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Aside from checking out the Yoast plugin, make sure your sitemap is up to date. There is a reason the bots are going to those pages, the question is why.

Without actually seeing the site I would say that if you have product pages that are identical to canonical them to one main place. If they are listed in the SERPS 301 them if you are removing them. Even having a few different words can still show up as duplicate.The last CMS option might work, but again without seeing the site it is hard to judge.

Since I do a lot of url rewriting I ran into a similar issue and did 301's and canonical to the pages I wanted to show and things are much better.

I think this is a great topic and wish I found this post sooner.

As a person new to the SEOMoz community, not SEO, I am proud that I can start giving back. I too notice that some of the questions are as Steve put, 'not the right questions', but feel that many times if you know the correct question to ask, you will know where to find an answer. Personally I have spend hours looking for and testing different things, just so I wouldn't have to ask a question, it's just my inquisitive nature.

I try to judge, based on the question, whether the person is looking for just the answer and not the means to find it, or is looking for how to find the answer (teach a man to fish), which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. I am striving towards being able to answer some things in the in-depth fashion that EGOL does.

As Dunamis pointed out, some (read most in regards to SEO) of the information on the internet is old and outdated, and the droves of new people just getting started don't know which is current and why something they tried from a 1998 webpage doesn't work. Since my focus has mostly been On-Site, technical, & server based, those are the only ones I work to answer.

I certainly appreciate that this is a paid forum and not one of the others that have people answering questions with, "I don't know", just to get their post counts up.

As for sticky items, I do see that a majority of the questions are repetitive, but that is just the nature of a Q & A forum. If everything had an answer I wouldn't have a chance to put those braincells back in to action to answer a question I found the answer to years ago. A big thumbs up for the SEOmoz Staff getting involved and adding additional thoughts to questions.

I have Rank Tracker set to fire off every morning around 4 to do my bidding, er checking. It works great if you use paid proxies, but using my own IP it just asks me to fill out captchas. I imagine I could set it to run slower to avoid that. I do have the whole suite, but only found that Rank Tracker was the only tool I had a use for.

Updates seem to be fairly regular, about every 2 weeks. As for pricing, the amount of time it saves me on a weekly basis had it paid for itself in about six weeks.

Use a rel='canonical' and use the non index.html for the href;

also don't link to the index.html from anywhere.

If you are doing it as a way of formatting the page and still offering an option or button that allows the user to see the rest of the text, then it is not the same thing that you are thinking of in regards to Google. Google states that you should not hide text on the page to purposely try and trick the search engine.

In E-Commerce situations it is very common to hide part of the text, for instance when you have 4 tabs for "description, features, specification, colors, etc." it is a good idea to use a 'display: none' so that all 3 of the tabs are not shown all the time. This is not considered Black Hat, it is considered good design.

Matt Cutts has said quite a few times, if it is good for the user it is good for Google.

It is when you intentionally hide a block of text on the page with no way for the user to view it that you are using Black Hat technique.

With rel='canonical' you want to point all existing pages that have the same content to 1 page. Having a rel='canonical' on the page with itself as the href will not hurt, can only help verify that it is the preferred page.

I would venture to say GWT for a few reasons:

1. The site command doesn't always show everything,
2. The site command is available publicly,
3. The GWT has to be verified by the owner, hence they should show you more accurate data.

Nice catch. I agree it should be:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ $1.php [R=301]

Moved over to: http://code.google.com/apis/customsearch/v1/overview.html

If you can't find an example that helps let me know.

Yes I am seeing things fluctuate.

Are they tweaking it daily?

I think they are always tweaking it, and now the webmasters are tweaking their sites more which is causing more fluctuations.

There are a few variables that would keep a software package from getting exact rankings, I know I use one. When in doubt I always check with a browser that I never click on anything with so that the results are not skewed.

I don't see a reason why you would stop linking building. If you have #1 #2 is going to try and get it back, or at least I would if it were me.

As a web developer myself I would have, and have, coded a blog system myself. However, about a year ago I started working with WordPress and find that it is much easier to use, and I don't have to code, or design, 98% of the things I want it to do.

I can also install and configure WordPress in under 5 minutes, I certainly can't code it that fast. And all the little nuances, like text formatting, special characters, security, etc. are already built in.

Save your time coding and use WordPress, then use all the spare time creating a great blog people want to visit.

As Google will not show you everything, even using the site command, I use Yahoo SiteExplorer:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=seomoz.org&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=s

and wrote a PHP script to take the TSV it exports and create a line for each page. I could probably make that available for use one one of my sites.

