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I always say, don't build a brand new baby website for your existing brand unless you're absolutely sure it's necessary - you're going to have to work hard to get it even just to the same level as your existing website, let alone beyond it.  Plus, why cut your link profile in half?  I'd definitely say build a page or section on the new location.  Some things you can do to help SEs figure out you're in 2 locations:

• Make sure both locations are in Google Places or other local services.  I highly recommend Universal Business Listing for this - one submission to UBL will put your business info everywhere it should be to send strong local signals.  Well worth the low price.
• Mark up the addresses of each location on your site with hcard microformat - this says to search engines "here is an address."  here's a wiki with everything you could possibly need on hcard microformat: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard
• Upload a KML sitemap with your locations to Google Webmaster Tools.  Here's a good guide on how to do that: http://www.martijnbeijk.com/tutorial/using-kml-for-local-seo/
• Use your city name in the title tags of pages that are about that specific location.

Best part about those last 3 suggestions - you can do them all for free.

Good luck!

I would agree that you use the word "Barcelo" more times than is necessary in a title tag. A good rule of thumb for keyword stuffing: read it out loud. If it sounds crazy, you're probably using the keyword too much. Eric's suggestion for a title tag is a good one, and you could really do anything along that line. It looks like the phrase you're targeting most with that page is "Barcelo Hotel Reviews" so I'd begin the title tag with that phrase. Other words like Resorts will still get some association with the word Barcelo, so there's no need to repeat it.

Your title tag is also currently targeting way too many phrases. It's best to target only one or two key phrases on any given page - it's difficult for a page to rank for more than that. Are there other pages on your site that you could use to target some of these phrases?

It sounds like your boss has some ego built in to those title tags, so maybe start out by saying that 2010 was a long time ago (4 years is like a million years in Internet time) and SEO best practices have updated since then. The best practice now would be to use your keyword at the beginning of the title tag, MAYBE use a secondary keyword if you can work it in in natural-sounding language, and keep it to under about 70 characters.

As for the meta description, ABSOLUTELY add one of those - like Eric points out, your SERP result is a little advertisement for your page and the description tag is another way to target your keywords and convince users to click. Having a description tag also means you have more control over what displays when people share your page in social media. As for the meta keywords tag, I'd dispense with those altogether - they're completely worthless at best and may be a weak spam signal at worst.

I'd recommend not using the canonical tag here for the following reasons:

• It's not what the tag is designed for.  By using canonical tag you're saying to search engines, "this page is the same as this other page so just ignore it."  Not true in this case.
• It seems like the pages you're noindexing are good candidates for it: they aren't pages that would be a good experience for users to land on from a search.

IFor product pages that are no longer available, I'd use a 301 redirect to point users to the home page or a similar product - that's a way better experience for users who click on links to those pages (remember, it's about the users as much as search engines), and you preserve link juice.  I'd also just double-check and see if your "view cart" and similar pages are accruing many links; my guess is they aren't.  I'd keep those noindexed via robots.txt just because it would be very odd for a user to click on a search result and land there.  A good user experience is more important than the (my guess is very small) amount of link juice you might lose by not having them indexed.

I find WordPress' blogging functionality a lot easier to use and a lot more customizable. Not only that, if your blog is currently a significant driver of organic rankings/traffic for your site, I would recommend against moving your blog if you have the option to keep it where it is, especially if moving it would mean an overhaul in URLs/URL structure.

Hi Marina,

The last I heard on this (earlier this year), https wasn't supported in the Preferred Domain feature - only www or non-www. So make sure that your sitemap is submitted with https URLs, your internal links all point to https URLs, and your http version 301 redirects to your https version, and that would be sufficient.

There's not a whole lot to be done about other sites getting hacked, unfortunately - even if you did find the program/network that is creating the bad links, you might not be able to tell which competitor of yours is doing it, and even if you did it would be difficult to prove or get them to stop. Your client's site may even not be the real target - link spam networks will often target a variety of random sites in addition to their real targets to cover their tracks. The good news is that Google is pretty astute at ignoring these types of links. It's highly unlikely (though not impossible, unfortunately) that your client will see a link penalty from this malware.

