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Have a look at their link profile in http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
their website has a links with the anchor text guitar strings pointing at their site from reasonable domains. How does you site compare in OSE as I am guessing you are looking at beating them?
Also take note that they have used the keyword as the url for that page from what I am seeing in the SERPs. I think this always helps strengthen your pages in the SERPs from experience...
I can't see why 1 and 1 should be causing you issues with getting info on SeoMoz. Have you used their site creator? Have you looked at your sites info through Google Webmaster Tools - does that give you any clues? Obviously SeoMozs index is huge but doesn't contain all sites and as with any search engines index the best way to get into it is to get some decent links pointing at your site which are followed.
Have you started link building and does your site have many links pointing at it? I am guessing you have stuck it into http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
From these results it would appear your site hasn't go many decent links pointing at it, so I would think about a link building strategy. When did you launch your site?
Is your descriptive text very similar and thin?
I have had a similar situation and all I did was take some time to beef up the content of the page and make sure it was unique - this resolved the issue which I believe you have - even though the list of products was the same..
I know the areas are very similar but with some thought you should be able to produce some unique content for it, if your current content is similar and thin?
The first place I would start is by looking at what links you have to that page using OSE - http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/.
If you don't have many decent links to that page you need to start looking at ways you can build these links through methods such as competitions, social media (build an audience/following and build relationships with authority figures for your niche, then you can put your great content in front of them for the exposure and links will come), informative articles about the brand and products, etc. There are lots of decent ideas and guides to building links on here so I won't reiterate them, just search for link building on here.
You also need to look at your domain authority and how many decent links you have for that. Essentially on-page factors only act as a guide to what your content is about but links indicate this information is worth reading so improving you link profile will increase your rankings for keywords.
Remember
Great content + exposure = links
Links give authority and help increase your rankings in the SERPs
Hope this helps
In the past when aiming at local search results for different places I have always created pages for the specific locations + term I am targeting. I have made sure the on page factors are naturally optimised well to incorporate this and I have also made sure the url of the page is location+keyword.html. Then I have created an internal navigation structure that points to this content with the appropriate anchor text. I have then built links that point to the specific location pages in terms of local listings etc. I have found this very successful, and yes I am still having success in a post penguin world, as I haven’t done anything in a spammy over-optimised way. I have not done this in terms of international SEO, but I don’t see why you couldn’t successfully do this on your site.
In terms of whether you should bring your sites under one with sub folders or not I think this article is a very helpful guide for international SEO.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday
Bringing your sites under one domain with sub folders and setting geo targetting in webmaster tools, then building links in the specific country as mentioned by Thomas Høgenhaven in the comments might be a good plan.
Good luck with this - I hope my thoughts might have helped give you some ideas...
As long as the code produced is readable in a web browser then it being bloated shouldn't have much of an impact in terms of SEO. The code bloats only downside is that it might slow the page load which will have impact on SEO. Remember crawlers like Google bot essentially look at the page content in terms of textual content, what labels (alt tags etc), images and links are on there not how neatly it is presented or whether it is valid markup or not. I would take a look at your page speed otherwise I would worry as long as it is able to fulfil all the basic on page requirements such as headers, page titles etc.
Just to reiterate this - I have worked with CMS driven sites that aren't W3C compliant and don't produce the nicest html, but have loaded fast and ranked in the top 3 for competitive terms.
Hi Alex,
This is a good question - if I were you I would look at this whiteboard friday as it gives you insights into all your options for this scenario.
Also don't miss the next to last paragraph on redirection, which I personally avoided when I was in a similar situation to you, due to potential mix-ups. I chose the ccTLD path at the time, though I would heavily consider the subfolder option if presented with this challenge again...
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday
Hope this helps...
Have a look at this - it might give you some ideas in regard to Bing and optimisation
Use canonicalization to resolve this common duplicate content issue.
You need to place the canonical tag pointing to your preferred URL.
See this SeoMoz guide on how to do it -
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content
See
this actually uses the example of capitalization and one page appearing as three to search engines...
Hope this helps!
As far as I am aware Google doesn't index urls with a hashtag as this is pointing to an internal part of the page - essentially it will only index the url without the hashtag, so it isn't creating a new URL. However to be certain of this I would stick a site: query with your url including the hashtag and see if it appears with the hashtag, if, as I expect it doesn't then you shouldn't have an issue with duplicate content under two urls. As far as them being ok in relation to your SEO efforts I don't see why there should be a negative impact as you are essentially making your site more user-friendly and pointing to a specific part of the page that is already indexed - your are not duplicating that part of the page by creating an internal anchor to that specific content.
Just for your confirmation I can tell you I have a page that uses an internal anchor (#) and when you do a site search in Google this page doesn't appear. When you search for it without the # it does...
