My take on it is that it's good old keyword stuffing and dodgy at best.

The content is of absolutely no use to a human reader - there's no reason for them to care what other search terms led visitors to that page. And since it clearly looks like those phrases don't actually link to other articles (correct me if I'm wrong) they can't be considered "related content".

So a spammy tactic for SE manipulation only. If the site owner knows the page is targeted at those terms, he should be using them properly within the content instead of stuffing them at the end.

This is the kind of stuff Panda's been finding and killing for the past year or so. I sure wouldn't want to bet my rankings on it - and look like a douche to my readers in the process.

Paul

The trick with sitespeed testing, Brett, is that you need to approximate as closely as possible the experience a real user will have.

By far the best tool for this in my experience is webpagetest.org.

It uses actual browser rendering for it's test, not a synthetic imitation. it also allows a couple of other critical customizations:

• select which browser you want to test your site with (you'll be surprised at the differences! Use you Google Analytics to tell you which browser majority of your visitors use)
• Select what sort of connection speed to test from (eg slower DSL which will also mimic phone users or faster cable connection)
• select a specific city to test from (this will have major effect - e.g. you should test from the San Jose location which is much more realistic for your Comox location than an east coast or southern US test would be)
• run a mobile-specific test
• shows both first load and repeat visit (particularly tests caching effectiveness)
• provides a waterfall view so you can exactly which elements may be causing issues

The app also provides full Google Page Speed results/recommendations and a number of other trouble-shooting tools.

GTMetrix provides a number of these, but doesn't have the same flexibility/customization available, I've found. (Though it is using a Vancouver-based server for your test from here (Alberta) which is useful.)

Note that you will get different results each time though, if you're using a real-life tool. That's due to differences in network load and latency and even different load on your server each time tested.

Finally, below is a screenshot demonstrating why you absolutely need to use a real-life test, not just synthetic Page Speed or YSlow scores - the site has a beautiful synthetic score yet a disastrous load time (due to server issues)

Paul

rDQjD.jpg

Glad I was able to help!

It would be great if you could mark the answers you found helpful, and mark the question as answered if you feel you got the information you needed. That will make it even more useful for other users.

Paul

Sorry, one additional - since you mentioned using Open Site Explorer...

Go to the Top Pages tab in OSE and filter the results to include only incoming links. One of the columns in that report is HTTP Status. It will tell you if the linked page's status is 404. Again, just download the full CSV, sort the resulting spreadsheet by the Status column and you'll be able to generate a list of URLs that no longer have pages associated with them to start fixing.

Paul

Ollie, if I'm understanding your question correctly, the easiest place for you to start is with Google Webmaster Tools. You're looking to discover URLs of pages that used to exist on the sites, but no longer do, yes?

If you click on the Health link in left sidebar, then click Crawl Errors, you get a page showing different kinds of errors the Google crawler has detected. Click on the Not Found error box and you'll get a complete list of all the pages Google is aware of that can no longer be found on your site (i.e. 404s).

You can then download the whole list as a CSV and start cleaning them up from there.

This list will basically include pages that have been linked to at one time or another from other sites on the web, so while not exhaustive, it will show the ones that are most likely to still be getting traffic. For really high-value incoming links, you might even want to contact the linking site and see if you can get them to relink to the correct new page.

Alternatively, if you can access the sites' server logs, they will record all the incoming 404s with their associated URLs as well and you can get a dump from the log files to begin creating your work list. I just find it's usually easier to get access to Webmaster Tools than to get at a clients server log files.

Is that what you're looking for?

Paul

The reason the site "looks" to tools like it takes a long time to load is because the Google+ API call and the Facebook Connect call are taking an obscenely long time to negotiate their SSL connections - over 11 seconds.

Fortunately the essential user-visible parts of the page (up to document complete) load quickly so the user experience is fine. Might be worth trying to figure out why the SSL negotiation on those 2 files is getting killed so badly though.

Here's a link to the page load Waterfall View that clearly shows the long purple lines indicating SSL delay for those 2 scripts.

Your homepage is a little over 900kb which isn't massive by any means. Your homepage loads in a little over 3.5 seconds from a Virginia location using the equivalent of a slow cable connection so it looks very-well speed optimized to me.

If you've seen that big a jump in bandwidth use with no accompanying jump in traffic, my strong guess is that some other site is leaching your content (otherwise known as hotlinking).

Typically, this means somebody else has embedded images from your site into their own, meaning every time their page displays the image, it loads form your server/bandwidth instead of their own. (Can also happen with other file types)

Some sites do this because they don't know any better, and sometimes it's malicious. I've seen this often happen from forums where a whole page of post images loads every time the thread is viewed. To see if this is happening, you'll need to check in your server logs. Google Analytics won't show it as the images aren't tagged with the tracking code.

If hotlinking is the problem, the only way to stop it is to tell your server to only display images that were requested from your own website pages. You do this through the htaccess file. If your site uses cPanel for it's hosting control panel, there's actually a button on the Panel in the Security section to disable hotlinking. I assume most other control panels have something similar. Be aware that this will disable ALL images from showing on other sites, including any badges etc you may have created for other sites to display intentionally.

Paul

NameCheap.com is another that will definitely let you 301-redirect one domain to another in the DNS admin (ie no hosting needed)

If you need multiple levels of redirecting, you could just set up the old site as an additional site on the server account that's hosting the new site, and install the htaccess file at its root, with no actual site installed. Then use the old domain's DNS to point to the new location containing the htaccess.

Paul

As Brian says - depends how the JavaScript is written whether Googlebot can parse the link.

Bigger issue though is that the concept you're talking about is exactly the kind of thing that the Penguin Update was designed to devalue/penalize.

Using this method (assuming the links get parsed) is going top create a glaringly unnatural link profile that will likely draw the unwanted attention of the spam team.

Paul

Just to add a couple quick points to the good answers above:

It's not possible to use the underscore "_" in domain names - not a legal character.

As far as using the .co because the .com and .co.uk are already in use - bad idea for another reason. The reality is most people are still not familiar the.co TLD (probably a bit more so in UK where they're already used to hearing .co.uk)

This means a huge number of your potential customers will accidentally type in (when going direct in the browser's URL bar and when linking from their own sites) the more common TLD, resulting in your hard promotional work sending your business to your competitors.

Not to mention the massive headaches when email addresses are accidentally written with the wrong domain ending.

The .co is an interesting addition, but it's still way too far out of the mainstream to risk as your primary domain at this stage, IMO.

Paul

Ayup - and to accomplish that means being willing/able to do some business analysis, not just site analysis. Which moves into the realm of web marketing optimization, not just SEO. Which is where the real value in this whole process lies IMO