Here's what I would do in this situation:

• Contact as many of the hacked sites as you can/want to, and let them know they've been hacked (that's just a courteous thing to do, as it's likely the site owners have no idea, but it's up to you how much time you want to spend on this).
• Be proactive about disavowing as many of the spammy inbound links as you can find (you're probably already doing this, I'm just saying). You could probably do this at a domain level since it sounds like the linking sites aren't related to your client's site in any way.
• Take a little extra time in the next few months to build some high-quality links to your client's site to make their link profile a little extra shiny.

Taking steps to guard against any damage/fix any damage that may have been done will be a better use of your time and effort than trying to figure out who's doing it and why, IMO.

Hi Eric,

A few things to reassure you off the bat:

1. For what it's worth, there is a huge, HUGE amount of crawler spam happening in the web today. Every site I work on is being hit hard with false referrals and direct visits. I know Google Analytics is working on a solution to better filter these visits out. So I wouldn't be too concerned that it is something a competitor is doing to your site, specifically - it's more likely that it's been caught up in the general wave of spam crawlers.
2. It's important to note that when we talk about Google looking at bounce rate and dwell time as part of ranking your site, those numbers are specifically from clicks through from search - that's data that Google can get without using your private web analytics data as a ranking factor, which they've said repeatedly that they don't and won't do. So a bunch of direct visits with high bounce rates will NOT affect your rankings.

So, it's not dangerous, just annoying. On to how to get that data out of your reports:

• Make sure you're not filtering out spam referrers at a View level - this can cause those visits to incorrectly appear as direct traffic.
• You could set up an Advanced Segment in Google Analytics to filter out direct visits with visit times of, say, under 5 seconds. Some real traffic may get caught in that, but it will get the noise levels down.
• The best way to filter out spam bot traffic, in my opinion, is to set up hostname filtering. Here's a post on Megalytic on how to do that: https://megalytic.com/blog/how-to-filter-out-fake-referrals-and-other-google-analytics-spam. Make sure you've also got an "Unfiltered Data" View so you'll still have historic raw data if you need it.

Hope that helps! Good luck.

Google will frequently rank two pages from the same site in the same SERP if they feel that both pages serve the user intent of the query. Often this will happen, as is the case with these two pages, when they are two pages that are on the same topic, but answer slightly different questions - either of which could be what the user is really asking, if that makes sense. In your example, the two pages that Google is serving up are answering closely related, but slightly different questions: "What is VVS diamond clarity" and "what is the difference between VS and VVS diamond clarity."

It might be advisable for this site to combine the two pages, if (for example) the wrong page was ranking for the query or one page was getting all the traffic and the other wasn't getting any. Another solution would to make them more different from each other, rather than tackling two long-tail variations on the same overall topic.

I would not recommend creating two pages on long-tail variations of the same topic on purpose to try to lock down two spots in a SERP; your time would likely be better spent researching what specific long-tail topics people are searching on, and creating content to serve those users' needs. Umar does have a good point that a SERP with two results from the same domain often present an opportunity to take one of those spots.

If you're suffering from Panda, another thing to look at is how much content you have overall.  If you've got a small amount of text and it has high recurrence of keywords, that's a bad sign for Panda.  A tip I like to use when it comes to keyword stuffing is to read your text out loud.  If it sounds unnatural, you're probably using the keyword too often.  I would focus on creating some new quality content and on making your language sound natural.

If you feel like you're saying Wordpress too much but it's negatively impacting your site, you could use "WP" or other variations to add some variety.

Hi,

I would not recommend taking this approach, for a few reasons:

1. As you say, individual city-keyword combinations have a low amount of traffic - even if you were to get all 30 of these sites ranking for that combo, you probably wouldn't see a bump in traffic to make it worth the work.
2. Building 30 different sites on 30 different domains means building 30 times as many links in order to get the same domain authority, which will take a lot of time and effort.
3. It will be very easy for Google to tell that all of these sites belong to you (all on the same server, all linking to each other, etc).  In the best case scenario, Google will simply devalue all of these links from one site to the other.  A far more likely scenario is that Google will actively penalize you for attempting to build this kind of link network.

This is exactly the kind of strategy that both Panda and Penguin are intended to combat, and I don't think that the potential payoff is worth the risk and effort this strategy will take.  Instead, I recommend spending that time and energy on making your client's site as strong as possible.  Use schema.org to send strong local signals that you're in the San Diego area.  If you're having trouble ranking for head terms such as "web design," look for lower-volume, more specific keywords to target.  Create great content showing your design prowess and cultivate an audience to share it with.