No problem - an SSL isn't going to prevent the problem you have, but that is why I mentioned going down the route of an SSL with extras such as daily malware scanning and weekly vulnerability assessment.
Verisign would have most likely alerted you to the potential issue before hand so you could have fixed the vulnerability. Also if your site is compromised with malware it will alert you, so you can take immediate action.
As far as SSL goes; now your site has been compromised and you are acting as a travel agent you want to make sure your pages are as secure as possible and a Verisign logo will help customers trust in entering data into your site.
You will still need to make sure that you employ the help of someone who is knowledgeable on the CMS that you are using to make sure it is setup to the optimum not leaving easily exploited windows open, so to speak.
Have you considered verisign - http://www.verisign.com/ and one of their SSL solutions, with extras such as
http://www.symantec.com/verisign/ssl-certificates/secure-site-pro-ev?inid=vrsn_symc_ssl_SSPEV
I would start by saying do you have a strong email list of customers - if so create a nice eye catching email asking them to follow you. You are more likely to be successful if you give them an incentive/ good reason to follow you.
As simple as following other people and thanking those that follow you with a tweet will lead to more follows, although this is a slow method.
Don't write off hashtags just take time to research the most effective one in relation to your field - this does include SEO as a niche.
Use the newly integrated followerwonk to identify relevant people and authorities to follow and mark out as those best to engage with. Building you relationship on twitter with these authorities will lead to more followers through the exposure of your interaction with them on their feed to their social following.
One final point - make sure your site has twitter social integration, making it easy for content to be tweeted and also making it easy to follow you.
Hi - for a guide on video SEO I think this is an excellent place to start and it helped me a lot with my approach to it - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo
Big credit to the author - Phil Nottingham from Distilled
Hi - did you mean a guide like this one
Link removed due to notification of it possibly containing links to a site that has malware - better safe than sorry.
I will come back to you shortly...
Well I haven't had an issue with duplicate page titles and if you include your brand name in the format I mention and the rest is unique then there won't be an issue with Google and duplicate titles, in my opinion. Also if you are still unsure start looking at major well ranked sites and how they have most pages branded without this problem. Take SEOMoz's titles for instance, they use this format effectively without issue...
Hi Shaun
If you look at Dr Petes response to a similar recent question SEOMoz transfer less PA through 301 redirects, especially in the short term.
You need to remember that PA is based on your links and the link juice they pass and 301 redirects pass around 90 - 99%, plus the fact that it can take sometime for them to catch up although I know you say it has been 2 months.
Has your redesign involved a restructure that might have changed the flow of link juice - also mentioned in the response by DR Pete in the below Q&A.
See here - http://www.seomoz.org/q/transfering-page-authority
Yes you want to make each page title and content unique with the keywords that best describe the content of that page. If you can't create a unique page title then you need to ask yourself this -
why do I need two pages that are titled the same, could I just have them as one strong page?
I always include the brand name at the end of my title -
keyword/description | brand name
is the format I use successfully - brand name at the end of the title for branding/recognition purposes.
For a decent guide on title tags see SeoMoz's guide here - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag
No problem!
Well I would imagine you are targeting some specific area/keywords with each blog post, so it would be a good idea to get them to link to the post itself. I have also found that this is more often the case. Obviously you will end up picking up links to both through these methods and you should see an increase in both page and domain authority. This will lead to improved rankings and more traffic.
Good luck 
Hi Justin,
Your ultimate goal would be to get them to link to your site, so in your case the blog entry, but it would still be good to encourage some interaction on your blog.
If you have a blog you could look at identifying active followers in your niche and getting them to produce a guest post for you. This will bring your blog to the attention of their audience, as well as yours.
You need to work out ways you can get this large audience to engage with you and your content. Tweeting links to decent content with something that will grab their attention and get them to visit your site for this content will help gain retweets. Through such exposure you are likely to get more interaction and links.
You might want to think about incentivising your followers to retweet and interact with your site.
As you are probably aware
great content + exposure = links
Social media is a great platform to build an audience and interact with them to form relationships, so that when you have great content you can put it in front of them and gain this exposure!
This Youmoz post today is a very good example of getting people to engage with your brand using such methods
A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect and passes 0% link juice, where as a 301 redirect is permanent, so passes around 90-99% of link juice, so you are correct in thinking you should go for the 301 to make the link juice flow.
For further info see here - www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection
I wouldn't use meta keywords either, as there is no real value in them in terms of ranking - Bing actually uses them to help identify spammers. As Moosa mentioned; if you put too much effort into them it is a quick and easy way for competitors to identify what keywords you are targeting.
I think this recent Q&A would be of interest to you -
http://www.seomoz.org/q/meta-keywords-should-we-use-them-or-not
Yeah, if you have got your target audience right and taken time to build a relationship with appropriate influencers I think you are on to a winner in any niche...
