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I may get chastised for this but I believe the value of sitemaps is over stated.

All things being equal, I feel they are crutches and band-aids for poor webdesign/production.

Your site should:

• be easily indexed by all engines
• expose all pages with in four-five links of the home page(s)
• utilize thoughtful linking to promote important content in an organic manner
• expose new content on a high value, frequently indexed page (ie the home page) long enough to be found
• be consistent enough that the site will seem similar after one or two passes by Googlebot.

I like sitemaps when big structural changes occur as the sites heal faster.  They're good when a lots of pages are only exposed via a long pagination scheme.  I also use them to break down parts of a site to expose problem areas (IE when a sitemap has 50 links but Google only indexes 25 of them)

But, they can be detrimental if they are not maintained properly. If anything changes in the structure, it should be immediately reflected in the sitemap.  Lots of automated ones don't consider the robot.txt file which can cause problems.

For SEOs, adding a sitemap is an easy way to ensure everything is at least looked at without having to touch the actual site.

Advice: yes, use them but only if you can use them properly or can't fix current indexing issues. Over the long haul however, you should force yourself to think of it as not there.

Two things jump out -

First, they have far higher authority and higher trust which is worth more than rank these days.

Second, this says nothing about the optimization of specific terms.  I can out rank a 100Mt/Mr site on terms they don't use.

Start with a comparison of where they get their links for the terms in question then see about earning them yourself.  I'm guessing they have a couple really good links from other trusted sites.

A no-follow, in terms of juice, would actually hurt your goals as the link still gets allocated the juice portion but it doesn't flow through.  **Each no-follow link will siphon off a little juice. **

See http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569

The effects of navigational links are diminished somewhat as Google treats them differently compared to content links.  To help solidify this, surround the footer with

<nav></nav>

tags.

Review: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links #5

Generally, remove any site wide links that aren't always needed and place them on page where users would like the details.  For instance, use a search form instead of a link to the search page.

Fact is, the robots file alone will never work (the link has a good explanation why - short form: all it does is stop the bots from indexing again).

Best to request removal then wait a few days.

This applies to Google Mini or Search Appliance which are custom search tools for an individual website.

They allow site owners to sculpt the indexing of their private set ups.

Adwords also has something to help indicate the important content for determining the page topic for relating ads.

However, they don't apply to Googlebot spidering as mentioned above.

If you down load the crawl diagnostics CSV report, you can see one referrer for the problem.

I have better success using Google Webmaster Tools. You get the information "straight from the horse's mouth" as it were.

1. Log in to https://www.google.com/webmasters/
2. Go to Health > Crawl Errors
3. Click "Not Found"
4. For each listed, click the URL
5. In the pop up window, the third tab will list the pages that link in.

Hey James.  Further to Colin's message, with a fresh site launch it's time to outline an ongoing content and marketing strategy. It isn't about some magic number of links but a methodical way you can earn those links on an ongoing basics.

Another easy start is asking partner businesses to give you a bit of link love. You could also consider a press release announcing the new site particularly if it has something special for customers.

Your local phone directory may have a plan that gets you a back link worth your time.

Head over to getlisted.org (now owned by seomoz) and make sure your local profile is as strong as it can be. A car repair shop will really benefit from a strong local showing. Keep on top  of any reviews.

After that,  Youmoz is full of link building strategies. Select a few and give them a daily or weekly time allowance.

Wordpress can get very fast once you properly configure a cache plugin. You could even use CloudFlare.com to enjoy some great CDN enhancements for very cheap.

This assumes you have reliable and speedy hosting - a constant of all websites.  It also assumes you are careful about optimizing the images and don't load the page with  megabytes of JS libraries/plugins.

(edit note: In my experience  cloudflare makes a significant impact if you are on a slower, shared hosting plan.  On a pro level host, it isn't as beneficial)

Sounds like (from other discussions) you may be stuck requiring a dynamic robot.txt file which detects what domain the bot is on and changes the content accordingly.  This means the server has to run all .txt file as (I presume) PHP.

Or, you could conditionally rewrite the /robot.txt URL to a new file according to sub-domain

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^subdomain.website.com$
RewriteRule ^robotx.txt$ robots-subdomain.txt

Then add:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

to the robots-subdomain.txt file

(untested)

Option 1 could come with a small performance hit if you have a lot of txt files being used on the server.

