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My gut feeling says #2. I'll spend the rest of this post thinking out loud why I think that one is there better option (though I don't think there is actually a 'wrong' and a 'good' option here, both have their advantages en disadvantages).

• Both your visitors and the search engines will stop visiting the old URLs as fast as possible (saving you bandwidth on the redirects).

• Less 'code overhead' regarding cases such as 'did I change that one already?'

• You are treating search engine robots and human visitors equally

Love to see what others have to say about this!

Yes, a followed link is still a followed link. It was like that before Panda and it is like that after Panda.

However, not every followed link has the same value. For example: a link from CNN.com has more value than a link from buy-viagra-online-now.info, this holds true both before and after Panda.

What Panda did was decrease the value to you that a link from eZineArticles.com has. Whether you're wasting your time is up to you to decide. Given that you know the article submitted to eZineArticles will only generate a low-value link, is that a wise task to spend your time on, or is that time better spend elsewhere?

B. Neutral

Pretty much the answer I've landed on by excluding the other two. Because this link is Javascript based and the engines are to my knowledge not following these kind of links (please correct me if I'm wrong), it won't give you any positive value. Giving that you're not doing anything illegal or bad, I don't see how this could affect your website's SEO negatively either. Thus, I would say that B best describes the value of this link from an SEO perspective.

These updates by Google are applied algorithmically. This means that they are applied based on a set of standards, which should affect as many 'bad' sites as possible, while at the same moment affect as few 'good' sites as possible.

For some reason the website you're mentioning apparently didn't match the algorithmic criteria to get hit by lower rankings (on this series of updates).

To my knowledge there hasn't been a definitive conclusion on this one.

The general advice as I know it seems to be: they are equally good, pick one, and make sure the other one (with slash if you choose to go for 'without slash' or vice versa) redirects to the chosen one (to avoid duplicate content).

I would personally place the keywords at the end for clarity. It indeed seems unnatural to have the id as the final part of the URL. Even if that does indeed cost you a tiny bit of 'keyword power', I would glady sacrifice that in exchange for a more user-friendly URL.

Limiting the amount of words in the URL does indeed make it look slightly less spammy, but slightly less user friendly as well. I guess this is just one of those 'weigh the pros/cons and decide for yourself'. Just make sure the URLs don't get rediculously long.

In my opinion this should be far more focussed on what a visitors wants to see here instead of what a search robot should encounter.

Make sure your main navigation is search engine friendly (no images, flash, javascript etc) so that all your main pages are linked there. You could choose to link to some of your latest or best articles (to show your visitors that your website is up-to-date), include some testimonials (to show you're credible). Perhaps in your footer you could include some partners (keep it natural), your privacy policy and terms of use?

Try asking your usability testers what they think should be on the main page and work from there.

Matt Cutts states that the number of subfolders 'it is not a major factor': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_A1iRY6XTM

Furthermore, a blog I wrote about removing suffixes: http://www.finishjoomla.com/blog/5/does-adding-a-suffix-to-my-urls-affect-my-seo/

Another Matt Cutts regarding your seperate question about the keyword order: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRzMhlFZz9I

Having some structure (in the form of a single subfolder) would greatly add to the usability of your website in my opinion. If you can manage to use the correct redirects (301) from your old pages to your new ones, I wouldn't see a clear SEO related reason not to switch.

Not necessarily entirely 'their issue', because if Jeremy is linking with a 302 redirect without wanting to do so, this issue might occur on more places across his website.

To expand on the question by Alan: is this (1) an internal link between two pages on your website, (2) an external link from your website to another website or (3) a link from another website to your website?

The (in)famous Google Panda update (thousands of posts on Google about this) struck international websites on the 24th of February, right in the same month where you reported the problems started. Perhaps the drop is traffic is a result of this update and not of the backlinks?

Regarding those links: I think a single website that links to you (be it with millions of links) probably won't be the cause of this drop. Unless, these backlinks were put in place close to (before) the date where the traffic started dropping. Have you tried contacting the website that has those links up and request them to remove your site from their system?