I would create a how-to section with ideas and examples/guides of how to use your products. You could also create some videos of these.
I would also look at **integrating social media into your site, especially the homepage, **and building a following through the main social networks, possibly pushing offers and discounts exclusive to these. A good social following will allow you to put your new content in front of your social network and help gain more links from this.
I would also think of doing some sort of competition for people to create displays/use your decorations and snow, then post these on your site offering a prize to the winner.You would want to put a poll in place for these and encourage visitors to vote on their favourite.
Hope this helps!
I don't know whether it will ever be king of SEO, but in terms of gaining exposure for your content then I think it is very important and this will keep increasing as do the number of active users on the main social networks.
Links are still the currency of the realm and social media is a bank - you need a good relationship with the bank of social media in order to make a withdrawal!!
I think this should help you - https://pro-sitemaps.com/
I have used the tools to generate sitemaps on websites in the past and found it very handy. The pro service sounds like what you are after...
I would personally go for the domain.com/lawn-mowing.html structure, less clicks to get to your information and easier from a crawl perspective, the extra category page seems like you would be having a page for a pages sake and you would just be burying your important content deeper in the site. Having a menu that has these ten services at the top level is much more efficient site architecture in my opinion. Obviously if it starts getting to much you would have to think about categories.
Remember you always want the minimal amount of links between the homepage and any other page on the site. For a small site you can have one level on your menu and provide relevant anchor text in the navigation on each page to the corresponding page. Obviously for any bigger site you would want to implement a pyramid structure to order the information efficiently.
Other than creating your 301 redirects on the two domains there is nothing that you should need to do with the domains themselves.
I would point both homepages to the new homepage and I would set the change of address for each of the old sites to the new one in their Google Webmaster Tools.
I think you will find this very informative about 301 redirects (from Google's very own Matt Cutts) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA
When you create the 301 redirect are you pointing the whole of the old domain at the new one or are you breaking the redirect down, pointing the old pages at new corresponding ones?
If you are going to redirect your second old site I would point the old content at new corresponding content using a 301 redirect, so that your practice is less likely to look manipulative to Google. In the past spammers have tried to take advantage of 301 redirects from multiple domains, and as such, if I was in your position I would be careful and break it down. I think you could potentially be on to a winner as you say both sites that your are redirecting targeted different keywords, so you can point it to different sections of content (pages).
Obviously a 301 redirect passes link juice from the old domain to the new one and so it will have an impact on your sites ranking, if the old site had a strong link profile. In theory this would then help your sites ranking, bumping it higher depending on your competitions strength (DA and PA).
I completely agree with the fact that those of us that do this everyday aren't the best to ask in regards to this, though our office is a mixed bunch, not all marketeers.
In general I have noticed that more and more users that I have come across are becoming more aware of what they are clicking on in the SERPs. They are filtering results based on their own judgments, not just trusting the search engines as they may have done in the past. Though as you say with the growth of the last five years there is probably one hell of a lot of people that trust in the SERPs whatever they serve for a query. In relation to this suspicion; I think page titles and descriptions influence this more than EMDs.
It would be an interesting study to see the impact of hyphens(the amount) in EMDs and their click through rates from the SERPs.
As we have both attested, though, we have had success with EMD with hyphens, though this is obviously down to many factors in relation to SEO strategy we have employed, not just a good domain.
Thanks for your input it is very valuable.
Here is to the day that we don't have to make a domain registrar rich!
Very interesting response Robert, with some very good and valid points - though I think you would want a expert in order to carry out that change, although that might not be the right place to find them - a very nice example of why hyphens, in the right situation, are very valid.
When you have worked with hyphens and domains what is the largest number of hyphens on an EMD you have worked on?
This has set off an interesting discussion in the office with the feeling that a domain with multiple hyphens is less trusted by the majority here when they appear in the serps, therefore receiving less click-throughs.
In general do you think users have been educated to be suspicious of domains that appear long and and exact match with hyphens and that is why it is believed to be spammy by some?
The most I have worked on in regards to EMDs with hyphens is one and this dominated the SERPs for the targeted terms.
Do you think EMDs with multiple hyphens possibly set off alarm bells with Google in regard to over-optimization rather than efficient labelling of a resource online, in particular since Penguin?
Hi Rohan,
You can use hyphens in sub-domains, however when using hyphens in relation to any domain or sub-domain I tend to stay away from them, if possible, as they tend to be related to spam practices, especially with multiple hyphens. I think you will find this SeoMoz best practice in relation to domains a good guide as to what is the best tactic to take - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain
Hope this helps
Hi Peter - having a quick look at your backlink profile it would appear that they are all no followed so they are not passing any link juice - essentially worthless in the eyes of the search engines in terms of increasing your domain and page authority. I would really work on building a decent internal link structure - some proper navigation that is the same on each page, with relevant anchor text for your internal menu links. I would also set to work on building up your link profile and start looking for some relevant links that don't have no follows on them so that you start having some link juice passed to your site. If you go about this properly you should find that your page index issues will go away.
