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If you do participate in an ad network or sell ads directly, make an effort to ensure that they are "brand-friendly" and won't drive away your users. Unsavory ads can hurt your reputation as a publisher and ultimately your rankings. That being said, lots of large ad-driven sites rank well all day long, even post-panda. Great content and ads your users find useful is a great strategy. For example, I not only don't mind the ads that are on SmashingMagazine.com, I actually find them useful as they keep me in the loop on products I really use to build my business.

One important factor about Wordpress in general is it's robust ping system. Each time a post is published a list of ping servers are notified and it helps to get content indexed VERY quickly, plus posts have datestamps on them so they are more likely to appear on searches for recent articles. Go posts!

One important factor about Wordpress in general is it's robust ping system. Each time a post is published a list of ping servers are notified and it helps to get content indexed VERY quickly, plus posts have datestamps on them so they are more likely to appear on searches for recent articles. Go posts!

Are you sure it is the exact page address? Perhaps a page serving up the same content but with a slightly different name is getting indexed, and while one instance of the page address is getting redirected another is not. Can you share specific examples?

If that isn't the case, I can't speak to 301 redirected pages still appearing in SERPS- typically they disappear upon getting indexed. Are there a bunch of links pointing to the old address? Are new links being discovered that are pointing to the old address??

John is spot on. The other factor to consider is personalization. When people are in a research mode and visit your site via paid search, they are more likely to have a personalized organic result for your site since they've already visited it. On long sales cycle transactions, this can be a very significant factor!

It will cost some cash, but the solution is this:

Buy iDevAffiliate with the SEO Links addon. Use it instead of 1shoppingcart's affiliate system. That will cut your 1SC bill and give you the links you're wanting, plus you'll have a more robust affiliate system to work with. I believe they integrate really easily. Hope that helps!

edit: I forgot to mention- you are right. The redirect scheme won't have any SEO value at the end of the day. However, having an army of affiliates can make you wealthy regardless of your rankings!

So I believe it is really critical to use phrase match for getting to the truth for SEO campaigns specifically. Exact match can remove a lot of good long tail traffic, but broad match is always deceptively high. Consider the scenario where broad match may substitute "Wholesale Cooking Supplier" for the broad match keyword "Baking Supplies" - that is the kind of junk you get with broad match figures all the time. Phrase match is also what we use for checking search competition. Rankings of course always have to be checked using broad match- that is all clients care about isn't it?

Joe's answer was great. Just to add to that, you can see where actual traffic is coming from on your site by installing Google Analytics on each page of your site, then looking at the "Traffic Sources" report. Direct traffic is people who navigated directly to your site (aka type in domainname.com), referring sites are people who click on links to your site, and search refers to people who found you via search engines. Backlinks can result in referral traffic, but ultimately generally help your site to perform better in organic search, which would get you more search traffic. Definitely check out: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo for more info.

That sounds like a sticky wicket! I would look at the following factors that might be panda related:

• How is the bounce rate on the site?
• What about time on site? under 2-3 minutes on average could be a problem
  (make sure to look at both of those for the non-paid search advanced segment)
• Try to compare tweets and FB shares with that of your competitors
• Do a site:domain.com search- is the homepage not the #1 result? that may indicate a panda penalty.
• If you were an impartial human rating the site for spaminess and usability, would you say that it is offensive or potentially off-putting in any way? The basic theory of panda is applying the feedback of search-graders in an algorithmic way. - Have any significant links to the site gone missing recently? This is REALLY hard to tell if it is a new client... If it isn't Panda related this is probably the #1 factor

I hope that is a decent jumping off point. It could be a lot of things.

The link building power of rss feeds is simply in getting other sites to feature and link to your content via rss. There would be no utility for a bot to crawl your feed stand alone, it would rather just look at the content itself. Try submitting your feed to rss directories or having other webmasters feature your feed on their site. I believe several web 2.0 sites like squid allow for feed publishing as well. Hope that helps.