Thanks a lot for the responses so far people! What I would like to use this data for is to back up the argument 'that good meta descriptions boost organic CTR' during a presentation. While I'm almost certain I'll find evidence that this is the case for ppc, I can't just generalize that data to organic seo. As kdaly100 suggested I'd think this is actually testable in a lab study. Present people with manipulated SERPS varying just one element at a time (meta description, title, url, etc.) and see what result gets the highest CTR. Strangely enough there doesn't seem to be any (public) studies that investigated this?

After having answered quite a lot of questions here, I figured it was about time to ask one of my own.

Can anybody point me to decent (experimental) research articles or blogs that actually show variations in meta descriptions influence the Click Through Rate (CTR) of searchers?

On dozens of websites on the internet it is stated that 'meta descriptions affect CTR', but (good scientific) sources for those statements are nowhere to be found. The only research I can find that comes closest to providing any evidence is a translated study by dynamical.biz, which states that searchers LOOK a lot at the meta description, but this study (atleast in the translation) mentions nothing of searchers actually CLICKING it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

To me this sounds like a clear-cut case of a need for the canonical tag.

5 links in the breadcrumbs will by definition mean this page is 5 clicks away from the main page right?

Google doesn't have to look at the actual breadcrumbs for that, they can 'simply' count the hops they have to make from the main page to the page being discussed here.

A normal case of this happening is when a link to the website is placed in the footer, which makes it link from all the pages. However, you've mentioned that the website nowhere nearly has that many pages. Perhaps the website is facing canonicalization issues (with several parameters in the URL, mixing up to become a great many number of pages). Have you tried using Open Site Explorer to investigate the issue further?

I don't really see how you can utilize testimonials to consistently build good content? Testimonials are often short, will only be available on an irregular basis, and will rarely (if ever) get linked to by outside parties. Could you eloborate on your idea a little further?

I think the canonical tag would do quite well in this case, though you want want to consider a 301 redirect first. Both would require you to decide which URL is the 'main' one though, and either add a canonical tag with that URL to the other pages, or have the other pages 301 to the main one.

I agree with Aran, as long as you use the display:none in a legitimate way, Google is unlikely to penaltize you for it. Even if they got as far as manually reviewing your website, they would see you've intended no foul with the display:none.

"99.9% of the time, if a subfolder will work, it's the best choice for all parties." (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/subdomains-subfolders-and-toplevel-domains).

Even though this is a post made in 2006, I don't know of any relevant changes that would alter this advice.

As long as these links are acquired in a natural and valid way, I wouldn't worry too much about them.

If you had acquired a couple hundred links in a short time, when your website had only ten before, that looks unnatural, which isn't good. If you already have thousands of valid backlinks, a couple hundred extra won't hurt you as this fits the natural pattern. Besides, PageRank isn't a great metric to base any decision on these days anyway as it seems (http://www.finishjoomla.com/blog/33/why-pagerank-lost-its-value-for-seo/).

In regards to the rankings: I personally think these are either natural swings or there is more at play than just a handful of new and naturally acquired backlinks.

I guess they will just have a harder time ranking well than. Of course they can still build links through their partnerships, referals, directories, clients etc.

It's not really a matter of 'making content' for the sole sake of getting links; it's also about educating potential customers, getting your knowledge out to people facing similar problems, being seen as an authority in your market, receiving business opportunities because people are landing on your website with long tail search phrases etc.

I've written a blog about SOC last week in which I'm explaining that the value of it has most likely decreased greatly over the last years. Even though it isn't based on hard evidence, you might consider it in your decision of whether SOC should be an absolute requirement for your the blog in your website:

http://www.finishjoomla.com/blog/41/does-source-code-ordering-still-matter-for-seo/

Short answer: no.

Longer answer: read the following article (http://www.submitawebsite.com/blog/2010/03/does-buying-google-adwords-improve.html) on the relationship between SEO and PPC.

"99.9% of the time, if a subfolder will work, it's the best choice for all parties." (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/subdomains-subfolders-and-toplevel-domains).