There shouldn't be any negative side effects to option 2 if the rewrite is clean (IE not accidently a redirect) and the content of the two files are robots compliant.

Good luck

1. Try logging out or using a completely different computer - Google modifies your results according to your past search behavior.
2. Double check you are comparing the same country version of Google.  You may be searching Google.co.uk and tracking Google.com
3. It could be getting a boost from local search - try the search with a friend in a different part of the country.

Out of the box WP handles on-page optimization fairly well especially for the "SEO unaware".  Titles and descriptions are customized from article content and the entire site can be easily index.  The pages tend to be light weight thus load very fast.  From there, it depends on the theme and plugins.

But that is far from 80-90% of SEO.  It isn't even 80-90% of on-page optimization which highly dependent on the content and content category.

As a blanket statement, it is false.  If all they are saying is the sites will be easily indexed, sure.

What if they just want to use a pen name to protect their privacy?  Hard to remember with modern life being so exposed and annotated but there are lots of people that prefer to remain anonymous.

So long as the persona is well developed, I wouldn't have a problem with it given the content was high quality.

You can also tell Google to ignore certain query string variables through Webmaster Tools.

For instance, indicate that "dir" and "mode" have no impact on content.

Other SE's have simular controls.

The Mozbar Page Attributes indicates:

| Internal Followed Links | 276 |
| Internal Nofollow Links | 60 |
| External Followed Links | 14 |
| External Nofollow Links | 14 |

But Link Data says 0 internal links. Curious.

PS, cute robots.txt file.

They are not treated as the same.

In fact, use of sub-domains is one way to combat Panda by shifting low value content off the main site.

http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2011/07/wsj-wtf-google-panda-subdomains.htm

The phasing made me chuckle...

Holding the obvious impact of normal conversations on marketing aside, one would guess higher positive social interactions would lead to a higher profile.

It wouldn't be a smart business strategy of these sites to not allow people to find hot spots but just continue to order by an arbitrary string of letters. (when you think about it, alphabetical order is really strange UI )

Given scheme.org has clear mark up for ratings,  I would further assume this would impact the SERPs, particularly in that location. This requires that the SE can see the data and that the site has sufficient trust/authority )

Testing this would be tricky however since you are talking about brick  and mortar places. It would be pretty elaborate and potential cruel to try making a fake restaurant out rank a real one. I would expect checkins from a single account would have limited effect or people would be gaming their listings.

As to rich snippet mark up, I recommend starting with:
http://schema.org/BedAndBreakfast or
http://schema.org/LodgingBusiness

The rest of the question seems to be more about Google Sitelinks and Authorship.

Site Links are up to Google and you need a certain amount of traffic before they will appear.  When they do, their based on linking structure and page popularity. The only thing you can do is tell it what pages you don't want in the list.

Authorship may not apply here but there are many good articles about it on SEOmoz.

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/google-authorship-and-the-fast-track-to-better-rankings-a-case-study

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/read-but-learn-by-doing-an-approach-to-the-analysis-of-seo-issues-between-authorship-google-plus-and-snippets

You should do a remove request in Google Webmaster Tools.  You have to first verify the sub-domain then request the removal.

See this post on why the robots file alone won't work...

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts

SEOmoz has a number of public tools they can use. After that, a basic membership allows for up to 5 campaigns so you and your friends could share a membership and get all the benefits of Pro.

A word of caution,  don't interlink with your friends sites unless they are of direct benefit to your customers.  Even then,  use sparingly. The absolutely last thing you want to do is anything that feels like cheating. Link exchanges/purchases are frowned upon.

Given the spec, a 410 for truly gone pages will be better regardless of reporting or Google.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html

Sadly, from that page: "Currently Google treats 410s (Gone) the same as 404s (Not found), so it’s immaterial to us whether you return one or the other."

This is direct non-compliance which I can only guess is due to people unwittingly use the code incorrectly.  Then again, they have allowed little errors to completely wipe out a site before.

There has been a suggestion from other engineers that it will reduce the number of Googlebot retries and 410'd page will take longer to re-index if they do reappear. http://productforums.google.com/d/msg/webmasters/i70G2ZAhLmQ/neKEH4spacUJ

EDIT oops, your question.  Seems Google reports all the errors it finds but I personally can not attest to seeing a 410. Here is the list of errors in the GWMT help section: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40132  
410 is on the list.

