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My site is very young, having only been up for about a month and a half. Despite being nascent we were seeing a ton of organic traffic.

Enter Google Penguin update....

Traffic is down 40% or so over the past week. So, assuming the damage has been done, the question is, what do we do next to start moving back towards where we were? If we're doing everything everything right do we just chalk it up to the fact that our site is very new and stay the course on original content and link building?

I know you can submit your site for reconsideration which is something that we are going to do this week, but I wonder what else we can do to start edging back to where we were pre-penguin update.

Maybe this would be a good Whiteboard Friday topic.

We have a directory that we're building and we're not sure if we should try to make each page an extension of the root domain or utilize sub-directories as users narrow down their selection. What is the best practice here for maximizing your SERP authority?

Choice #1 - Hyphenated Architecture (no sub-folders):

1. State Page /state/
2. City Page /city-state/
3. Business Page /business-city-state/
   4) Location Page  /locationname-city-state/

or....

Choice #2 - Using sub-folders on drill down:

1. State Page /state/
2. City Page /state/city
3. Business Page /state/city/business/
   4) Location Page  /locationname-city-state/

Again, just to clarify, I need help in determining what the best methodology is for achieving the greatest SEO benefits. Just by looking it would seem that choice #1 would work better because the URL's are very clear and SEF. But, at the same time it may be less intuitive for search. I'm not sure.

What do you think?

Thanks Casey. I'm interested see if there is any varying opinion. I've had a few voted in favor of your methodology, but a couple of critics for the alternative.

I think one page with all of the content will work well for us. Plus, the user experience should improve since we won't be having to load a new page each time the user wants to see additional information.

We are building a from-scratch directory site and trying to determine the best way to structure our pages. Each general listing page has four sections of specific information.

What is a better strategy for SEO: Using tabs (e.g. JQuery + CSS) and putting all content on one page (and will all of the content still be indexible using JQuery?) OR creating unique pages for each section.

1. JQuery:  sitename.com/listing-name#section1
2. Unique Pages:  sitename.com/listing-name/section1

If I go with option one, I can risk not being crawlable by google if they can't read through the scripting. However, I feel like the individual pages will not rank if there's a small amount of content for each section. Is it better to keep all the content on one page and focus on building links to that? Or better to build out the section pages and worry about adding quality content to them so that long term there is more specificity for long tail search and better quality search experience on Google?

We are also set up to have "../listing-type/listing-name" but are considering removing 'listing type and just having "../listing-name/". Do you think this more advantageous for boosting rankings?

I know that was like five questions. I've been doing a lot of research and these are the things that I'm still scratching my head about. Some general direction would be really great!

Thank You!