Welcome to the Q&A Forum

The two shouldn't be interchangeable, both should be in different formats and writing style.

If you do want to repurpose it, as Clare said, make sure that it is unique and would avoid a duplicate content penalty. Most good blogs won't accept it if its a duplicate of a previous press release.

Check out this post on the subject

Make sure your internal links to the landing pages have the correct, distinct anchors.

No, you're fine.

It is usually best to keep the number of links on a page low so that you can direct users down a specific conversion funnel. However, this varies from site to site so it may be better to make many sub-navigation options.

Test, test, test. No way to know for sure without testing.

My guess is that it would still increase CTR and trust as there is an image of a real person (hopefully CEO or someone else influential) that would stand out in SERPs. For personal training, I think it would work really well seeing as there will be an actual person working with whomever signs up for the training sessions.

Looks much cleaner already

Shouldn't affect your rankings. If you want to keep the vids on the page, popular maneuver with ecommerce sites is to add content (and/or videos) into a drop down div. i.e. a hidden div that opens up when someone clicks "read more" or the like.

Try this

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Your color scheme is not doing you any favors. Red is supposed to make certain elements stand out, I feel like this whole page is yelling at me. Try to keep your color scheme to two/three colors + 1 call out color.

Suggest a few top sellers, preferably some that you carry in many sizes. As Kevin mentioned, filters would help people sort out exactly what they need.

The connect with us looks bad and is in a prime location. I'm sure this isn't your CTA for the page so I would move it towards the bottom of the page. Can use this place for the filters.

The "Plastic Storage Bins" sidebar just has the model number as a title and the price. Check your analytics to see how many people actually click on that. My guess is slim to none. Its non-descriptive and not relevant to the page. Instead, highlight 3 "top sellers" for the category they are currently viewing or something.

I would move the text below the products as they should be the main focus of the page.

The right sidebar videos are also out of place.. I highly doubt anyone would press play on one of three random videos that are 150px wide, with no titles.

There are many things you can do to improve this page.. main thing is that it is very busy and gives little direction to the visitor. Check out analytics and install something like inspectlet or clicktale to view how visitors interact with the page.

Cheers,Oleg

You will lose some link authority that comes with 301 redirects but if the new domain is worth the branding and potential gain of future backlinks, you should go for it.

As BeardoCo said, you need to replicate/recreate the posts from the first two sites onto the third and have individual, page specific redirects set up. This would conserve as much relevancy and link authority as possible.

Also take note that your traffic will most likely tank for 2 weeks while G deals with the site transition. Don't panic, rankings will return within 3 weeks.

Make sure you tell google you changed domains and set up 301 redirects as soon as you do that. Otherwise, you can get hit with a penalty for creating too many pages too quickly + content is duplicate from the other two sites.

Good luck!

Hmm, I think you created a new page via Google Local instead of reclaiming the existing business page.

Go to https://plus.google.com/pages/create > select "Local Business or Place" (your current one seems to be a "Company, Institution or Organization") > Enter "(604) 227-3883" and select the correct page to merge.

Take a look at this.

Basically, go to create a local business page via Google Local... enter in the phone number of the existing business page (it should appear).. and verify it.

Use something simple like "Contact BRAND" and "Register for BRAND"

They should have a title tag (meta desc wouldn't hurt either), even if you don't want them to rank.

Looking at your profile, looks like you built a bunch of spammy links. If you had PR previously, then you were probably hit with a penalty. Check your GWT for a letter.

I recommend doing some serious link removal.

-Oleg

Hah, reading my daily dose of news and this came up.

"If we've seen a URL once, we're likely to retry it again and again, especially if we should run across new links to that URL. This isn't something that you really need to worry about, it's absolutely fine and even expected that a website returns 404 for URLs that don't exist. Assuming these are URLs that you don't want to have indexed, then these 404 errors will not negatively affect your site's performance in search. Having 404s is fine." - John Mueller

http://www.luckygemstones.com/anypage.htm" />

Yes, add the www. because that is what you want to be indexed.. you want the non-www version to be ignored and replaced with the www. version.

