sure the page is gone.

Google talks about removing pages from there index here.  The Google Webmaster Tools URL removal tool is only intended for pages that urgently need to be removed, so I wouldn't recommend that.  Google recommends:

• If the page no longer exists, make sure that the server returns a 404 (Not Found) or 410 (Gone) HTTP status code. This will tell Google that the page is gone and that it should no longer appear in search results.
• If the page still exists but you don't want it to appear in search results, use robots.txt to prevent Google from crawling it. Note that in general, even if a URL is disallowed by robots.txt we may still index the page if we find its URL on another site. However, Google won't index the page if it's blocked in robots.txt and there's an active removal request for the page.
• Alternatively, you can use a noindex meta tag. When we see this tag on a page, Google will completely drop the page from our search results, even if other pages link to it. This is a good solution if you don't have direct access to the site server. (You will need to be able to edit the HTML source of the page).

Is there a reason you are 404'ing these pages rather than redirecting them?  If these pages have new pages with similar content, you should do a 301 redirect to keep the link juice flowing and to take advantage of these pages being linked to.  If you do continue returning 404 for these pages (or even if you don't...), make sure your 404 page is a useful one, that helps users find the page they're looking for (Google help article).

Also, Ryan, I'd be interested in hearing the results of using the 410 status code.  I would imagine that status code would do the trick!  I'm surprised I haven't read about this more, or why it's not mentioned in the help file linked to above.

Also, you might consider adding title text as well to your images.  Here's a Search Engine Journal post about it.  The title is less important for SEO, but can enhance the experience users.

If you view the source of your page (hitting cntl +u should do this), and find the image on the page, it should have an alt attribute on it.  For example:

I believe that is commonly done with the meta refresh tag.  From http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection:

Meta Refresh

Meta refreshes are a type of redirect that is executed on the page level rather than the server level (They are usually slower and not a recommended SEO technique). They are most commonly associated with a 5 second count down with text "If you are not redirected in 5 seconds, click here". Meta refreshes do pass some link juice but are not recommended as an SEO tactic due to usability and the loss of link juice passed.

Adam is asking the right question.  On http://eartheasy.com/live_water_saving.htm, I grabbed some text "Many beautiful shrubs and plants thrive with far less watering than other species. Replace herbaceous perennial borders with native plants. Native plants will use less water and be more resistant to local plant diseases."  That text appears on a bunch of sites.  I tried this with several other phrases from different pages on your site, and almost every time several other sites shared identical text to yours.

Google is penalizing you because your content is identical to a bunch of other sites.  The more unique, original content you have, the more you should see your rankings rise.

It does appear that some of the posts are duplicate content, so you should use the canonical tag on those pages. For example, you serve the same post under http://callnerds.com/andrea/understanding-verizons-tiered-data-plans/ and http://www.callnerds.com/blog/att-and-verizon-tiered-data-plans-7132011/.  I would suspect you'd want the main blog to get the link juice and appear in search results, so you'd want to place a canonical tag on the /andrea/ version pointing to the /blog/ version.  I would imagine all her posts duplicate posts on the main blog, so you should add it to all of them.

Andrea's page, http://callnerds.com/andrea/, doesn't appear to be duplicate content of the main blog page http://www.callnerds.com/blog/, so I wouldn't add the canonical tag to that page.  I don't think the content between the two pages is similar enough that the search engines would respect the tag anyway.  That's good anyway, because you want her page to rank when people are looking for her posts.

If you can display the contents of the comments on a page you host, as given in the blog post, there's nothing stopping you from displaying those on a the page below your blog post when the GoogleBot is viewing it.

The implementation should result in a set up where the page for your regular viewers has the blog post, and the iframe with facebook comments.  The page you serve to the GoogleBot (or any search crawler) will have the blog post, but then HTML with the comments, as generated by the script mentioned in the SEOMoz post I linked to prior.

The con he mentioned is what the post was solving.  I believe it's true that content in an iframe will not be indexed with the page it resides on, but in this case, you can get the content out of the iframe, and load it onto your own page.

Matt Cutts posted a video regarding this question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8eQgx-njk4.  The answer is that it's ok to do.

I think the point of the article was that you can serve the actual Facebook comments you get from this script on the page when GoogleBot crawls it, so the actual comments will be on the page and you can get the SEO benefits from the comments. Excerpt:

I was amazed by the simplicity of the code and that no authentication is needed. If you'll examine the code you'll also see that the comments can be styled easily to fit any site's layout. So basically you can now use Facebook Comments Box on your site and serve GoogleBot (or any other crawler/browser agent) with the comments to have them crawled & indexed. Obviously this won't be considered as cloaking as you're serving Google exactly what the users see (just like creating an HTML version for a Flash website).