Even though this is a post made in 2006, I don't know of any relevant changes that would alter this advice.

I personally wouldn't rely on the advice of just one company that 'your domain is toxic' (whatever that might mean). In order to make such a drastic move, I'd first get a second opinion on this, or run the site through some tools.

Perhaps the company doing the SEO just isn't capable enough to get your higher rankings? What arguments are they presenting that might be causing the 'toxicity' for your domain?

Perhaps HTML5 tags are used as one of the signals in determining which piece of source code is what. Seeing how easily one could manipulate these tags, I don't think it'll be a strong signal though. Of course it can be a good guidance for future web developers to identify pieces of source code!

Google is able to read CSS files (for example to determine if a link is hidden), but I don't think it will parse these files and apply them to the webpage to determine the visual layout of it. I think it would require a great amount of processing power (and time) to actually render a webpage, rather than sort out the pieces based on the source code like I described in my answer above.

Glad I could help!

I don't think this is (in most cases) related to penalties.

My best guess would be exactly keyword optimization (somebody optimizing his page for 'book' rather than 'books' will most likely rank higher for 'book' than he ranks for 'books) and incoming anchor text.

I got the same question during a presentation I was giving recently and have to admit I didn't knew the answer on the spot either. Some thinking and discussing with others has given me a pretty clear picture on this though, which I will now try to pass on to you.

I don't think code order matters that much anymore. A couple years ago, when Google was crawling only a portion of a large webpage (mostly due to hardware restrictions), you'd better make sure your valuable text or links were placed in the first part of your webpage, otherwise it wouldn't get crawled at all! With Google crawling large webpage in total (if I recall some quote from Matt Cutts correctly he stated that they now index webpages over several MBs in size, as long as they contain enough valuable information).

With Google advancing their detection of the 'visual location' where text and links are placed on a webpage (see #5 on http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links), source code ordering will most likely have dropped in value as well. Using CSS styling, we can now order our source code pretty much at will anyway, which has changed it from a valid signal to a 'SEO trick' (just like adding a suffix to the URL has, see http://www.finishjoomla.com/blog/5/does-adding-a-suffix-to-my-urls-affect-my-seo/).

By 'viewing' (and perhaps manually categorizing or using machine learning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning) webpages Google will notice patterns in webpage source code. For example: 'that div containing a large amount of links, usually placed in an ul-li, often containing links to 'home' and 'contact' will most likely be your menu. Just like 'that div containing more text than any other div, often starting with a H1 or H2 tag, containing the most images and ending with a call-to-action' link will most likely be your page content area. Thus, Google doesn't 'know' whether a certain part of your source code is your menu, your sidebar or your page content, it deducts it by looking at common patterns.

(lol, my answer is more than three times as long as your short question!)

Pages that should contain the canonical tag aren't nescessarily 'offending' anything. They are just pages containing the same information as another page, where usually the only difference is a (non-significant) URL parameter.

Discounted? Maybe. Penalized? Not sure.

Google will have a hard time reading the intention of these links. How can they be sure these links were placed by the competitors of Anton rather than Anton himself?

I think this would be 'Doorway pages' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorway_page) and more specifically:

"More sophisticated doorway pages, called Content Rich Doorways, are designed to gain high placement in search results without using redirection. They incorporate at least a minimum amount of design and navigation similar to the rest of the site to provide a more human-friendly and natural appearance. Visitors are offered standard links as calls to action."

Doorway pages are not allowed by Google.

Is this happening every day at 10AM? What happens between midnight and 10AM? Before midnight? Is this static IP on a blacklist? Does this static IP change over night? Where are you getting these 'impossible CAPTCHAs'? Where is 'Google blocking you'?

Even though I cannot point you to a specific UK host that does, I'm absolutely certain there are dozens of hosts that have their platform set up correctly. Using the .htaccess file is a truly normal activity that pretty much every host I've ever used (Linux only, not Windows as .htaccess is not available there) has allowed me to do.

Are you sure you're asking the right questions to a potential new host?