I just went through it pretty quick and noticed that:

1. you don't have an xml sitemap, usually named sitemap.xml

2. You are using javascript for your drop down menu items,

The 2 above factors will keep all engines from being able to crawl your site fully.

What I would do is just create a sitemap in the footer so that there is a physical link to each page that is not javascript based.

Oh that would be evil, especial just after another update.

Would certainly keep SEO's on their toes, and cause me to pull out more hair trying to rationalize some of the things I have seen over the past week.

If it is a Fan page, and you have a FB account, you will be able to just add yourself as an admin. There shouldn't be a separate login.

Not a function, and I didn't mean to state that you had to use PhpED to see the problem, just pointing out how I did find it.

With any page loaded, on the right hand side you will see a handful of tabs, next to that is a pinkish bar that will have a Red circle, indicating that there is an issue.

phped_error.jpg

Hello Zack,

That is an issue that they are working on, I know this because I already discussed this with one of their help desk people. Here is the page that describes the changes: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/brand-new-open-site-explorer-is-here

In addition to that, here is some additional information I can share with you:

you may see “questionable” links with weird file extensions. This is due to the crawler reaching much deeper into sites where there are more download links. We are looking into fixing this bug as soon as we can so these won’t be counted as links.

It sounds like you are referring to this mozinar:

http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/conversion-optimization-for-local-businesses

Here is one possible way to handle the situation:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tracking-traffic-from-google-places-in-google-analytics

Redirect doesn't allow for (.*).

What your looking for either: RewriteRule to show the other page (which it doesn't sound like your looking for)

RewriteRule /category/diamond-pendants/nstart/1/start/(.*) /category/pendants/nstart/1/start/$1 [QSA,L]

Or the hardly used: RedirectMatch

RedirectMatch /category/diamond-pendants/nstart/1/start/(.*) http://www.provada.com/category/pendants/nstart/1/start/$1

Rank Tracker has it's own built in 'Find free proxies' just like most other software that I have tried with mixed results. I treat everything as a business, so if it costs me money to save time, or headaches, that's what I do.

I do have the whole suite, but tend not to use the other items, but that is solely a personal thing and you should not base your decision on that. Download the trials.

Looking over this real quickly and running the 2 sites listed, yours and wholesale flights, through OpenSite Explorer, I see that yours mostly has img alt links titled "Lets fly cheaper", some of your other high PA links are titled: "Ramon Van Meer", and "Cheap International Flights", none of which are your target keyword mentioned above.

Your Wholesale Flight competitor has links titled "Discount business class tickets", your desired keyword.

You would be better off with text, not img alt links. See if you can get those changed out.

I think I understand what your doing about hiding part of the text. I also agree with EGOL about, if that is what people are looking for just give it to them.

Will it hurt your SEO efforts? I would say, no it will not. You are not intentionally hiding text for the sake of cheating the systems, you are doing it to help the user experience, something that I have heard Google employees speak of many times. What's good for the user is good for SEO.

I would test this in one of the many ways possible, heatmaps, clicktracking, etc. to see what the percentage of people reveling the hidden text is, if it's more than say 40% I would show more, simply because the other 60% might be interested, but are not willing to got the extra effort and may be going somewhere else.

Personally I would do a clean start on the new domain, and 301 or canonical the current pages. If you have a new version why even bother seeing if there are problems with it. One thing I have noticed is that when setting up a new domain, the first time Google Indexes a page it 'seems' to keep that page longer, so the older page would remain in the index when you have a new revised page. If you just go live with the new version, block the search engines with a robot.txt, check it, test it, check it again, then remove the block and forward you could be up and running faster, in my own experience.

I know SEO Spy Glass will find any known links to a site.

Hello Sophy.

A comments.

1. Use the rel='canonical' on all your pages (more on this below),
2. create a robots.txt file
3. I'm seeing a lot of keywords in your Meta Keywords, (which does nothing) but you are missing the Meta Description, which is important.

In regards to the canonical, even if they come in with an affiliate link this will reduce or eliminate your duplicate page issue. If you have any way for a page to have duplicate content, use a canonical, if you have a page that is generated dynamically, figure out the best url for it and create a canonical for it.

If your having a high bounce rate, I'd look at the site, and see what people are doing. I would point more towards a

• 'Not so clear idea what to do', or
• 'doesn't offer the information we expected'

Consider using heatmaps, or using on of the survey sites that will send 30+ people to your site and fill out a form stating what they likes, didn't like, couldn't figure out, etc.