You can get Facebook comments to be indexable by search engines!  There was an SEOMoz blog post about it not that long ago at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/make-facebook-comments-box-indexable-by-search-engines.  If that's the only thing holding you back, it sounds like you don't have much to lose in trying it out!

Ryan is right... you shouldn't do this.  If you want to help the crawlers find their way through your site, you could submit a sitemap?

I'd just delete that verification meta tag, and from a new Google account, generate a new verification meta tag to add (if that's how you want to verify).  If you already have verified an account you have access to, just delete the meta tag.  Who knows who that's giving Google Webmaster Tools access to... if you hear from someone after you remove it, I guess you'll find out.

This sounds awesome!  It looks like a great topic for a YOUmoz post (hint hint).

I do!  If you log into Bing Webmaster Tools, and go to the Crawl Settings, you'll see a new checkbox at the bottom, with the option "Configure your site to have bingbot crawl escaped fragmented URLs containing #!."  According to the Search Engine Land post here, "It appears as though this means Bing will crawl #! URLs according to the Google standard. The help information hasn’t been updated, so it’s hard to say for sure."

It sounds like this is the option you're looking for?

ref=nofollow is incorrect (according to this).  If it's ignored, it will pass all of its link juice.

Yeah... beyond what I've already said, I don't really know what to do.  A sort of similar question is here, and Thomas makes some good points.  Adding some of the new schema.org markup could help (they have it for products, reviews, blogs, and more).

You can have a page canonical to itself, so if you just add the canonical tags to all the pages, they'll appear on all of masked domains as well.

Thomas is right; if your goal is to get any of the vanity domains on search result pages, the canonical tags will prevent that.  A better set up might be to have the home pages be different (with the reps name and information), and then have the rest of the pages on the site be duplicate content with canonical tags.  To say the sites do not exist isn't really accurate... it just means you haven't set them up yet.

People will see your ads, and then go to your site, or search for it to find more information.  In Adwords, for display campaigns, Google will show you "view-through conversions", which occur when someone sees your ad and didn't click it, but went to your site and converted.  This happens (at least for us) more often that I would have expected.  For some of our campaigns, almost 1/3 of our conversions are view-through conversions.  Google doesn't track this for search ads, but yes, just having your name out there on ads will get people to look at your site, or remember it and search for it later.

It's not getting a boost from the search engine just because you buy their ads... it's because people will remember seeing your ads and then go and search for your site.

That's fine, just rel=canonical all the pages under each salesrepresentative.com to the corresponding company.com pages.  That tells Google that it's duplicate content, and will consolidate all the rankings for those pages under the company.com domain.

• About rel=canonical
• Google Webmaster Blog explaining canonical tags

It sounds to me like you need a sitemap?  If you want to create one dynamically, here's a thread with some info.

You should also set it up in Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools and set them explicitly to not ignore those product parameters in the URL.

I looked a bit more.  If I had to guess why you're being penalized it's because your site doesn't have much in the way of original content.  For example, go to a product page, like this one for a Brother ribbon cartridge.  The description reads "Brother Black Ribbon Cartridge. This brand new Brother 1230 black ribbon cartridge is manufactured by Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). 100% Manufacturer Guaranteed."  If you stick that in Google, you'll see that you, along with every other printer site uses basically the same description, like printert.com, 123cheapink.com, inkcircus.com, etc.

You need to provide original content on your site that doesn't appear as duplicate content to Google.  The blog is a good start.  Having customer reviews, testimonials, and articles custom to your site are also good.

You might try taking a look at your competitors that are doing well in searches, and see what they're doing in terms of original content on their sites.

Usually, what's good for the user is good for Google.  I'm a little confused by how I'm supposed to navigate your site.  There are 3 ways on the page to navigate your site, on the left, top, and right?  There seems to be a lot of redundancy between these.  You could probably consolidate these into one form of navigation?

Also, the links to categories within the expanded top navigation are wrapped in

s.  For example, if you expand Ink & Toner, Brother, Canon, Dell, etc are all in

s.   This is resulting in a lot of

tags on your page.  I'd remove those tags since those elements aren't headers.  It looks spammy to me.

Have you installed Bing Webmaster Tools on your site and looked in there?  There you can see how many pages Bing has crawled and indexed, and submit your sitemap.  You can also submit individual URLs for Bing to index (10/day, up to 50/mo) which should help Bing find your site if it hasn't already.

