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Have you tried creating a redirect rule for each of the folders? From you example above the "post-name" has remained consistent. Therefore if you create a redirect from each folder then you should see a proper resolution with just appending the "post-name"

You need a 301 redirect from a www to a non www. Or vice-versa.

You need to read this article: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

Here is some help if you have a windows server:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/301-redirect-on-windows-iis-help-part-2

A Canonical tag can be used when the split pages are the same pages but with two different URLs. So site.com/sneakers.php and site.com/sneakers, here you could create a canonical tag to let the bots know which page you'd prefer them to index.

Read more here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

I wouldn't advise a canonical. That's not really the purpose of canonical tags. If the page isn't ranking or has no real value then a no-index isn't going to hurt you. What you really need to decide is if the old page is still relevant and useful. If it isn't relevant or useful any longer than you should 301 redirect it. If the content is similar and still relevant, but you don't want it to compete with the new content then you no index it. If the content is relevant and significantly different then you may want to leave it live and link to the new page.

Without seeing the content this is hard to determine, but guessing where you are trying to go with this I'd say a 301 sounds most appropriate.

As long as your redirect is working then it doesn't create a problem for the bots. They can read the 301 redirect.

.....Now if you want to confuse the bots a bit then use a 302. And then turn the site on and off at leisure. Kidding...

My advice is find the higher converting less competitive terms. Individuals that are search for "Denver Highlands Neighborhood Homes for Sale" are further along in their buying decision than "Denver Homes for Sale". The shorter phrases are more often window shopping. The more detailed the phrase, the more likely they will enter the store and make a purchase. Plus, if you do it right, it is much harder to get knocked knock out by a competitor when you are the first to capitalize on a unique search. If you find some gold in "Denver Lofts for Sale" then try dominating that term.

Large rivers are made up from very small streams.

You pay a "ghost writer" to be invisible. Therefore you claim the content as your own. If the content is original quality content than it could and most like would boost your authority. But author rank is more than just having a lot of content published by you, it is about influence. So simply writing a lot of good content does not make you an influencer. Your influence and in turn author rank are based on the citations you receive and the traffic you command.

Back to your 'ghost writer" question. Ghost writers have been used on and offline for sometime now. It seems to be a generally acceptable practice. But this does not mean that Google does or will always accept this. So if you were to ask me if this were acceptable, then I would judge this by how much you are contributing to the content.

An alternative method would be to set up a "persona" as the writer. This is justified by saying authors use pen names. Indeed, Franklin once wrote newspaper columns under a pen name in his early years for fear his age would discredit his work. But this "persona" approach may also run a risk with google.

So pick one or the other, and stick with your story.

You should certainly fix this. You don't want google having to guess what you are trying to tell them. For the most part they will probably get it right, especially in your case with the 404s. But if this is occurring too frequently then they may begin to ignore your canonicals all together. Or worse, you may loose some google trust.

I'd put this on my fix it list.

Here is my 2012 short list:

1. Videos - Creation of videos. And optimization for youtube.
2. Videos - Dynamic insertion of videos on site and conversion tracking with/per video
3. Completion of a niche network and adding 1000 members.

Looking forward to another great year.

Really?...

Start with the basics.

• Comfortable leather seats.

• Large Duel Screens

• Frig and Microwave

Upgrades

• Stocked Frig

• Multiple Stall Bathroom

Posh

• Creative Room - Would include music, Art couch... maybe even paintbrush, video camera, digital camera, piano, books, magizines

-  Strategy Room - Wall of reference books, Board Games with game table, more of a quite feel.

• Social Butterfly room - Bar, bar stools, Soda fountain, chips, dips... if it were AZ I would include a Shaved Ice machine.

But really... I am all about the duel monitors with right webmaster suite programs and I am happy... Phone would be optional.

If phrase match = "red cars"

Google will show your ad for phrases that contain the exact phrase "red cars".

So the search "Songs about red cars" would show your ads.

Your two examples: "cars that are red" and "cars with red" don't actually contain your exact phrase "red cars" so they should not be showing up. Your negative keywords should still apply to the phrase match.

I've found that the SEO community here is very giving. Rand in particular has answered several of my emails and requests personally. It appears that he will be helping you out, so I don't think I can much here.  It's amazing what simply reaching out and asking for help will do for you.

It also appears that this page, which is now public, does not link to your site. So hopefully with permission of  Rand and the community, here is a little contribution to your cause: Down syndrome families

Hope that helps. Looking forward to seeing your cause move forward.