To answer your questions - micro sites for lead generation CAN work, but I don't think local-focused is the way to go for a product like web design for which Google doesn't provide local search results. I DO NOT suggest that you build 30 microsites, interlink them and then point them to your home page, as this is likely to incur a penalty.

I hope that helps! Good luck.

There are a couple options that I see here:

• Go through the list of pages, find the most relevant equivalents on your current site, and 301 redirect them. Yes, 20,000 pages is a lot but you'll quickly fall into a groove where you find whole sections of pages that can be redirected to the same place. I did it with 65,000 or so URLs when SEOmoz moved to Moz, and it took about a month to plan out alongside my other tasks. It's tedious, but doable.
• Figure out which pages have the high-value links you want to preserve, 301 redirect those to their most-relevant equivalents, and redirect the rest to the home page. This won't work quite as well to preserve link equity or any traffic/rankings they might be getting, but it will be faster.

Either way, once you've got those redirects in place I strongly recommend taking a look at the sites that link to the old pages, and seeing which ones you might be able to reach out to to get the links updated. That way, you won't be losing link value through the 301 - plus, you might strengthen or re-establish some relationships that could result in future links. Good luck!

A longer page title is certainly ok - although, as the other answers noted, yours is pretty unreadable by humans.  Too many keywords in a title tag can make your page look "over-optimized" and have a negative effect - not to mention that users are less likely to click on an unattractive tag.  I would advise targeting a maximum of 2 keywords in a title tag.

WIth Google's recent updates it's becoming more important to have a tag that's not TOO long, though.  Title tags longer than about 68 characters (including spaces) may be automatically shortened by Google - or Google may choose to use different text from the page altogether in place of the title tag.  This can make for some pretty weird results since Google's auto-inserted text isn't always as nice of a user experience as your hand-crafted tag.  So make sure your tags are shorter than 68 characters so as not to get truncated.

What analytics tool are you using? I know that both Google Analytics and SiteCatalyst have functions where you can make a note of changes - make sure you've recorded the date of the change so you can compare back and forth and as time goes on, remember exactly when the switch happened.

I would also run some comparison reports for equal amounts of time before and after the switch - things like your most popular pages by organic traffic, home page visits, etc. That will show you right away if an important page has stopped doing well.

In the Moz tool, tracking rankings before and after is definitely a good thing to do. You should also dig in and see which pages are ranking for your target terms before and after the switch to make sure it's still the page you want ranking for the keyword you want.

Lastly, don't forget that your site switch didn't occur in a vacuum. Take into account factors such as seasonality that could also be impacting your traffic post-switch.

I would say this is pretty risky. One barometer I have for penalty risk is "if a human quality reviewer looked at this, would they see something amiss?" and in this case, someone who knew what they were looking for would sniff this out as shady right away. I also think the combination of signals you're describing are easily machine-readable to an extent that a penalty trigger would definitely be possible.

I also don't understand the logic the vendor is using here. If Google can't crawl schema in an iframe, why include the schema at all? It's not like users are going to see it or get anything from it. There's no point in having schema if it's not machine-readable, so why do it at all?

James has a good point that reviews are actually more trustworthy when they include some negative ones. Users are smart enough, and used to reviews enough, at this point to be able to tell when they're only being shown the positive reviews - so including only 4- and 5-star reviews is probably hurting their credibility with customers, as well as with Google.

I don't have any data on how Google specifically treats markup within an iframe. I have heard that you are only at risk for a penalty if you're receiving the reviews rich snippet, so that's one thing I would look for - but again, if they're not trying to get reviews snippets, why do any of this in the first place? If they're a small enough business with low enough traffic, this is the kind of thing that could fly under Google's radar for a long time, but as you've already experienced, recovering from a penalty is a lot harder than never engaging in shady practices in the first place.

One nice thing about the Penguin update is that we don't need to be quite so concerned with anchor text.  I would say focus more on getting links from high-authority, trusted websites and less on the anchor text.  Getting keyword-rich anchor text links from time to time won't hurt - and if you're using natural link building methods, you'll probably be fine having them - the important thing is that your ratio of keyword-rich anchor text links to regular anchor text likes (like "click here") is similar to that of other sites in your niche.  It's when it's ALL your links or a vast majority of your links that it starts to look suspicious.