Here's a similar Q&A post: http://www.seomoz.org/q/canonical-pagination-content.  The answer there suggests adding a view all link, and then setting rel=canonical to all of your paginated search result pages to the view all page.  They also suggest this on the search engine roundtable blog here.  A good point is that since these pages have different search results, if you try to rel=canonical these pages, there's a good chance it'll be ignored.

You need to 301 redirect all these old URLs to their new counterparts.  If you just block them, people who have linked to these pages across the web will be getting 404 pages, so you'll be losing potential customers.  Also, you won't be passing the Pagerank along.

To find out if your site is splitting domains, try going to different pages and seeing if they're served.  For example, go to http://example.com, http://www.example.com, http://example.com/, http://www.example.com/.  These should all end up with the same URL at the top when the page loads.  If it doesn't, that means your server needs to be configured to do these canonical redirects.  Depending on what software you use, this can vary, but the Q&A forum has had a lot of answers related to configuring redirects, so look there, or try Googling it.

I'm not sure it'll make a huge different if you decide to use example.com or www.example.com, but whichever you do choose, be consistent throughout your site.

If you really want to learn to get into the nitty-gritty of web pages, the main tool I use to view web requests, http headers, source, etc is Firebug, a Firefox Add-on. Chrome has something similar, which I think came pre-installed (if you can right click something, and choose "Inspect element", you have it).  To learn it, play around with it a bit.  The HTML tab in Firebug (Elements tab in Chrome) will show you the source of where you're selecting in the page.  The other tab it sounds like you'll be interested in is the Net tab (Network tab in Chrome).  Here you can see all the different files the page is loading, and you can view their statuses, headers, and responses.

Another tool I use frequently in Firefox & Chrome is the Web Developer Toolbar.  It lets you enable/disable a lot of different things (caching, images, CSS, JavaScript), and clear your cache with a few clicks.

Like and share are different.  Sharing will just give you the option to post something on your wall, but you won't "like" it.  Here's an article which should give you some info about implementing share buttons.  From what I've read, it looks like Facebook will be phasing out shares for likes at some point, so who knows how long share will be around.  Share is a little outdated, since when you like something, you also have the opportunity to share it on your wall.  If you're going to share something on your wall, don't you like it?

Huffington Post allows you to do both on their articles. For example, see here.

In response to your reply on Nicholas' answer, I think there is some control by site on how the additional text you can write on your wall when you "like" something.  Maybe there is some psychology involved, where if you click "share", you're more prone to adding a comment about what you're sharing, and with "like", you're less prone to adding text when you post it to your wall.

rel=canonical is more for when there are parameters on your URLs that you can't really do anything about.  When you know one URL is being served, but should be another, you should use a 301 redirect.  So in this case, you should pick which URL you like better, either with or without the trailing slash, and redirect one to the other.  Google treats both of these as two completely separate pages, which is why you're seeing views on one and not the other.  If you can't configure the redirect, then you could resort to rel=canonical.

If you have pages with similar content but not a lot of views, then 301 redirecting that page to another page with more views would be fine.  That'll pass it's pagerank along, and good for people who find that original URL later, because they'll go to an actual page instead of your 404 page.

Here's a link to more info about geotargeting in Google Webmaster Tools.

Also, for other search engines (like Bing), you'll want to set content-language.  Read more about how to do that here.

You don't want to do this in robots.txt.  If you serve pages with these parameters, people will inevitably link to them, and even if they're disallowed in your robots.txt file, Google maybe still index them, according to this: "While Google won't crawl or index the content of pages blocked by robots.txt, we may still index the URLs if we find them on other pages on the web."

This is what the rel=canonical tag is designed for.  You should use that to tell Google the page is duplicate content of another page on your site, and that it should refer to that other page.  You can read (and watch a video) about that here.

A few other things to note for having parameters in URLs:

• In Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools, you can instruct the search engines to ignore certain parameters, so that they'll treat domain.com/topic?keyword and domain.com/topic as the same page (if ?keyword doesn't change the page content)
• You can also place the rel=canonical element on pages.  So you could set domain.com/topic?keyword to rel canonical to domain.com/topic to pass its pagerank along.

The NCAA site does seem to be pretty well put together.  Like you said, their TITLE changes from page to page, which you need for decent SEO.  Also, once you figure that out, you should also be changing your META description tag within the HEAD on each page on your site, so it describes that page you're on.  In the meantime, I would recommend removing your meta description altogether from all of your pages if you can't set it on a page by page basis.  That way, the search engines will try to pick out the most relevant text from your pages (and relating to the user's search query) instead of always using "Auto Insurance from Universal Insurance Group – Trusted. Fast. Service." (also you're missing some punctuation here between Group and Trusted).

