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If you have a static site with twenty pages that doesn't get new pages added very often then yes, a site map probably isn't of a whole lot of use if your website has good architecture.

However, if your site is 30,000 pages and gets new content added regularly, then an xml sitemap is useful to make sure that the engines know about all of your pages.

Using multiple sitemaps can be useful to help you diagnose what type of content Google is crawling best. A hypothetical example is that you have a large site where you a) sell baking supplies b) have recipes and c) have user profiles that you want indexed. You could submit a site map for each area (then a master sitemap that lists each of the sub sitemaps).

In Google Webmaster Tools, you get a report that says how many pages you submitted for each site map, and how many of those pages are indexed. using the above setup, you might find something like:

baking supplies has 50 URLs indexed out of 2000 submitted
recipes has 10,000 URLs indexed out of 11,000 submitted
users has 500 URLs indexed out of 1000 submitted

At a glance, you can tell that something is up with the products you're trying to sell and that Google isn't indexing that section very well, and you know to focus on that section, and maybe there's a bug in the code that put a noindex on most of the pages on accident.

Does that help?

Roger, search the Q&A system for Magento, as there have been a couple of others discussing that software and its merits. Two threads that might be of use are:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-is-the-most-seo-friendly-ecommerce-cms-platform-available-today

http://www.seomoz.org/q/need-advice-re-selecting-an-ecommerce-platform

Bozzie311, I agree with Roger totally in that Wordpress and its plugins for ecommerce are often quite inadequate when it comes to an enterprise solution. On Strike Models I run Wordpress and Foxycart, and even with just a few hundred products (with many of them being nearly identical, such as ship plans for different ships) I know I'm outgrowing that solution.

My hunch, and it's only a hunch, is that it relates to their URL requirements that the URL has to be dedicate to an article. An index.html page is usually not a page that would be dedicated to one individual news story. See http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=68323 for their URL requirements.

Anything change in the past week?

We've announced the transition, so I can post the URL here. It's http://rcnavalcombat.com/.

We're running out of HDD space on the current virtual server, so I'm shopping for a larger package, and will be setting up the new server with the latest in DNN and AF, tweaking things the way I want, and importing the existing site (and rinse and repeat about five times to get bugs worked out I imagine) then going live with the upgrades on the new server.

Has there been any progress on your site's rankings?

The non-www version has dozens of pages indexed in Google when you use [site:sarahhueniken.com] as the query. Open Site Explorer does show links from your home page and from external pages into other pages within the site, if you select links from all pages to pages on the root domain.

Wissam beat me to the link to SERoundtable. I quote that one at least once a week in here -- it's happening to a lot of people.

And it would also violate a couple of the terms of use of TripAdvisor, as they specifically prohibit copying and scraping of their content. You're likely to encounter the same problems with duplicate content and copyright in other similar sites, too.

In Rand's "The Story of SEOmoz post", the marketing section bullet point six references Wistia. "We recently switched our hosting provider to a company called Wistia, if you are doing online video, I think they are phenomenal. They do all the good SEO, the XML video sitemaps stuff for you, it is really good."

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-story-of-seomoz

It's also in point number 6 on the following post, and includes a link to a sample report. "Wistia is video hosting on steroids. Not only does this video hosting platform support HTML5, which makes your videos viewable on a slew of non-Flash enabled devices, but the platform is inherently designed for SEO."

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/top-10-web-apps-we-love

One thing to look at is Outwit Hub for Firefox. It might be able to help with that. It can scrape data from a page and do a lot with it. http://www.outwit.com/products/hub/. Don't know that it meets all of your needs, but I also haven't seen a response with anything better at the moment.

Rik, do you have any information about business versus individuals? And what country are you referring to?

At the very least, you'd want to have this covered in your privacy policy, and make sure (like Adam points out) that you're not violating any other policy by mixing data.

You might be surprised at the amount of content you do already have, but don't think of as content. Things like:

• Brochures and flyers that explain your business that you have in your lobby or you mail out to people.
• Outgoing emails to potential/existing customers, where you are answering the same questions over and over.
• Telephone scripts for inbound or outbound marketing.

Look around for what types of unique things you already have developed outside of the web, and see if you can use that on the web. You've already done the work involved in vetting the content, etc. Now let it work for you, and have people be able to find that answer on your website, without having to write the same email for the 50th time.

I myself don't use Google Places, as we don't have a storefront, but these SEOmoz resources should be a good starting place for your first question.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-places-seo-lessons-learned-from-rank-correlation-data

http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/50586/google-places-strategy

http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/50621/google-places-optimisation

And site speed is based off of those users with Google Toolbar installed. A tool like Firebug with Yslow can help identify things slowing down your site, and can give you another view of your site speed.

After looking at your site, I have a couple of questions and suggestions about the site in general. Remember, it's not just rankings, it's also visitors and conversions and visitors trusting your site.