At the most basic level, your competitors for any given keyword are the sites that rank for that keyword - but if you Google not only your keyword, but also related keywords (not just SEO but SEO services, SEO consulting, etc.) you will start to see a few sites that come up for a variety of semantically related searches.  I'd start by mining their backlinks.

There are lots of ways to find link targets beyond mining your competitors' backlinks, though. Try searching "(your keyword) blog" to find relevant blogs on your topic/in your industry.  Use a service like FriendOrFollow to look at your competitors' followers and the people they follow on Twitter - some of them will have useful sites as well.  Once you find a site that you'd like to target for a link, look at that site's backlinks to find more related sites to target.

Don't forget that you can use the "pages on this root domain" option in Open Site Explorer and pull out all of the links to a domain, whether to the home page or internal pages.

If Moz and Webmaster Tools are showing the 403 error, it means that they are able to crawl to the URLs that are returning the 403 - so somewhere on your site or on the web, pages that are accessible by bots and crawlers are linking to these pages that don't exist yet. Having a bunch of errors on your site can impact Google's ability to crawl it well, which can impact your rankings, so it's best to get those cleaned up. In Webmaster Tools you should be able to click on the pages and see which pages are linking to them, so you can remove those links; you can do the same using a tool like Screaming Frog if you'd prefer. Good luck!

DA doesn't usually transfer very well across subdomains - so it's likely the DA from www.example.com is already not affecting subdomain.example.com.

It's certainly possible to keep the subdomain alive, but I'd be a little concerned about what it would do for your brand. If you're sending the message that example.com is now newexample.com, but then keeping things running at example.com, it could create a lot of consumer confusion. From a DA stance you should be OK, though, especially if you take some extra time to promote the subdomain and the new site after launch.

You may still not see pages from the new domain and the old subdomain ranking in the same SERPs, though - Google is often pretty good at figuring out when multiple sites are owned by the same people.

Linda has a good point: on-page factors are only one element that determines whether a page will rank for a given phrase. Have you changed your internal linking recently? It could be that your site is sending signals that Page B is much more important than Page A, based on how you're linking to each internally. Page B may also have more external links.

One other hypothesis: Google may be deciding that even though Page A targets the keyword phrase more directly, Page B matches the intent of the search better. Take a look at the other pages that rank for that term - are they thematically closer to page A or page B?

I would recommend altering page B to better serve the new search traffic that you're getting from this phrase, rather than attempting to get page A ranking again.

Neither access denied nor not found crawl errors are dealbreakers as far as Google is concerned. A not found error usually just means you have links pointing to pages that don't exist (this is how you can be receiving more errors than pages crawled - a not found error means that a link to that page was crawled, but since there's no page there, no page was crawled).  Access denied is usually caused by either requiring a login or blocking the search bots with robots.txt.

If the links causing 404 errors aren't on your site it's certainly possible that errors would still be appearing.  One thing you can do is double-check your 404 page to make sure it really is returning an error of 404: not found at the URL level.  One common thing I've seen all over the place is that sites will institute a 302 redirect to one 404 page (like www.example.com/notfound).  Because the actual URL isn't returning a 404, bots will sometimes just keep crawling those links over and over again.

Google doesn't necessarily crawl everything every day or update everything every day.  If your traffic isn't being affected by these errors I would just try as best you can to minimize them, and otherwise not worry too much ab out it.

You certainly don't need to include every page of your website in your top navigation menu. Your plan of having a Locations page that then links to each of your location pages individually is a fine way to go.

That said, the deeper into your site architecture your page is, the fewer ways there are for people and search engines alike to discover it - to your point, there is now only one page on your site linking to all of these location pages. One reason internal linking outside the navigation is important is that it provides additional ways for users and search engines to browse to your content. I would recommend taking a look at the pages on your site and thinking about what pages a user might want to visit next, and linking to those. Providing an intuitive next step for your users keeps them engaged, and provides additional ways for your content to get discovered.

Not sure how you'd cover this in cheat sheet form - but somethign on using JavaScript/AJAX for faceted navigation would be helpful.