I wonder how people handle sold outs properly. - Keep the page and replace the "add to cart/buy now" button with a "Sold Out" graphic.

That way you get to keep all your pages (hopefully they are unique and get external links) and are able to target more keywords to cross sell your other items. And if you do get more of the item in stock, you can just add the payment buttons again.

One thing to note is that Google usually pushes all its updates to the US first, then if they are successful, pushes those updates to other countries.

.ca could be using some older algorithms that are easy to spam (although there is plenty of that in .com as well).

Correct code for .htaccess.

I wouldn't remove the non-www version from GWT. Instead, set the preferred domain (configuration > settings > preferred domain > Display URLs as www.luckygemstones.com)

In addition, I would add rel canonical tags to the www. version of each page.

Can you list some sample soft 404s? By definition, they are pages that aren't found but return a 200 response code.

A lot depends on the keywords being searched and also on the backlinks the website has. G may deem your website to be better suited for a US audience (based on content, keywords and linking domains) than the Canadian audience (who's serps will contain many more .ca sites and those targeting Canada in GWT).

If you are trying to consolidate link authority by changing some links to be nofollow, that won't work. This would have worked a few years back when nofollow was used for pagerank sculpting, but G has changed the way these links are treated.

I would dofollow all the internal links on your site.

-f is for file and -d is for directory, correct?

Correct.

And your very welcome

A course should help you understand RegEx a lot more but I still find myself looking up specific situations online.

RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^faq(.*) /faqs [L,R=301]

That should do the trick

Add this to header of each site. The following code is for the homepage:

My guess is that it would either be a setting or a plugin for your forum script of choice.

Basically, it would consider googlebot a logged in user and display all the forum threads/replies.

Try following another account. If there is no problem, that rules out scenario B.

If you like, share/message the handle and I can try adding it as well.

Few things you can do.

1. As long as Google can index the text, it will appear in the SERPs. So making it read only is fine.

2. If you just show the title to Google, that's all that will be indexed. You'll probably be missing out on a bunch of long tail keywords and quality content from the conversations.

3. Make the content viewable to googlebot but not viewers. That way you get your privacy and let Google know about the conversations going on within.

Note: Non-members can still view the content via Google's cached version of the page but most people don't know about that feature. They also wouldn't be able to post from the cached copy.

Cheers,
Oleg

Still use the hreflang attribute.

US site: http://example.com/" />

CA site: http://example.ca/" />

In addition, I would set country targeting via GWT.

Yes, it will help improve rankings if your content is lacking relevance. They are no where near as important of an influence on SEO as they used to be but are still influential. Think of them as in content title tags.

Each page should have a unique H1 tag that describes the pages content and contains the target keyword.

Your canonicals looks all good to me, I wouldn't worry about it.

Google knows the difference and that is why they wouldn't give it the same value.

They are looking for other websites to link to your site on their own. No organic link is going to have tracking variables appended to it, meaning that the backlink was "self-generated". As such, your link value is discounted (especially press release links).

(The site does have some adult content!)

That's probably it. Site got flagged as adult and won't rank for dating terms any more. Your homepage title alone is very adult oriented.

You can set that up. You need to create events and have them be triggered on click of the play button/link (or page loading if your audio auto runs on a specific screen)

Working for me right now. Try restarting your browser, logging in via seomoz.org and trying again.

You need to set up rel="alternative" hreflang="x" tags to let google know that you have two sites, with very similar content, that target different countries.

Prob won't do much for SEO but will improve UX. Only way this would help is if other sites decide to link to your glossary and bring in more authority.

I've had clients who had nice glossary pages but they didn't improve traffic much (low inbound links and low keyword traffic).

You should go the 51A / 51B route. Here is a similar question/response from Miriam that covers everything you need.