If Bing is running the Yahoo search results then it seems to me the ranks for both Bing and Yahoo should be the same. So why are my SEOmoz ranking reports showing different positions for each?

We have seen a lot of shifting and movement in the search engines as of late. So I am curious as to what people are setting their sights on for 2012. And perhaps a top 3 would be appreciated. This is Internet Marketing goals, therefore SEO, Social Media, PPC, all count.

Link Building? Schema.org? Facebook optimization?

And try to be a little more specific like URL rewrites instead of just On-Site SEO.

Do PR releases help? Do links from PRweb.com carry no value? Was Matt Cutts being specific to the user's website in the Google Webmaster discussion, when Matt said "I wouldn't expect links from press release web sites to benefit your rankings, however."

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/O178PwARnZw/discussion

First off, social media for pest control companies isn't nearly as sexy as social media for a taco stand. So any ideas of glitter and glamor are going to be as helpful as a rainbow colored unicorn. Just wanted to get that off my chest before diving in here.

How I see social media as a pest control guy:

1- Maintaining conversations about interesting pest control subjects.

2- Building relationships with current customers.

3- Building relationships with current employees.

On Facebook after establishing a fan base you can use paid advertising to friends of fans, using fans as endorsements. But don't expect huge returns here. It's more building awareness and trust. You will most likely not see Facebook as a last touch for sales. And it's hard to track the first touch.

Funny videos can build links, but I wouldn't consider them great for building trust. I prefer the class nerd image over the class clown image. Nerds are allowed to make jokes, but your know for being smart, not for being funny.

Lastly, check out http://www.familyownedpestcontrol.org we have just launched this lead sharing network, no cost to you.

And if you want to guest post on blogpestcontrol.com I could probably get you in.

Well Alan, that is fairly specific numbers on your sites, and if you are hitting 95% occupancy then it sounds like a success, albeit I don't know your time/value on the online marketing.

You will find at some point, diminishing returns on your marketing efforts. How much time and how successful you can be with internet marketing depends entirely on your business model and the industry you are promoting.

As for me, a pest control guy, I've found that I only have so much money with which I can invest, i.e. market. Yellowpages still have a return, if that return fits your model then it could still be a good form of advertising. While the phonebook may have good returns, online marketing has better returns. If I have limited money and can buy a customer for $1 then why would I pay $10 for the same customer? If I had unlimited money, then I would buy all of the $1 and $10 customers that I could. (theoretical figures)

Sorry that's a long answer... in short, I believe that most marketing attempts have some return, its a matter of figuring out what the return is and how much it's worth to you. I personally love SEO.

I would have to agree with Steve. It's good for a rough estimate. I would look at more in a ratio scenario. So they might say 100 for the 1st result and 10 for the 2nd. If they are using similar math to hide their numbers then you are looking at a 10 to 1 ratio.

You are looking at site structure. You want it to make sense and you want to link from the broad subject down to the specifics. Example:  Shoes > Women's Shoes > High Heels > Brand Name High Heel Shoe

The reciprocal linking in the content of each page can become confusing if your Shoes page is linking anchor text "High Heel shoes" to the High Heels page, while the High Heels page is linking to anchor text "shoes" back to the  shoes page. I believe that the best way to establish your pyramid is through breadcrumb links, and URL structure. Folders can be useful for defining hierarchy.

The pages you cross link must make sense to users. Dropping in a "Children's Toy" link on a High Heels page doesn't usually make sense. Whenever you consider doing something for "keyword optimization" or "ranking" you need to consider how does this benefit a user.

An account with SEOmoz does give you historical ranking information... but only from the time you created your account. There is no system that will give you historical rankings from a date prior to beginning the ranking log. There are other factors you could use to determine if your site was hit and possibly determine a loss in ranking. General traffic loss would be the prime indicator. If your traffic took a huge dive when penguin went live then you can likely attribute that loss to the update.

As far as keywords go, you can compare keyword traffic to your site before and after the date. Sadly "Not Provided" can skew this data. You would need to look for changes greater than the "Not Provided" average. Most changes, however, are based on so few numbers that the margin for error is pretty high.

Honestly your best bet is to look at pre and post penguin traffic. I have a site that dropped by half. Conclusively a penguin attack.