1. The latest Open Site Explorer crawl is showing only 13 different domains linking to you, and not all of those are relevant (such as the five-page skylifeguard.com site that links to STD tests, XBox 360 cheats, and a couple of dozen other sites including yours.

2. Remove that pop-up! When i try to view another page on your site (not trying to leave the site), I get a big window that asks me if I'm sure I want to leave the page. It's not helping your users have a positive experience.

3. Is the blog content unique? I'm seeing what looks like the same content on several other blogs. Also, the "223 comments" next to a blog post but the message of comments being closed and no comments being shown is confusing.

4. If you haven't yet, verify the site in Google Webmaster Tools to look there for any messages from Google regarding the site, and to see more information about the site.

5. There have duplicate content within the site. There are twenty pages that appear to be identical, except for the city being targeted.

In Open site explorer, you can put in a URL for a specific page, and it defaults to showing backlinks for just that particular page, not the whole domain.

Alan, have you tried contacting the help desk about this? They'd want to know about this as well in case it's a problem on their end.

http://seomoz.zendesk.com/home

I'd say continue contributing unique content and link building from relevant sites, and hang in there a few weeks. The changes can take time to show up, and I am glad to see that some rankings for words important to you have improved.

I'd go with the second, again because you don't want to look keyword-stuffed, and the second option is shorter, which helps when you're wanting to share your URL in social areas and if people are typing in your URL.

I've used that sitemap strategy before (a separate sitemap for the different major areas of the site) and had good success with that. I'm going through GA and taking a look at the pages with the most visits and making sure those pages don't have glaring errors for a human or bot visitor, such as missing/mis-sized images, horrid misspellings, etc.

Do you have any advice regarding modules to use or avoid?

More of a general forum question than a DNN question, I'm wondering what the schools of thought regarding changing or cleaning up thread titles are. Do you ever go back and make things more clear, such as changing "a noob question" to "a noob question about [subject]", or standardize thread titles (in a product review section for example).

Does anyone have resources or forums where forum managers can go to answer this type of question (about any changes made to UGC)? I'm wondering where other forum mods hang out.

Check in Open Site Explorer. If I guess your site correctly, it looks like you have only five linking root domains, and one of those is a site-wide footer link from an unrelated site. More links from on-topic sites would certainly help. With OSE, you can add in a competitor's URL and look at their backlinks and find good places to start your link building campaign.

Again, if I guess your site correctly, it does look like a nice site, good content that hasn't been scraped elsewhere, etc. I don't see anything headsmackingly obvious there.

And as a side note, I sympathize with you on the gun laws. Our business involves RC warships that shoot BBs and ball bearings at each other, and there are many countries that just can't be involved in our sport.

I agree with the page speed comment, they have been known to slow down sites.

As a user, I get annoyed with an addthis-type widget that pops up with 50 social networks that I can like or submit to. If you are going to use one of those, take a few extra moments to look and include just the ones your users are likely to use

You might look at this question regarding ecommerce. http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-is-the-most-seo-friendly-ecommerce-cms-platform-available-today

In the answers, there is someone using Magento with 60,000 products between two sites. Speed has been a large problem, though it looks like a recent update has helped. You might contact that poster, as it looks like s/he could offer a lot of first-hand experience.

SEOmoz staff and associates do monitor the Q&A and often respond. I don't know the answer to this question, but I'll get someone who does know the answer to come in and contribute, as I'm sure others would like to know the answer. If you sent a tweet to @seomoz they're also likely to respond there.

On Monday Google announced they're taking the Panda update to English-language Google searchers worldwide, not just in the US, and that they've also made other updates that affect about 2% of US queries. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/04/high-quality-sites-algorithm-goes.html

New sites can fluctuate, usually getting an initial boost then settling out a bit. In your case, launching right before a couple of major algorithm changes may have made for even more fun.

Can you give us any details about your site? If not the URL, can you give us location of the site and type of site? Is it a forum? A blog? A small business? Original content? User reviews? etc.

Have you looked in Google Webmaster Tools to see if there are any messages or information for you there?

I don't have experience in the local arena, but I have heard good things about Get Listed (http://getlisted.org/), and in general it's a good thing to have some way to make sure that your NAP (name, address, phone) are in a consistent format across all of the different online listings.

The URL is in the index, it just doesn't have a meta description or cache link displayed. I did a search for ["Finding the Right Cremation Urn" site:flowerpetal.com] and that page does show up in the results.

It doesn't totally answer your question, but at least the page itself is indexed and this can be a starting point for further investigating the question.

I use the redirection plugin for wordpress to manage this. I personally use it to take care of another site I have redirected to my current site, but don't have access to the .htaccess file, and use it to take care of pages from the old site that don't exist on this site. It has a handy 404 log you can use too, and create redirects right from the 404 list. This might work for your old URLs that were renamed.

Did this ever get resolved? If so, what was the result and do you have any idea what caused it?