Produce more content that contains the keywords you want to show up. That list is purely a word count and does not represent the relevance of the website's keywords, although I would assume there is a correlation.

Option 2 all the way.

If you want to rank a local page, check out all the ranking factors compiled by David Mihm. Here is a post by Mike Blumenthal on your exact question. Basically, its a waste of time to build links to your G+ places page.

Check out the "How much is my site worth?" sites - They usually give you a widget to embed once you "evaluate" your site worth.

Sucks, don't it? Google isn't perfect and there are still many flaws that let sites like this rise to the top.

I've seen this happen many times (especially in the more competitive industries). This is the difference between black hat and white hat seo.

White hat route: keep providing good material, get higher quality backlinks and eventually you'll overtake him (and the results will be more permanent).

Fast & Risky Route: Looks like he just did a big social bookmarking blast to the sites. You can find these services around the web and order them for yourself (get a link report first and see if the sites match up). You'll be on even ground but the downside is the risk of going under next update.

Best of luck,
Oleg

Embedding links into widgets (especially keyword rich, hidden links) is considered a link scheme by Google. TripAdvisor will not be penalized (at least algorithmically) because they have a very strong link profile. A small site may be hit with penguin for these actions.

Manually, G may or may not decide to penalize them. Personally, I don't think its a bad thing. They are providing a service and show a link that would allow someone to get more info in case their JS is off (as you mentioned).

If you were to make a widget, I would link back with your brand name. It can be an excellent way to build links as long as you do it right.

Cheers,
Oleg

Hmmm, are you positive its sending a 301 response code and not just redirecting? I've seen that be an issue before.

Also make sure you are testing the redirects with and without the trailing slash.

I would update the sitemap with the new urls and if possible, block the old url structure via robots.txt

rel=publisher makes information about your business pop up in the right hand side of the serps when you search for the brand name (map, business info, reviews, related searches). This is where you would display your business entity, not yourself.

rel=author is what causes the icon to appear to the left of the result and must be an actual person.

You should be linking to your business page from the website and asking people to follow your places page. Your author profile is supposed to be more personal and used to connect your work from around the web (think guest blog posts).

Check out this great explanation by Ann Smarty on the difference between the two.

1. If you use IIS, urls are parsed case insensitively (i.e. page.aspx = Page.aspx). Unfortunately, crawlers treat them as separate pages and would say they are duplicate pages. Be sure to set up canonicals for the proper url structure.

2. No, it would be handled through IIS and the web.config file

3. Check. site:url.com and see if your pages appear

Cheers,
Oleg

Is the quantity correct?

You just need to do some detective work in GA and see when/where the product purchases were logged. How many different people? Did they revisit the same page (as you mentioned)? Where is your conversion tracking code located?

There are so many questions/possibilities that it's hard to determine without actually going into GA, following the conversion funnel, troubleshooting on page analytics code and analyzing the situation.

If you followed their instructions for pagination with rel="next" and rel="previous" then you should be fine. A canonical tag should only be used if there are even more variables (i.e. sort by, category filters, etc)

Yes, especially if the pages are identical. I would leave the new url (/internet-daily-special/itemA.html) and set a canonical to the page that is permanent (/subcategory/itemA.html). That way users and magento will be able to navigate to the daily specials section easily and crawlers would know that the permanent home for itemA is inside the subcategory.

Cheers,
Oleg

Could this be a bug in SEOMoz's crawler or is it because IIS is not case sensitive and maybe Apache is??

This is most likely the case. Most websites would treat those URLs as separate pages and think crawlers would too. You should set up canonicals so that only 1 version of the URL is indexed (whichever way you link to the page most often)

In addition, you should choose whether you want a www. or non-www url and 301 to your preferred version (I would keep the www as it looks like you have more links to it).

Wait for Google to recrawl the website and update the index. You can also set up canonical url for them although the 301 should be sufficient.

What are the pages that have duplicate titles/metas? If its the pages that are being 301ed to the new URLs, you should be fine.