Working within this platform, one thing which the NCAA site is doing well,which I think you could try to do is to get that nasty session parameter out of your URLs.  I think you only need that if you're tracking the user's session?  The NCAA site doesn't include it until I click the member login link.  Since the Googlebot won't be signing in, if you can manage to get rid the these parameters when people aren't signed in, that would improve the SEO of your URLs.

The more of these random directories you can get out of the URLs, the better.  So it looks like the way it's configured right now, is the URL doesn't change, except for the WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT parameter at the end, which is setting the content of the page?  The NCAA site is getting the WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT parameter to appear at the end of the URL, like it should be, rather than as a parameter.  That is much more natural, and I would imagine Google rather see keywords in the URLs rather than in parameters in URLs.

Let me preface this by saying I don't have any experience with WebSphere Portal with Lotus WCM.  If you could describe more about what the platform outputs, or know of a site using it, I could take a look.

Non-pretty URLs aren't great, but they're not the worst either.  If you're stuck with 'em, you're stuck with 'em.  According to the SEOMOZ 2011 rankings report, having keywords in the URLs are still pretty important (69.9/100).

One way to work around the non-canonicalization of the URLs is including rel=canonical tags to all of your pages.  That way, when Google comes across a non-normalized URL, you'll have the canonical tag to tell it the right page to pass the Pagerank to.  Provided you always know what the normalized URL is supposed to be for non-normalized pages, this makes it easy to always have the Pagerank going to the right page.  Even if the normalized version rel=canonicals to itself, Matt Cutts gives that the aok (video here).  If you have a procedure that's working to normalize URLs, that's best, since we never know what's going to happen next.

More sources about rel=canonical: Google Webmaster Tools help and Webmaster Central Blog.

Yeah... you'd probably want to redirect those offline advertising URLs depending on the device being used.  Unless your site is primarily mobile, you'll probably want to distribute your regular URLs in offline advertising, not URLs with mobile.example.com.

For usability, you should have links to go between the two version of the site.  What would be even better is if you did this: set a cookie when you change the version of the site you're on, to prevent the redirect in the future.  So if you change from the default version of the site from the version that we think you would want for your device, and come back to that site later, we'll use the version you selected.

For example, if a user prefers the desktop version on their iPad, the first time they go to your site it'll take them to the mobile version.  Once they click the link for the desktop version, they'll always receive pages from the desktop version of your site (for 1 year unless you renew the cookie or they clear their cookies).  This will work even if they click a new link to your site from search result pages.

I don't see how redirecting that domain to your site is going to help your SEO all that much, unless that site had a lot of existing links pointed to it.  People aren't going to link to your pages through redballoons.com; they're going to link to your domain now.  I would be very surprised this would get your from rank #21 to page 1 on the results pages (unless that domain had a bunch of relevant links pointing to it).

If you're building a brand name at your domain now, buying domains with the keywords you're targeting and redirecting those to your site aren't going to help much.  I wouldn't bother.

I can think of one use for buying this domain... if you're doing PPC, you could try using redballoons.com in your display URLs instead of your current domain and see if you get a higher CTR and/or more conversions.

Sure!  Somehow it ate the colon after the https://...

https://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Analytics/thread?tid=22b5ad113c19f2e6&hl=en&start=40

For Analytics it's easy... you can just add your apps e-mail address as an administrator for each profile you want to view. If you want to get rid of access for your gmail account, you cannot delete an old administrator account, but if you switch the user access to view reports only, you should be able to delete the account from your new admin account (see phil fox rose's comment here).

For Webmaster tools, you'll have to re-verify each site with your apps account.  Then you can delete the sites from your gmail account if you don't want them there.

Geotargeting!  Set up Google Webmaster Tools, and do this.  You can set the location to the US there.  For other search engines, like Bing, you can set the content-language attribute in a few different ways (read this).

If you're not going to serve the pages from mysite.com/countryname/, then you wouldn't need to put the canonical tags on.

If you are going to serve those pages, but not link to them from within your site, you might want to add the canonical tags anyway, in case people link to the URLs  under mysite.com/countryname/, so they'll pass their pagerank along.  You should also disallow that directory in your robots.txt, as Google has a way of finding pages and indexing them even if they're not linked to.