I'm in the process of buying and running an existing forum that is running on DotNetNuke 5.2.0 and Active Fours 4.1. As part of the transfer, I'm asking that the site be upgraded to the latest version of DNN and AF 4.3. AF 4.3 has SEO-friendly URLs instead of the current long, ugly default URLs, and I'm looking forward to implementing that feature.

My specific question is:

What would you do to prepare for this upgrade in terms of the content, especially related to the URL changes?

I've gone into Google Analytics and downloaded content by page title, exported the first 1000 results, and put those titles into Word and corrected spelling errors in the title so URLs will be based on correct spellings.

General background:

• The site is not currently monetized, and there will not be an initial focus on monetization and likely only smaller efforts (affiliate Amazon links in a resource section) in the future.
• The site is free for users.
• I'm fine with taking a hit in organic traffic in the short term. About 1/3 of the traffic is from search engines right now, and less than 30% of the visitors are new visits.
• The site is going to continue much the same as it has until now. Same moderators, same purpose, same skin, etc.
• I have access to GA, site is verified in GWT, need to verify in Bing, and I do have root access to the server.
• I've already started working on image file sizes, both of user-submitted images and site-related images like the header.
• Until now, I have no experience with DNN or AF or any of the extensions (and am appalled at the price and lack of features of some of those extensions, compared to what I'm used to for WordPress).

More general questions:

In terms of SEO, I'm intending to treat the upgrade of the forum with the friendly URLs as a re-launch. I'm wanting good URLs, put in a site map, fix non-www to www, etc. When I start making the changes and submitting the site map and generally drawing Google's attention, I want Google to like what it sees, and have as much optimized as possible when googlebot comes around. My goal is to draw more targeted visitors from search that are interested in the content in the site.

What other suggestions do you have for the site prep, both from being a forum in general and specifically on DNN/AF?

I'm not putting the URL out just yet, as we haven't announced to the users the change of ownership is taking place.

Thanks everyone!

Did any of this get cleared up when your impressions started showing for your UK account by some wild magic chance, or is this still an issue?

All of the major engines say paid doesn't influence organic, so not advertising less on Yahoo/Bing shouldn't be a factor there.

Bing has a lot of good features in their Webmaster tools. Have you verified your site and looked in there yet?

I'm not sure if this meets your needs, but it is something to look at if you haven't seen it already.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/xml-sitemaps-for-videos/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/flv-embed/

What is your geography? North Dakota versus Los Angeles also makes a difference with this question.

What time frame are you looking at? Month over month? Year over year? Are there seasonal trends that may account for the change? The changes in domain using the redirect can have temporary drops in traffic as well.

In your analytics, look at various segments. What does the traffic look like from your target countries? How is traffic from each specific search engine? Is it search traffic that has declined? Or direct traffic? Or referral traffic? Or all of the above equally?

Is there anything of interest in Google Webmaster Tools?

I would still look at your image size while you waited -- getting the load time down can only help things.

Anna, were you able to figure this out? If not, we're happy to help if you can give us some more details, examples, or a URL.

It's not a diagram, but this post is a good introduction to how to start building links.

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

I don't have figures or the first-hand experiences, but because there haven't been any others chiming in, I wanted to offer links to recent conference coverage about ratings and reviews. The session did talk about the reviews and stars in Google. If you contacted the speakers, they might be able to give you some more information.

SMX West 2011 session coverage by Lisa Barone:

http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/ratings-reviews/

Rhea Drysdale's presentation at that session, including some ranking factors.

http://www.slideshare.net/rdrysdale/smx-west-2011-ratings-reviews-reputation-their-growing-impact-on-search

Following up here -- did this answer Dave's question?

It's looking like others may be copying the first paragraph or two of your content, then linking back to you. diamondweddingringsets. org/jewelry/wedding-jewelry-shopping-in-houston is one example, and most of the duplicate content I've seen has been on that domain.

Did the .htaccess information answer your question, or do you still need some more help? I don't know your domain, so it's hard to know if you were able to get it implemented. =]

I have no experience with Majestic SEO, but I believe it has some of this capability.

What about a tool that allows you to change your IP address to a different location so you can check rankings that way? Or are you ideally looking for an automated tools?

Thanks for the report back. It's always helpful to have data points about how long it takes for this type of thing to come through.

I wouldn't want 300 casino and body part enhancement blogs linking to my site, but in general it's not a problem. Jen Lopez has mentioned my business (RC model warship combat boats) with a link in coverage on the SEOmoz blog in relation to a wrap-up post on an SES we both attended. I'm not going to turn down that link. A lot of the top links to our business in OSE are from SEO sites, as I usually liveblog a couple of conferences a year.

Would I intentionally go out and try to build links from someone with a blog about fruit tree care as opposed to spending the same time and effort building links from a blog about WWII model ship plans? No, not at all.

Have your rich snippets displayed yet, and/or have you gotten a response in the Google Webmaster Forums about this?

I can't see why there would be a penalty, but if you give us an example of the code or plugin/solution you're using, we can research it a little and see if there are any problems.