I'd recommend checking MozCast.com to measure overall volatility in the results page - but I agree that dropping from #3 to #10 doesn't sound like a penalty. Remember that Penguin et al are updates to the whole search algorithm, so in addition to big shifts there are also going to be a ton of smaller changes as Google tweaks what works and how well it works. It's definitely something you can recover from. Take a look at the sites that are ranking above you now: what do they have that you don't? That will give you some insight into what you need to start improving first.

One of the questions Google is trying to answer with fresh content is "is this site still relevant?"  If you're not updating your home page regularly because it's not necessary for your users, continuing to get new fresh links is a great way to keep sending the signal that your page is still relevant.

I would definitely advise against making a bunch of random changes to your home page just for Google's benefit - but if there are ways you can include more fresh or dynamic content that would also be good for users, that might be something to explore.  Maybe have a link to your newest or most popular blog post that updates when you post?

I would say, don't use press release syndication as a way to build links - it tends to generate duplicate content an David's right, the links aren't worth much.  Instead, use PR the way PR is traditionally used - to build awareness and encourage media outlets to cover your stories in their own words.  The last thing you want is for your own content to outrank you on somebody else's site!

Hi Nick,

It's common to see a drop in traffic after a redesign, but you definitely should have recovered by now. The difference in your number of indexed pages is a red flag. When you run a Screaming Frog/DeepCrawl/Moz Crawl Test crawl of the site, what shows up? Are there any site sections that are missing? Does that 7,740 pages number sound close to the number of pages that are actually on the site, or are there still more like 30K?

Take a look at the pages that were getting organic traffic before the migration. Which of them aren't getting traffic now? Can you verify that they still exist and that redirects are working properly? Are there areas of the site that used to have a lot more internal links pointing to them then than they do now?

I doubt that your domain name and age have much to do with this, and it's common for 404s to pop up from time to time, so I don't think those are your culprits.

One thing you might try is reaching out to the domains that link to your old site and see if they would update their links to point to the same page on your new site. Start with the sites with whom you have the best relationship, and any who link to you multiple times. Make it easy by providing them a list of the pages that link to you and the updated links. You won't get a 100% response rate but it might mitigate some of the link loss.

I hope some of that helps!

I think you pretty much have to be engaging with people on social media - otherwise in what sense is it "social"?  You're missing out on a lot of opportunity not only to win your users' hearts and minds, but also to learn how they interact with and think about what you do.  That's how a lot of companies right now are using social media - to figure out what their customers really like and want so they can make a great product.  The conversation will happen whether you participate or not - don't you want to be part of it?  If you're not, you have no control over the message.

So who to hire to do it?  I've had a great time working with the good people at Social Creatures Media.  That's who we use when we need some social magic.  I don't know what you'd consider a "reasonable" cost but I find their pricing more than fair for the quality work they do.  And no, I don't work for them

Having an SSL certificate won't remove your (not provided) keywords. As long as users are arriving from Google's HTTPS service, their keyword data will be stripped out, regardless of your own SSL status.

There's no compelling SEO reason to have or not to have an SSL certificate - as Kevin points out below, it's really more a matter of user trust/data security. If users are providing you any kind of personal information (email, address, CC info, etc) you probably want an SSL certificate at least for the pages where you're collecting and sending that data. Your users will appreciate the extra security.

One thing to watch out for is that http and https versions of the same page may be counted as duplicate content - so make sure that one redirects to the other.

Hi Antonio,

You're correct - we don't currently use tag pages.  We rely on our site map, category archive pages, and inbound links to surface up content, and this is working pretty well for us (in part because we have such an active community who share and tweet and post about our content, so we have a solid external link foundation).

With as much content as we have, I would be hesitant to add tags as an added layer of complexity, as it would be difficult to scale.  For one thing, these pages wouldn't have any unique content, which is already a problem with our category pages.  For another, we already have some categories that don't get posted in too regularly - adding tag pages would increase the number of pages in the /blog folder that have no unique content and don't get updated regularly. Finally, our users seem to be able to drill down into our content as needed just fine, so there's no added user benefit.

Our site is a big, old site and has a lot of the same problems a big, old site has.  I wouldn't necessarily use us as the example of what to do or not do on your own site.  If you feel that tag pages would add a user benefit to your blog, I say go for it - but in my opinion, they're often unnecessary.

It could be a lot of things.  If all or most of your inbound links to that page have "Hemorrhoids treatment" as their anchor text, you may have been hit by a Penguin penalty for that keyword. Have you received an unnatural links warning in Google Webmaster Tools?