How do the back link profiles compare?  One really good link for keyword 1 could be enough to propel it to the top.  Alternatively, perhaps it gets better treatment by your internal link structure.

Another thought: competition is usually a measure of how many pages are returned for a search but it doesn't get into how well optimized those pages are for a given term.  It also doesn't measure the authority and trust of the domains.  It could be the competition for the first keyword is low value domains and unoptimized pages.

Another tactic one client used was a website credits page.  It had full priority content dedicated to the authors/designers and developers of the site.  This link could be treated as higher priority over small footer text.  Bonus, the page would likely be more topical to your business.  Not for everyone however.

The fact a Caps create a 404 error on LAMP site is a pet peeve of mine - so is the fact Google thinks mix cases on IIS are separate (thus duplicate) URLs.

Too arbitrary to be picky about and cause user frustration.

Thanks goodness at lease DoMaInS can be what ever.

"Domain authority 82"

There's your answer right there - that's a fantastic link.  One to cultivate and track.  Hopefully you can be a resource to the domain again sometime.  Perhaps the topic can be updated year by year etc.

If you can use server side programming to change the homepage, this would be better for your users and optimization.  Just be sure to expose enough content on each for Google to spider and index properly.

Yes, 301 redirect the old night home page. In fact, redirect all homepage requests to just http://www.domain.com/

The canonical link can be removed if on the domain root.

If the descriptions are very technical then likely there is a fair amount of repetition in the sentence pattern, diction etc.  I'd recommend playing with regex to help transform content into something original.

For instance, you could search for industry abbreviations CW and replace with long forms _**Clockwise (CW).  **_Maybe they over use an adjective that you could changeto your own voice.

Also, perhaps the stock descriptions have blocks of useless content you could strip out in the mean time?

The DB probably has a few other fields (name, product attributes etc) so be sure to find a unique way of assembling the meta description, title and details.

If you find enough to change, I'd think having the description would be better then having a page that is too light on words.

Be sure to mark up with http://schema.org/Product so SE's understand the nature of the content.

EDIT:  I have used the regex technique to enhance the content of a database by added inline tooltips, diagrams or figures and glossary links.  However with Penguin, I would be careful with automated links.  You would only want to create a handful using the same anchor text.

EDIT2: I forgot - MAKE FREQUENT BACK UPS.  Regex is super powerful and can tank a database really fast.  Make a backup of the original and of every successful iteration - it will take a little longer but it will save your butt when things go bad.

Short answer: fair amount and/or no point.

Alt tags have been abused so they'd be on the short list of places to watch for keyword stuffing.  H1s are also on that list but fine within normal use (1-2 a page, highly visible,  title length content).

With modern web fonts the only reason to use an image to replace words is a really fancy treatment of the font. Even then, use an image replacement technique so that Google has a easier time understanding the content.

http://www.zeldman.com/2012/03/01/replacing-the-9999px-hack-new-image-replacement/

Save the alt text for describing actual content images.

If you don't want these indexed, first put a noindex tag on all pages.  Leave the follow alone as the engine still needs to find the pages to change the index status.

Add the domain to GWMT then request a removal all the pages.

Allow this to take effect then add a robots disallow to the entire sub-domain.

Your domain then be cleaned from the index and the duplication won't be an issue.

My suggestion is to try AJAXing the tabs.  If the outbound links are more of a concern then the keywords of the link, AJAX loading of the tab content would remove them from consideration.  Google won't index content pulled in from an external source.

However, be careful to put a rel="nofollow" on the link that loads the content as you don't want SEs indexing the source.

Do not put a meta nofollow in the head, it will kill all links on the page and seriously mess up your link flow.  Your use of rel="nofollow" is correct in the context of the specific link tags.

I wouldn't sweat the shear number of links - the 100 count is a left over from the days when spiders only downloaded 100k from the page.  It has since risen to the point that the practical limitations of over 100 links is more pressing (IE, do you visitors actually value and use that many links?)

If each link is valuable and usable, no need to worry.  If not, perhaps there is a structural way to reduce the count.