If you are looking for local accounts then I would focus first on your local markets. You may get less traffic but it will be more qualified. It should be a little less competitive as well. Plus it will give you an edge in the local maps, which could completely alter the universal results when they update the UK search to match the US blended search.

But getting ranked locally for "web design" will require some focus on the generic term as well. So I would place a priority on your local target market first. Go for "web design Leicester" first. Worry about generic rank 2nd.

I would title it:

"Leicester Web Design by COMPANY NAME"

or

"Leicester Web Design | COMPANY NAME"

"Leicester Web Design & Graphic Design | COMPANY NAME"

Ideally if you want to rank for each local term then you would want a page specific to each local search.

"Leicester Web Design | COMPANY NAME"

"Leicester Graphic Design | COMPANY NAME"

Disclaimer: I am a local pest control guy so I am biased to local.

You can add as many analytic codes as you like. Google allows you to add unique codes for sets as well. So you could tell google they are all the same site and then add unique codes for each site under the same account.

Side note, if the page does not fully load you may have varying numbers based on where you place the analytic code. So potentially, the top code will show more results then the bottom code. Not likely, but just a FYI.

Interesting thought on the follow, nofollow and the editorial approval or disapproval. Would love to hear your follow up.

Regardless of the do follow or no follow and the link value, I have found that traffic value is still a huge bonus. One quality comment on a high traffic article can produce a lot of visitors.

301 one of the domains to the other domain. That should work. You need to decide if you want a www.site.com or a non-www, just site.com. Keep it consistent from here on out.

Code for htaccess to redirect non-www to www:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.site.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.site.com/$1 [R=301,L]

The Caffeine udate was claimed to make instant updates to the Index. To me this suggests that as soon as the link is indexed it gives value. However, part of Google's patent suggests evaluation of links over time, so the history of a link could add value to that link. So like fine wine, links with age are worth more.So the value you are looking for may not be achieved until the link itself as aged and increased in value.

What you suggest is that in your findings the value of a link is not immediate for ranking. I believe that is heavily dependant on the difficulty of the desired ranking. I have seen a link or two provide imediate value on obscure rankings. Where as, competitive rankings need the added value of time and quantity.

Take an average for 10 5-star reviews. Not competitive. Easy to move the average by a few more reviews. Now consider average from 100 reviews. Much harder to move average. Take 10000 reviews and a new review is a drop in a bucket.

Very competitive rankings will not see immediate value.

Disclaimer, I am a pest control guy.

As Streamline mentioned, you can go to your htaccess and set up the 301. However, if you are on a windows server it may not be that easy. You can find most of your 301 redirect questions answered by google.

If you do not see or have access to the htaccess file then you can create it in notepad and FTP it to your site directory.

If you are using wordpress then there is a plugin for adding it. ..although I believe the more recent versions my include it already.

You should also consider reading this article in it's entirety: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

So if you had to pick just one or the other you'd prefer the non-map result...

If that's the case then change the URL in your local listing to different page. You may lose your map. It may come back. But at least you get your preferred listing.

Go for it. I've seen 301s help. Direct it to the most appropriate page on your site. You may also want to match up some of the old content and redirect those specific pages to the main site as well. But overall, a simple 301 redirect to a relevant site works wonders.

You may also want to take note of rankings and keyword traffic that the site you are redirecting is currently getting. Monitor the success of the main site in keeping those rankings and the traffic on a keyword base. That will tell you how successful the redirect will be in the long run.

I would opt for the opposite strategy. I would prefer  powerful sites using branded keywords, and lower PR using targeted keywords. The Wall Street Journal is more likely going to link to Nike using the term Nike over "running shoes". Looks more natural. However, if you can score both a branded link and a "running shoes" deep link then go for it.

I hate to bust your bubble on this, but I don't think you will find such a list, especially with the added criteria of white hat. It's really difficult to fully understand a website's entire optimization and strategy from an outside view. Plus, are we speaking of strictly site structure or all aspects of SEO? Wikipedia kills the SEO game by being so massive and having so many inbound links. Tough one to list off.

But if I had to suggest 5 sites to start with I believe that these sites would be great to study:

Zappos.com - Good site. They do a lot of SEO work on their website. I trust their team.

Logitech.com - A well built site. They try to follow all the white label stuff as well.

SEOmoz.org- Maybe it's a bit of a cop out, but the reason you are here is because they are recognized as an authority on the subject.

http://www.mattcutts.com/ < With the exception that you will want to navigate to his blog. But other than that, his site should follow all the white guidelines.