Also look for high quality links be careful with blog and forum comments as these are spammy and hold little to no value in terms of links and link juice. Ini the post penguin world I would also be careful not to over do your anchor text from external links.
Hope this helps...
No problem - you could place canonical tags on all the http:// pages to the https:// -
have a look at this guide from SeoMoz -
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization
I think you should also give this recent Q&A a read as it is very informative in regards to what you are looking at -
http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-content-and-http-and-https
Hope this helps
Link profiles are all about looking natural and that is what Google is looking for especially after Penguin. If it is natural and beneficial to your visitors to link back to the big company then do so, as this will help your link profile in the eyes of the search engines.
Check this whiteboard friday out by Cyrus Shepard - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/external-linking-good-for-seo-whiteboard-friday
I have seen this happen when sites new sites initially submit a sitemap for a new site most of the pages are indexed. However over time this drops and is usually down to the perceived value of the pages that are no longer indexed. Are these pages thin on content? Do they have any external links pointing to them? Do you have a good internal link structure between all your pages? A new site is more vulnerable to index fluctuations due to factors such as this and the fact that they are likely to have low domain and page authority. I would suggest you look at the factors mentioned above and also make sure you have all the on-page factors covered; making sure they are unique. If no of the above, the other times I have experienced a sudden drop in pages indexed has been when a new enhancement has caused page load to decrease? What has your traffic levels been like since this change – up, down or constant?
This is a good question, I would consider going down the route of making your transactional/payment pages https and then anything else http - anywhere your customers have to enter their sensitive data should be https. The one thing to remember with https is that it potentially causes duplicate content from a search engine point of view:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-content-and-http-and-https
Have a look at this interesting article in relation to https and why everyone isn't using it:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/03/https-is-more-secure-so-why-isnt-the-web-using-it/
Remember more importance has been placed on page load times since Panda so people are looking to shave every ounce of time they can in relation to load times, this also improves user experience.
I hope this has helps give you some more insight into HTTPs and whether it would be best for your site to be all this protocol or just part of it.
William is right meta keywords is essentially a worthless tag that is no longer used by most search engines, as it was a method abused by spammers in the past (in the days of the meta crawler when you could type any term in and still be served porn). Bing still takes them into account as a signal for spammers not ranking!
I always look at competitors meta-data in order to give me a quick overview of their targetted terms, so I would think about ditching them if I were you, though don't panic if you don't., just don't give precious time to them..
Hi Robert - how true lol - we must have been writing it at the same time as when I clicked submit your reply was already there! At least it qualifies this answer with two of us in agreement
I take it you mean is it better to use a subdirectory on your domain or a sub-domain in order to build your sites authority - I would go with the subdirectory as link juice isn't passed to sub-domains in the same way. Therefore building your content in a subdirectory will also help your new pages ranking being part of a domain that has authority. Quite often Google can treat sub-domains as separate sites so they have to build their own authority.
Have a look at this article - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites
This might be a much simpler solution for you -
http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/articles/301-redirect-IIS.asp
This might also be helpful as installing a form of ISAPI rewrite module would also make the solution quicker and more simple than what it sounds above.
http://forums.iis.net/t/1176085.aspx
Hope this might help..
Hi Ray
I would look into fixing this issue by placing a 301 redirect from one version of the page to the other using a method such as .htaccess depending on your server hosting. You also need to make sure all your navigation points to the page that isn't being redirected.
Look at my answer at the bottom of the Q&A from a few days ago addresses this issue, the implications and how you can fix it easily - http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate...
Having two versions of your homepage is likely to cause dilution of your sites authority in the search engines. I have seen cases where both versions have links and so you are weakening your overall potential of what is essentially one place to point links to.
This should help!
Are you by any chance using relative urls for your navigation? I think this issue will be down to your navigation/internal link structure, but I would need to see your site to tell your for sure.
Hi Bob
Have you seen this answer to a similar question by Gianluca posted this year - http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-content-on-multinational-sites
I was going to give you some input on this but who better to answer this...
I have a website with two ccTLD that have the same content but are targeting their own countries - I haven't found issues with ranking myself and I think Google recognises that they are sites for the same country working in different markets and so are less bothered about duplicate content in my opinion.
Did you by any chance send your link to this website in an email? I have seen this before when a site has copied a piece of code from outlook - it is a security feature in outlook to add this blocked::. It shouldn't have any impact on your link juice from this link, it is not the same as nofollow. Though for piece of mind I would email them and ask them to remove that piece of the code if you are not happy...