Getting tweets can be good for being quickly indexed, but links from tweets don't have much staying power.  Here's what I would try:

• Remove directory links from any directories that aren't human-curated.
• Check Google Webmaster Tools for any warnings or errors.
• You could also try creating a new page targeting the keyword, since the existing page is no longer ranking.  Some fresh, high-quality content and concentrated linking could do the trick.
• Regardless of whether you create a new page or use the existing page, try to target other websites on related topics for links and shares - don't just rely on social media, social bookmarking and press releases.  You might start by looking at the pages that do rank for that term and seeing if they have links from sites that might be good targets for you, as well.

Hi Rosemary,

Miriam has the right idea - Google probably can crawl your marked-up JavaScript, but whether they will actually use it in e.g. rich snippets is up to them.

You can apply semantic markup to the individual containers that each piece of third-party data is pulled into, and that should work.

Hi David,

Google's semantic processing has gotten pretty sophisticated - If the name of the website is on every page and is the URL, and also makes up a significant portion of the anchor text, those are all pretty clear signals that "this is the name of the site."

With an exact match domain you want to make it clear that you're not a fly-by-night site just set up to quickly take advantage of a single keyword.  Some ways to do this are:

• Make sure you have deep content on every page - Panda can be particularly brutal to EMDs.
• REALLY watch your usage of your brand name - give it the "read out loud" test to see if you're using it too much and giving the appearance of keyword stuffing.
• Optimize non-home-page pages for other, related keywords and create content accordingly
• Build a history of social mentions - search engines look to social mentions and interactions as proof that "this is a real company."
• Focus less on anchor text when building links, and more on creating sharable content that people want to link to. People will be more likely to use your keyword as anchor text than would be typical, since it's already the name of the site, so I would focus link building efforts on other keywords and just on general link volume, even if the anchor text is "click here."

Basically, do everything you can to show Google that you're a legit site that deserves to rank, and not a keyword spammer.

You should be able to use the same GA tracking code on your new site that you were using on your old site, yes, and then just set goals for whatever you want to track. Make sure to annotate when you made the switch so you have that information going forward. If the two sites will be live at the same time at all, I recommend doing some research into cross-domain tracking with GA so that traffic from one site to the other isn't counted as referral traffic. Good luck!

I don't want to advise you to ignore Matt Cutts' advice but honestly in the same situation I'd probably just leave them be. I think Chris' suggestion of making sure you've got authorship set up is a good one. If you want to nofollow your links going forward you should do so, but there are probably better things you could do with your time than go back and change the existing links - especially if your inbound link profile is already pretty diverse and on-topic.

It depends, in part, on whether what you're seeing is a manual penalty or an algorithmic update that is causing your site to rank lower.

Often times with Penguin updates, what looks like a penalty is actually just that a lot of the links pointing to a site have been devalued and are no longer passing juice. This is definitely something that can affect your whole domain, if there are enough inbound links to enough different pages on your site that have all been devalued. Subdomains won't be immune to this effect. However, as Michael points out below, losses from Penguin are usually more page/keyword specific, so you won't necessarily see your whole domain/subdomains hit.

With a manual penalty, whether or not the subdomain is hit depends on whether or not it shares the low quality signals that got the main domain hit. I certainly wouldn't recommend isolating black-hat practices on a subdomain, however; a penalty on a subdomain CAN affect other subdomains and the main domain, but it doesn't always do so. It's something to keep an eye on.

Honestly, the sandbox isn't something Google is doing much now.  It was more something they did several years ago before they had the power to quickly crawl and index new sites.  You say your site has been indexed - you used to rank for your target term and you're still ranking for other terms.  That means you are not in the sandbox.

Again: you are not in Google sandbox. If you were, your site wouldn't be in the index at all.

It sounds to me like you're not ranking for this term because it's very competitive.  The link sources that you mention (squidoo, article marketing, press releases, directories, social bookmarking) are all relatively low-value.  I would suggest creating some new content for this term.  Take a look at the pages that are ranking well for the term and figure out how you can provide a resource that is different from them while still being useful.  Then try to get some links from related sites - maybe doctors, medical/support communities, pharmacists, etc.  The best way to do this is to create a resource that would be useful for these target audiences and then reach out to them to see if they will link to or share it.