You'll have to wait a LOT more. Results such as these coming from a couple backlinks might take weeks if not months to actually process into higher ranks for specific keywords. Hang in there, keep getting great links, and eventually your rank will start increasing!

As long as these links are editorial given and are coming from good domains, I think there should be a lot of benefit in them. Of course links from related domains are better (if only for referral traffic), but I personally don't think they'll be devalued or be seen as manipulative.

Research by SEOmoz has shown there is little to no value in having optimized anchor text for your home page:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/testing-the-value-of-anchor-text-optimized-internal-links

I don't think there'll be a trustworthy tell-tale to know what directories are still passing link juice and which aren't. You might want to try looking at the 'Domain mozTrust (DmT)' as reported by the SEOmoz toolbar. The higher this value the greater the change directories are still passing value.

Why not use the 301 redirect? Even though the content strictly hasn't move but has 'expired', I'd use the 301 redirect to take both visitors and links from the old expired page to another page that 'catches' them. Good for both the user experience (perhaps you might place some links to jobs related to the one that we were redirected from on the new page?) and for your link juice.

See this topic for more information: http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-do-you-do-about-links-to-constantly-moving-pages

This is called 'pagerank sculpting'. It was used in the past to make sure the links that didn't have nofollow received a larger amount of link juice (as the link juice that was passed by a page was split by the number of links back then).

There was a 'recent' change in the way internal nofollow links are treated, that renders this practice pretty much useless nowadays. Read more about it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-consolidation-the-new-pagerank-sculpting

Assuming these companies are closely related in market you might just get away with 301 redirects.

Is it perhaps possible to port the actual content on domain B to domain A (for example blogs, news items, events etc.), pretty much anything that has heavy backlinks? You might want to give the 'top pages on domain' tool by SEOmoz a go to see which pages are most important to conserve link value for.

The // is most likely the result of a faulty setting in the (url routing) system and should be something that can be fixed. As for both the // and the /cpage: is it optimal? Most certainly not, neither for search engines nor for visitors, will it harm your rankings badly, I don't think so. Even though it is something you'd rather not have in your url, all other things being perfect you'll probably won't notice this in your rankings.

I think you should start visiting other speakers on your seminars The amount of root domains linking to you is far more important that the numbers of links from a domain. Having 50 Tumblr blogs would never count as good as 50 different sites linking to you.

I think they do, as I can't find any 'nofollow' on their links. However, unless if you have a really popular (and well linked to Tumblr blog), I don't think the value will be large.

A couple months ago I've written a blog post about this. The blog was targeted at Joomla templates rather than Wordpress themes, but pretty much all the arguments apply to both of them, so this might be an interesting read for you:

http://www.finishjoomla.com/blog/21/18-benefits-of-professional-joomla-templates/

I've recently written a blog about this very subject, you might find it interesting:

http://www.finishjoomla.com/blog/34/google-rankings-dropped-after-switching-to-joomla/

I think the first thing to do is contact your competitor (if you're certain is it they who are behind this) and ask them in a kind and open email to remove this kind of aggressive advertising. If they are unwilling to comply with this request, you might want to consider legal steps against them.

Noindexed pages are pages that you want your link juices flowing through, but not have them rank as individual entries in the search engines.

• I think your legal pages should rank as individual pages. If I wanted to find your privacy policy and searched for 'privacy policy company name', I'd expect to find an entry where I can click and find your privacy policy

• Your search results page (the internal ones) are great candidates for a noindex attribute. If a search engine robot happens to stumble upon one (via a link from somebody else for example), you'd want the spider to start crawling pages from there and spreading link juice over your site. However, under most circumstances you don't want this result page to rank on itself in the search engines, as it usually offers thin value to your visitors

• Blog archive and category pages are useful pages to visitors and I personally wouldn't noindex these

Bonus: your paginated results ('page 2+ in a result set that has multiple pages') are great candidates for noindex. It'll keep the juices running, without having all these pretty much meaningless (and highly dynamic) pages in the search index.