And per Avinash, http://lds.org does good SEO work. I've also run into them at a SEO conference or two.

Of course, all the above are well trafficked sites and very large. Matt's is probably the smallest of the group. If you are looking for smaller websites then I'd just refer to the search engine and who ranks well for any given term.

Are you beating the reseller sites for those products? If you are the established authority and are beating the resellers then you have little reason to change. If you are not beating the resellers then yes you should create unique product descriptions and images for your main site. You would also do well to get some customer reviews on your site and to use the schema.org mark up for the reviews.

I agree. Lowercase in the example above. For ease of direct typing.

But when advertising just a website URL in print offline, caps. www.BulwarkPestControl.com is easier to read than www.bulwarkpestcontrol.com.

When building a link you have the option to add a 'rel=NOFOLLOW' to the HTML. Follow links, which occur with and without the rel mark up are believed to be more powerful than a NOFOLLOW. However, you want a balance of external follow and nofollowed. Your question as to the difference in your Total External Links and External Folllowed Links is that 24 external links are NOFOLLOW.

Here are some more insights: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-matt-cutts-on-nofollow

You will also find some great dicussion on Matt's blog post here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

Confession... I have a lot of errors on my site.... Still manage to rank.

The canonical isn't really for feeding google URLs in the a preferred format, it's more for cleaning up duplicate content issues.

Let's say I could track traffic and conversions on my website by adding a source code to a link. So I create a link on SEOmoz. You can reach my page www.bulwarkpestcontrol.com/pest-control.php with the url string http://www.bulwarkpestcontrol.com/pest-control.php?src=seomoz and that link is now indexed by Google. Well now I have duplicate content and google must decide which page get's placed into their index. Adding a canonical to the main page

<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://www.bulwarkpestcontrol.com/pest-control.php" />

, tells google which page they should place in their index and it helps me avoid splitting my links.

This also applies heavily to shopping carts where the parameters in a URL determine the content, and products that overlap in categories can cause duplicate content issues. Creating canonicals will help avoid indexing issues.

So the point to canonicals is to determine what URL gets indexed and gets the juice for links when there are duplicate content issues created by varying URL stings that lead to the same content.

If you are simply trying to fill in a canonical for a URL to get a "A grade" on a SEO checklist then you will just create the canonical for each page using the exact URL for that page.

Did you add any specific links at that time?

Have you had rapid movement to the top? If you moved to the top quickly then it could just be Google testing your site with the old results. I have seen them do this on several occasions. You get moving, hit the first page, stay for a week or a month then drop down about 30 spots or more.

If you didn't do any specific link building at that time, then keep your current pace going and wait to see if it rebounds next month.

I am guessing you wanted a little more than just a "Yes". So let me assume you are only asking about back links from FB/Twitter profiles.

There is certainly worth in the backlinks, what that worth is varies. But you can check your linkscape to find that twitter links are very trusted. Facebook on the other hand may not give you the same SEO benefit. But in regards to  facebook, if you have followers then taking the 20 seconds to fill in the link info is worth the 20 seconds of labor. For no other reason than if people search for you on facebook you can lead them to your website.

Hope that helps.

I simply use incognito in Google Chrome.

I've got a separate blog site. There are benefits to both scenarios. The reason I have chosen to keep them separate is so that I can post content from other bloggers and contributors and not worry about the content being officially endorsed by Bulwark.

If you do move it over to your main site, you can easily export the wordpress site and all it's content to a sub-folder and then do a 301 redirect rule from your old blog. It is probably ideal to have them all on one site so long as the company wants to take claim for all the content written there.

I am sure there are number of opinions on the best way to accomplish this. I for one still believe you can create a unique page for each of the surrounding areas of a metro city. Metro areas are commonly associated with their surrounding towns and suburbs. In fact, if you search "Wellington town fl" in the related search you will find "town of jupiter" which then has "village of tequesta" in it's related search.

I do so for locations like San Antonio. San Antonio is the main city, Converse, TX would be a subset of that metro.

Google is finding text URLs on sites with limited characters. It's a google crawl problem.

SiteX refers to your article: http://yourdomain.com/blog/austin/steve-rides-to-the-alamo but they hit a charater limit of say 40 characters so they print the URL as "http://yourdomain.com/blog/austin/steve" but link it correctly. Even with a correct link, google will read the text and crawl it the way the text is printed, not linked. Or this happens if it's not linked at all and just a shortened text URL.