Ranking for a very competitive term is hard and takes a long time, and a ton of work.  It can definitely be done but you may also want to see if you can rank for less competitive, more specific terms - like "homeopathic hemorrhoids treatment," "hemorrhoids treatment over the counter," etc.  This would probably be faster and you would need to get fewer quality links to rank.

Hi Ken,

Thanks for looking to our blog as an example - I wish we could be the perfect example of on-page SEO that we want to be, but like a lot of big, oldish websites we've got a lot of room for improvement. Some of the things you've called out are on my wish list to fix. In general when it comes to SEOmoz.org, a "do as we say, not as we do" attitude can be useful. I'll try to answer your questions with "what we should be doing" instead of "what we are doing."

1. The only page within the blog that we might wish to self-canonical (as we do on individual post pages) would be www.seomoz.org/blog, which we probably should be doing.  I don't think there's as much point in self-canonicaling subsequent pagination, since as you say the blog pages are always changing. In general we do like to put a canonical tag on each page canonicaling it back to itself, so query parameters and other referring data don't cause problems with duplicate URLs/content.
2. Rather than noindexing paginated pages in the main blog, I would like to see us start using rel=prev and rel=next.  You can learn more about that here.http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html. The reason that we noindex category pages' pagination is that it becomes duplicate content, since all of those items are also appearing in the main blog's pagination as well.  We do want the main category pages to be indexed because we want people searching on those specific categories to be able to find them; we've had a lot of discussion in the MozPlex lately about how to give those pages some relevant unique content and make them more of a useful destination for people searching on specific topics. You may see some changes to these, although right now it's a bit low on my list of things to update.
3. We noindex the "show # of pages" pages because of duplicate content concerns, and I suggest you do the same.

Thanks for your question, and please let me know if you have any more.

Hi Adam,

My first question is - how does the client know that they had a drop in rankings/traffic? Where are they getting that information, to give to you? Are they inferring it from having had a loss in sales, or do they know some other way? If they are basing it solely on a drop in sales, it could be that the site has a conversion problem, rather than a traffic/rankings problem.

SEMRush is the tool I would use to identify where they had losses in rankings - have you used their historical data option to see what keywords the site used to rank for, that it doesn't anymore? Even if you don't know the exact date that things went wrong, if the client can give you a date that is definitely before the loss, that should help you compare. The next thing I would check is Search Console and Majestic/Open Site Explorer - are they, or have they been, under any kind of penalty? Is there a pattern of shady backlinks in their link profile?

I would also check for new competitors in the market. Who ranks for their target terms now, and did they rank for them before this change in traffic?

I know this isn't a great answer to your specific question, but if this drop in traffic/rankings happened a while ago (like a year+), I would try to get the client to focus less on "what happened" and more on "what can we do now." Even if you did figure out what happened, if it was long enough ago, putting things back how they were before might not help at all. Instead, I would approach the site as if it were any other SEO project - where are their weaknesses, what could they be doing better, etc. It may not satisfy their need to know what went wrong, but it will get them results.

The results of your internal search tool are all fully indexable, which is creating hundreds of variations of very similar pages based on the user's search term and the filtering options they select. Alick300 is correct that dynamically inserting the search term into the title and description tag is a problem - it means that the possibilities for individual pages and title tags being created are pretty much endless.

I usually recommend adding the meta tag

The indexing behavior you're describing does sound like you may have been hit by a penalty, but from what you're describing I don't know why you would have been.  It's starting to sound like you may need more consultation than we can really give over Q&A - I suggest hiring an SEO consultant to look into this more deeply.

I think what your developer is talking about, and what Facebook does, is the idea of all of your content being on one page. Progressive loading or "infinite scroll" is when you scroll down to the bottom of a page (like e.g. a category page on your blog) and more content loads on the page itself, as opposed to having to click to page 2 of results to view more content.

The problem with doing this is that even though the content continues to load on the same URL, it's being pulled from another place - so anything beyond that first set of content is being loaded by a JavaScript call. That means that search engines can't index that content that's being loaded as the user scrolls down - and users with JavaScript turned off also won't be able to view the rest of your content. This can be a big problem on main product level pages like your client is thinking of doing, since any links to other products that are beyond that initial page load won't be crawled by search engines.