Also, load the footer by AJAX  onscroll or on demand.  Assuming all of the pages can be found in the top navigation, the bottom links are just exacerbating  your issues.  Primarily, this section is giving far too much weight to secondary or auxiliary pages.

For instance, your Privacy Policy only needs to be linked to where privacy is a concern (ie the contact form).  Good to put it on the home or about pages too if you have a cookie policy.

Ha, true enough!  My dyslexia got the better of my math again!

If they claim it, ask them to back it up with a real example or two.  Then copy what they did (ie noscript link perhaps?)

Before you delete anything, submit a ticket to the help desk.  They may be able to fix it up or point to why it's happening.

http://www.seomoz.org/help

Is the message dated?  Perhaps this occurred before and fixed now but the message keeps popping up?

A stale or poorly created sitemap can hurt in the following ways:

• long lived 404 pages - deleted pages continue to be indexed if not removed from the sitemap
• use up Google indexing allowance - if 404 and low value pages are included, Googlebot will use up valuable indexing allowance on them vs covering more of your important content.
• links to private areas - depending on how the map is created, the tool may not be smart enough to not include administration or community pages that you don't want in the index.
• inclusion of noindex pages - a couple methods (such as a robot.txt update after a sitemap is created) will include noindex pages which a technical problem. I'm not 100% sure of the impact but I could see this being a quality indicator.
• create distracting work - maintaining sitemaps, particularly semi-manual ones from Xenu etc., suck time better spent improving your indexability or earning back links.

However, all of these are easily avoidable with a solid approach and/or good server side tools.

Page two correctly uses:

rel="prev" href="http://www.buffetdomicilio.com/category/artigos" />

Which indicates to Google it is part of a pagination scheme thus it handles it differently to proper content.

You really don't want Google sending traffic to these pages but instead to the actual articles.   In that case, optimizing the title or duplication reduction isn't such a big a deal. It's just one small part on otherwise different pages so you won't get a bad penalty.

I wouldn't use the canonical link suggestion as this will effective remove the page from your index.  I assume you want these for spidering so anything that removes them could be an issue.

If the triangle is on the message, it is historical and you don't have to worry anymore.

Check Health -> Crawl Stats.  You will see what periods Googlebot was unable to index the site.  If there is a positive number most recently then the issue has been fixed.

This is a strong indicator something is up and deserves deeper investigation.

Perhaps you have content duplication issues, low value content (Panda), spammy back links (Penguin) or other indexing issue.  See if there is a pattern to the missing pages, perhaps one of the directories is the cause.  How old is the site and how is the domain trust/authority coming along?

Could you attach a crawl stats for the same period?

Also, what does this site http://www.solvedns.com say about your domain?

Set up a monitor at pingdom.com and it will tell you about any DNS issues that happen 24 hours a day.

I have had direct experience with this issue.  Here are a few of the things I have done:

1. Make sure the current URLs are rock solid and can be long lived.
2. Ensure all links to the old structure are completely purged from the content.  No good to propping up the old patterns.
3. Get a clear picture of the off-site back links.  No sense worrying about pages that will have no value. If they changed that fast, there won't be many to worry about.
4. For those that have good back links, make a direct 301 redirect to the new page.
5. At the point of low ROI, redirect the rest on pattern matches.  There could be a couple double jumps here but they won't mean that much anyway given #3. (side note, double jumps leak extra link equity so they should be avoided)
6. Ensure your entire site can be fully and easily spidered - before resorting to xml sitemaps.
7. Ensure you have a helpful even compelling 404 page that returns the proper status code.  410 errors are reportedly a bit faster at getting content removed so use if you can.
8. Remove any restrictions you have in the robots.txt file to the old structure until the 404 and 301s take full effect.
9. Submit remove requests to pages and folder. This is particularly important if the site is very large (compared to domain authority) and SEs won't get a full picture of the changes for weeks or months due to low crawl allowance.

Doing these got my sites back on track within a couple weeks.

EDIT: forgot a couple...

• remove any old xml sitemaps
• submit multiple sitemaps for different sections of the site.  This helps narrow down problem spots easier.

Excellent, on the 8th you can see the pages indexed dropped to 0 but then picked up again the next day. This aligns with the DNS error graph. If your DNS report is above 80% (email scores are not relevant to indexing) , you are fine.

Ok, domain scored a 93.3% so you are fine. The triangle is just confusing UI by Google.