Places is very... dynamic. It looks like your listing may have gotten accidentally merged with another listing. Which is unfortunately all too common. 1. Check out the places support forums. 2. Read blog.blumenthals.com and consider contacting Mike Blumenthal... He is like google's unofficial global support desk for places. 3. Consider deleting and recreating the listing. Do it with a fresh google account that is an email address from your domain. That could put you back in action in days, not months!

I totally agree. Every URL is precious... Every one deserves a 301. In terms of indexing, WordPress has a built in ping feature for whenever content gets published, but so does EE... It just needs some configuration. Look for it in EE docs. Also, consider using LG Better Meta for EE. It gives you nice control over metadata plus if you work at it you can use it to help auto generate an accurate XML sitemap. This helps with indexing significantly IMHO. I love EE's power, but after our last few projects with it I would rather stick with WordPress for content publishing and custom code any needed features rather than fight with and pay for EE.

I don't believe there is much correlation between being listed in the Google directory and rankings. Quality content, design, and links from more relevant local sites will be worth spending effort on and yield more immediate results. Very nice site. I noticed one of your competitors had this link, might be worth pursuing: http://www.packagingsupplies.com/links.cfm

It is the email tied to your webmaster tools account

Search engines can read most characters in a URL string, but specifically & generally refers to a variable in a script which doesn't typically have much valuable information regarding what a page may be about. Sometimes those variables may be the topic of a category of a shopping cart, so I have to imagine that information could be taken into account, but for long urls like the following it is hard to believe everything is factored into the URL's relevance to the keyword: http://www.google.com/search?q=long+url+string&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Search engines index the whole URL and if there is keyword rich content that can definitely help, both from having the keyword bolded in the snippet (CTR WIN!) and a possible bump in the page's relevance to the keyword.

No problem with that nav. It's all good. Javascript navigation is a problem if the menu items are contained in javascript. In this case javascript is just acting on the menu items. You should be just fine. For fun, test it on a mobile device and see if it works okay there.

Code snippet:

• Diamonds

• Engagement Rings

• Diamond Stud Earrings

• Wedding & Anniversary Rings

• Diamond Rings

• Diamond Earrings

• Diamond Bracelets & Bangles

• Diamond Necklaces & Pendants

Don't sweat it! Unless Google just sent you a message that you have a problem with bad links pointing to your site there is nothing to worry about. Google reps have stated many times that there isn't a problem with having potentially nefarious sites point to yours- otherwise people would build evil links to their competitors sites to try to take them down. This isn't the case. The only exception is that if you are paying for a link with them or it appears that you are, you may be penalized or removed from the index. As of last week Google has been letting people know with an email if their links are questionable.

The best thing you can possibly do for getting more unique content is to encourage user-generated content which is typically in the form of reviews, but can be anything (photos, video reviews, FAQ's, etc).

Product descriptions are inherently and necessarily non-unique. I really believe that simply spinning phrases or rewriting a paragraph here and there is a low value activity. A much more sustainable activity is to pick a handful of interesting, current, high margin products and create the absolute best page about them on the web. A personal story, a groupon-style humorous reference, some unique research... whatever, and just dominate that product with content. You'll rank for that and also probably earn some love from customers for being so cool. Keep doing that one by one and carve out a niche. I bet if you do that 10 times really well you'll get a much better ROI for your time and/or cash than 10,000 pages of slightly varied copy.

Unique content only goes so far. A strong domain with piflered copy will outrank others with the same content all day long. They sometimes even beat sites with totally unique content. As unfair as this is, building domain authority takes of time and investment, and is rewarded with traffic for having trusted content.

Finally, my dablings in the dark side have taught me that Google is getting much smarter about spun content, aka content that is thinly unique. 30-40% unique is definitely not unique enough. Varying synonyms is not enough. Significantly unique content varies in theme, length, and style - all of which are algorithmically detectible. Hope that helps.