Can you post examples of the url, and what you have in your htaccess? This would make it much easier to diagnose.

I have had an instance where the upper menu had a nofollow, but the lower footer links did not and it didn't seem to matter, juice still went through. This was not the intention as one of them were overlooked.

Because of the 5,937 incoming links compared to the 6 the next highest link has.

Ok the first one, or both, you can easily get away with doing:

RedirectMatch /blogs/fleet-management-and-tracking(.*)the-easy-way/ http://www.newplace.com/here-it-is/

The few things I would point out, which aren't so much WordPress issues, but are how this WordPress installation is configured, are:

1. No description tag, that is in the 'Settings -> General' page
2. Well over 100 links on the home page, mostly because of the 'Blog Archive', are people actually clicking on those items?
3. No good H1 tag, the one that was created by the theme "Athletic Foodie" has been commented out and the current (second) one is, "How about a 2,000-year-old Salad? Kale!!", a poor descriptor of the page.
4. Dangling links, some of the images are linked to themselves, that is set on the post or page they are created on.
5. The page names 'slugs' don't usually match their titles, ex, Fiber: health benefits for athletes...., would be: 'fiber-health-benefits-athletes', etc.
6. From a user standpoint, way too much text, the full posts could be reduced by using excerpts and linking to a separate page, increasing load time, and most likely page views. Would you scroll all the way to the bottom? What if it was half or a quarter this size?
7. The 2 main items "Recipes" & "Videos" go offsite? And they are follow links! What the!

Cheers.

In regards to SEO I completely agree with EGOL, however there is something else you can do to continually get traffic to pages, and that is to use twitter and retweet your posts. If your posts are not specifically date based, and you can provide valuable information to people, it can work in your favor.

An example of someone doing this is @jeffbullas ,he uses SocialOomph to send out a tweet with an interesting title and link every 15 minutes. Some of them are a year old, but still have interesting, if not valuable, information.

From what I'm seeing, you have the noindex, nofollow tag in your head... Since you have this, Google wont index it and wont show the information you have in the title or description.

Another reason for doing it is for the user experience. They no longer have to scroll back up to the top to change pages. The one problem that I ran into was having too many links on one page by doing this, I fixed it by using an iframe instead. It looks the same, and still provides the linking to the user that I wanted.

There are a few ways I would approach this. In order:

1. Run a find in files using one of the text editors I use for coding, either UltraEdit or PhpEd, you can use whatever you are comfortable with,

2. Check the server logs for that page, it should show a referring page, which may not be on your site,

3. or just do a 301 from it to your home page or a relevant page. I have had situations where people link to the wrong page and I redirect them instead of letting it 404,

4. If you are sure it is an actual link on your site, and maybe it is being generated (you didn't post a link so I don't know which site you are referring to) , and not a redirect from somewhere, consider paying someone $5 on http://fiverr.com/ to find it.

I agree. I do it for the user, not for Google, which I think is what Mr. Cutts says to do all the time.

Stephen I agree with the KISS method. Using an htaccess RewriteCond is not the simplest solution for someone who does not know htaccess syntax. In an effort to fully answer this, here is the typical code we are referring to:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://www.yoursite.com/ [R=301,L]

The first 2 lines are typical commands to Follow Symbolic links, and make sure that the rewrite engine is in the on state.

The first RewriteCond looks at the host, and if it is not the www. version the RewriteRule will redirect the visitor to the http://www. version of your site.

The second RewriteCond looks at whether this is an index.html file, if it is, it will the RewriteRule will 301 redirect them to the version with out the index.html, just yoursite.com/

Here's the problem with that, the comments are done through Javascript, and since that is not available when crawling, only to a persons browser, the search engines can't see it. Hence, no real value.

However, from a social aspect of getting more traffic it works. You have to find out in your specific situation which is more valuable, having a higher SERP listing for a blog post, or having more possible user traffic from social.

I would actually venture over to using:

tummy tuck scottsdale az

Since it is what is showing in the Google suggest when typing that in.

Additionally going throught Googles Keyword Tool we can see that

Tummy Tuck Scottsdale gets 720 searches a month

Tummy Tuck Phoenix gets 590 searches a month

Tummy Tuck Mesa gets -- searches a month, due to lack of search volume.

You would do better if you have individual pages for each individual area. Having the additional towns in a single title will not help and it brings down your keyword density in the title.

The amount of juice you will lose will be made up in the long run by having the keyword in the page name.SEO should be a long-term goal, and having the keyword in the page name is the best situation.

I have, and would recommend, doing it.