To sum it up... Google's got a problem and scrapper sites that chop up URLs are feeding the bots crap. If however the linking domain is a good one and you'd like to take advantage of this little error, then you create a redirect rule on your website for the 404 page.

I would have stopped at "Website tonight".

You can check Google itself to see if they are indexing both. Just search for both pages.

I believe that website tonight would allow you to add meta tags, so you could try using a canonical tag.

Overall this is probably a minor SEO error. Build all your links to one of the two and Google will figure it out.

And GET AWAY FROM WEBSITE TONIGHT!

Nice dialog there. Videos are on my short list as well.

The re-ordering of content on a page could give the page different emphasis. You would have to take a look at the page as a Google bot, to determine if the responsive theme displays the content differently. This could even go as far as throwing up links that should be navigational as content. What does or doesn't fall between a

and

makes a difference.

For the most part, I wouldn't expect a properly designed responsive site to change your SEO.

I believe you will find verbage about historical data in Google's patent. http://www.seomoz.org/article/google-historical-data-patent

You can also read the following from Google's Page Rank Patent 6285999

4. The method of claim 1, wherein the assigning includes:

identifying a weighting factor for each of the linking documents, the weighting factor being dependent on the URL, host, domain, author, institution, or last update time of the one or more linking documents, and

adjusting the score of each of the one or more linking documents based on the identified weighting factor."

It is not specific on if newer links are better or older links more valueable. Since Google does pay a lot of attention to trends and hot topics I think there could be an arguement for newer links being better, but perphaps only on a trendy base. Meaning new links = quick boost, but old links = authority.

Well yes... I heard you were also speaking at SMX. True?

Very interesting. I was just told the other day not use underscores in my image names... which I have done a lot. But my images seem to rank very well.

Did you note that Wikipedia actually has underscores in their site links? Found on all the variations above.

Also noted that I got local results with all but B_L_U_E_

When doing the search for P_E_S_T_  I found similar video and image results

http://www.google.com/search?q=b-l-u-e#hl=en&sugexp=ldymls&pq=p-e-s-t-&xhr=t&q=p_e_s_t_&cp=9&pf=p&sclient=psy&source=hp&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=p_e_s_t_+&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=822bf32b5c0e0691

But doing the search for p_e_s_t_c_o_n_t_r_o_l _ did not give me image results.

http://www.google.com/search?q=b%20l%20u%20e#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=p_e_s_t_c_o_n_t_r_o_l+_&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=822bf32b5c0e0691

Why would long tail be different?

Fun one to add:

http://www.google.com/search?q=b_l_u_e#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=b_l_u_e_++moon&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=822bf32b5c0e0691

http://www.google.com/search?q=b_l_u_e#hl=en&sugexp=ldymls&pq=b_l_u_e_%20%20moon&xhr=t&q=b_l_u_e_+m-o-o-n&cp=16&pf=p&sclient=psy&source=hp&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=b_l_u_e_+m-o-o-n&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=822bf32b5c0e0691

http://www.google.com/search?q=b_l_u_e#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=b_l_u_e_+M_o_o_n_&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=822bf32b5c0e0691

Again no local results for me on the last one, but yes on the prior two.

Thanks for sharing.

Looks like you are starting early in your community participation.

I don't believe adding a blog to a website would generally cause a drop in authority. But here are a few scenarios where I feel it could drop your authority.

• It could be negative if the content added to that blog section is duplicate content.
• It could be negative if the content is too thin in that blog section.
• It could be negative if the bounce back rate is too high in the blog section.
• It could be negative if the blog is overly syndicated to other low quality blogs.

So unless you fall into one of those, then I don't think your drop in authority is likely related to you adding a blog. Now if you lost rank, then perhaps google is trying to determine between pages that are too similar which one should rank.

To your 2nd question, internal links to your homepage will most likely not hurt you especially if they are part of the navigation structure. It is natural for a page to link back to the home page in the navigation. But links to your home page within the blog content that are keyword stuffed could hurt you, these links are not natural.

Have you lost a significant amount of traffic? What exactly do you consider a loss of authority?

I agree. Being able to track links you've aquired and monitor links you may be working on is a big plus to Raven's tool belt.

I am not, but others appear to be http://twitter.com/#!/ReubenYau/status/79159856245903360

So I guess my site is doing fine.