I wouldn't expect you to get penalized.  I thought from your original post that the Is the content between the sites different?  If so you shouldn't have anything to worry about.

I don't have an explicit answer to this, but this article discusses these issues and links to several different sources.  In particular, this video with Matt Cutts.  According to Matt, it sounds like it's good to have a different URL like you suggested for mobile sites.

If you have two different URLs, make sure that the regular Googlebot spiders your main site, and Googlebot-Mobile spiders your mobile site.

If you serve your regular and mobile pages under the same URL, then you need to make sure you serve the mobile version to Googlebot-Mobile to get those pages indexed properly.

Hope this helps!

You'll be serving identical content from two different URLs, even though they're on different domains.  It sounds like you'll want www.newdomain.com to do well in it's rankings in its country, and it's probably not as important that www.mysite.com/countryname/ URLs do all that well everywhere else.  If that's true:

1. You should rel=canonical (what's that?) all URLs under www.mysite.com/countryname/ to their corresponding page in www.newdomain.com, so the pagerank will flow to those URLs under newdomain, and you won't have duplicate content issues with the search engines.  Google does support cross-domain rel=canonical tags (source).
2. For newdomain, set up Google Webmaster Tools, and set it so you're geotargeting that country (source).
3. For newdomain URLs, set the Content-Language so other search engines (like Bing) can understand the geotargeting.  This can be done in a variety of ways (source).  We found it easiest to set it on our HTTP headers.

Sorry, I'm a little confused as well.  Why would you want people linking to your RSS feed instead of your original posts?  Why would you even want the RSS feed to be indexed and returned in search results rather than the original posts?  Wouldn't Google want to link people to the original post vs. the RSS feed?  Aren't RSS feeds supposed to be a feed of content already on your site... so I don't see why Google would have much of an incentive to spider it or return it in search results?

It's all about quality unique content.  The reason a lot of .edu's do well is because they have a lot of domain authority and a lot of them have been around for a long time.  The directories that pass good link juice have this going for them as well.  If you create a link farm on an .edu domain, you won't be fooling the search engines.  It'll be a brand new site with no links to it that has no unique content which links out to a bunch of sites which may also be spammy, aka a link farm.

I'm not sure what your goal is with this site.  If your goal in creating the site is to give an SEO bonus to these site you're linking to, I doubt it do any good.  If your goal is to create a site that is a directory that is useful to people, and people start using it, linking to it, sharing it, then it could work.  If your goal is to put up a site that has some links for your own enjoyment, go for it!  If Google thinks your site is a link farm, it's not like they're going to dispatch agents to your house in the middle of the night or anything.

Also, if you haven't yet, you might also want to set up the Google Webmaster Tools.  Once you get re-included, if something like this happened again, you'd see your # of impressions drop drastically from within their search queries report.  If you set up the Bing webmaster tools as well, you could compare the two to see if Google is truly penalizing you.

I just got the new UI today, and you're right, it appears the wonder wheel is gone. Even manually entering the URL to use the wonder wheel doesn't work, so it looks like Google has retired this feature (source).

If you were using it for keyword ideas, I asked my Google reps about using the wonder wheel, and they said that it would be ok, but they recommended that I use the Contextual targeting tool in Adwords instead.  The Adwords engineers over at Google are still working on improving the results that the Contextual targeting tool gives, whereas the wonder wheel is more of a novelty that is not actively being developed.

Like enzogg2 says, work on improving your site.  Certainly there are features you want to add?  And bugs to be fixed?  For example, when I view your site in a window that is less than 768 px wide, the banner links start getting lost on the right (like the contact link).  Also, your home page is trying to grab http://www.findahealthcarejob.com/wp-content/themes/JobBoard/style.php twice and it's returning a 403 status code (forbidden).  Also, your sharing icons in the upper right hand corner aren't positioned quite right in my IE9.

Even though the recipes are the same, I doubt they'd be penalized for having duplicate content.  If the search engine decides that it's duplicate content, it may filter out one or the other, and may knock one page down in the search results.  If your first page of results was all the same page from different domains, the search engine would have failed you.  The duplicate content penalties you're thinking about are more for spammers and spam content, where they're duplicating a lot of content, and doing it intentionally.

In your example, there is a lot else on the page other than the ingredients and the recipes, so that also should mitigate some of the duplication, and they're also laid out a bit differently in the HTML between the two pages, one with divs and one with tables.

Sources:

• [Google Webmaster Central Blog '08](Google Webmaster Central Blog '08 )
• High Rankings Advisor (Jill Whalen) '10