If you're going to go the infinite scrolling/progressive loading route, make sure that when JavaScript is disabled, there's a crawlable "next page" link to a new, static URL for the next page of results. Basically, make sure that there's a more old-school "previous page/next page" environment with static page URLs that search engines and users without JavaScript can browse, in addition to your progressive loading page.

Here's a link to a similar question from last year that has more information: http://www.seomoz.org/q/infinite-scrolling-vs-pagination-on-an-ecommerce-site

Hi Erik,

It's great you're thinking about this ahead of time! Using the Campaign URL Builder to establish UTM links is the best way to do this. You'll want to make sure that your Medium is set to email (not e-mail, or that will be counted as a different Medium). I recommend keeping a running tracking document of the Source, Campaign, Term, etc. you use for each campaign, so it's easy to keep track of which thing was named what. You may also want to sit down and figure out some naming conventions for how you'll determine these, so that multiple people can use the URL Builder the same way. I hope that helps!

It's fairly common for Google to rewrite the displayed title of a website to more closely match the searcher's query, if Google thinks it would be helpful to do so - it's like an extra signal "yes, you're in the right place." When your query is your domain name it's not unusual for Google to display that instead of whatever the actual title tag is. I'm not sure where the apostrophe is coming from; it may be that a high percentage of inbound links use the apostrophe, or it may be that your entry in a data provider like Localeze has an apostrophe. I'd use the Moz Local testing tool to make sure your business name is consistent across data aggregators. Other than that, I wouldn't worry too much about the snippet changing, since it will give people searching for your brand/domain a strong signal that they're where they're supposed to be. Hope that helps!

I agree with Sean - I've never heard of an official limit to image filenames in terms of length alone. Since the file name is almost always part of the image URL, you could be running the risk of too-long URLs but that's a relatively minor problem. I would make extra sure that your file names don't appear keyword-stuffed, though - so watch out for things like repeating keywords or having all variations of a keyword. There's a big difference between widgets-extralarge-round-blue-widgetmaker.jpg and blue-widgets-best-blue-widgets-blue-widgets-online-free-shipping, if that makes sense. Other than that you should be fine.

Hi Jon,

I'll be doing a Mozinar on June 27th telling the whole story, and I'll have a big blog post with lots of juicy data in it to follow up. One reason we are waiting a bit is that there's a lot of noise in the signal right after a site migration, and I want to give you guys some realistic data.

The short answer is: So far it's gone very, very well - more smoothly than any rebrand/site migration I've ever worked on. We have lost a bit of (mostly long-tail) organic traffic, but less than I was forecasting. We've seen an uptick in bounce rate, but since we've also changed our funnel that's also to be expected. You can sign up for the Mozinar at http://moz.com/webinars, or view the recording later if you don't have time to attend.

In a post-Penguin world, I'd be leery of this kind of automated anchor-text-rich link building.  If you continue with this approach, make sure you're also getting plenty (i.e. a majority) of links without keyword-rich anchor text.  Otherwise, yes, they will both count as they are to different pages.

I'm glad you were able to sort out part of your issue, and it sounds like there's hope for it all to get fixed! The only thing I would add is to make sure you get a promise in writing that should you part ways with the company that's hosting the site, they will transfer the site to a host of your choosing and hand over the keys.

I wouldn't use the SKU property unless it was actually marking up a SKU - marking up something else would probably not be useful or result in a more detailed snippet. Could you use another property to mark up these grouped products instead, like the ProductID property?

You've stumbled into a test we were running! Yes, putting it in the is the methodology recommended by Google - we were testing to see if having it in the anchor would work as well (looks like no, it doesn't). We're often running tests of this type so just because you see us doing something, doesn't necessarily mean it's the 100% best way to do it! You're better off reading the blog and Learn SEO sections for best practices information. Good catch!

I would be cautious with doing too much article marketing - you're at risk that search engines will see your article on multiple sites, deem it duplicate content, and then decide your article on a submission site should rank instead of the version on your own site.  With the Penguin release, Google is also taking a closer look at links from article submission sites - I wouldn't be surprised if those links become lower and lower value as time goes by.

Definitely let Google discover your backlinks on its own - grow your link profile too quickly and they'll take a close look at your site to see if any of those links look suspicious.

There are plenty of more valuable ways to grow your link profile.  Mike King recently had a post on this topic at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-link-building - I suggest you check it out for new ideas on how to build links to your site.