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In terms of pure SEO Meta Descriptions will have no effect on your rankings. But they are potentially your first chance of presenting your content to users convincing them to come to your site, so in that respect they are important. Search engines will use page content as a meta description if there isn't one and that can be fine, but it isn't always what you want.

Titles are a little more tricky, if you have keywords beyond those 70 characters they are unlikely to be "read" by the spiders, and that is less than ideal, so it's important to try to say what you need within that 70 character limit.

You will be doubling your workload, essentially starting a brand new website from scratch in the same niche. I feel I need to make that very clear.

You asked about efficiency and that's pretty much the core of what I'm talking about, subdomains are inefficient.

Niche subdirectories are by far the better option.

I hope Lewis doesn't mind my replying. You've sort of hit the nail on the head, a nofollow link looks exactly like that first bob marley link yes. That rel="nofollow" is the key.

It's not totally useless though, it does have substantially less value, but a search engine will still follow the link, it just doesn't apply the same metrics and credit it would to a normal link.

A nofollow from a reputable source is worth having, even if it's not ideal.

The link from Ziggy Marley is a nice follow link and should be very helpful.

Tom

The wordpress "Redirection" plugin by John Godley has always been great for 301's if you are unfamiliar with setting them up.

Dejan is right, a 301 for a complete site can take a while so that may well be the problem.

It could also be an effect of switching from .com to .co.uk, you are intentionally targetting the local audience over the international. That may well be what's important but it will mean you get less traffic from overseas, it might be worth taking a look at your analytics and seeing if that might be the reason.

I feel bad because someone posted this yesterday and I have no idea who it was:

http://www.vervesearch.com/blog/seo/how-to-optimise-for-google-products/

I will have to go back and find out. Credit where it's due and all.

Edit: It was of course Mr Rand Fishkin on Twitter @randfish.

You want the anchor text to be your keywords, simple as that. Failing that Zion Rootswear is nice because it could help indicate that it's a brand. Using the url as anchor text is close to being your last option.

Hope that helps.

I can't give you anything definite, but I do the fuzzy seo wordpress plugin on one of our sites, and that pulls the keywords out of the referrer for use on the site. You can find it here:

http://seoforums.org

I'm not a coder by any means but it looks like the guts of the program is in the .inc file once you've installed the plugin.

Wish I could help more but it's all I've got.

EDIT: If anyone is using wordpress it's quite a nice plugin definitely worth taking a look at.

It's worth looking at the Webinar video on Sitemaps for this one. It's just a month old so it's completely up to date.

http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/getting-value-from-xml-sitemaps

Sitemaps aren't just a case listing every page on your site anymore, they require a bit of thought and attention.

If you use just used robots.txt to block the byrating directory that would probably be simplest. SEOmoz will still flag the pages up as errors but this is an intentional use to reduce duplicate content.

Bob Marley Tees and accessories sounds good, but failing that (if there are space issues) Bob Marley Tees would work well.

As for the image, yes put those urls behind appropriate text, it's by far the better option. URLs by themselves pass on only a limited amount of information, the anchor text reinforces that considerably.

Everyone starts somewhere.

I can see what you're getting at, but I agree with Lewis-SEO. Given that meta description is not visible on the page any changes (other than perhaps old school spammy) are just noted and displayed. If you were to change something on-page at the same time it may well get re-assessed, but that's not what we were discussing.

Even if it were to trigger a re-assessment all it would be doing is reviewing that page and putting it in it's "correct" place in the SERPs. Had you not done anything to it, it would still have dropped as soon as it was re-crawled regardless, all initiating a crawl would do is bring forward the inevitable.

Of course if we go on the theory that Google has started using user data; if the meta description changed how the page converted or how people reacted to the page (and you could check your analytics) it could effect your rankings.

Basically if users are now leaving your page in droves because of a misleading meta description that may have a knock on effect.

Sorry it was a bit late to help.

I've suggested using robots.txt in the other question you've posted and I think the same applies here. Do any non-duplicate pages appear in the /embed/ or /email/ directories?

Provided what I read was true, interflora were aware prior to the penalty that they were in trouble and were taking steps to remedy the situation by getting the links removed. It could be that their recovery is part of a settlement of sorts, they are a big brand, they took quick action, and this sort of recovery is hardly unprecedented (BMW recovered in 4 days after their penalty via Nick Wilsdon (credit where it's due)).

They apparently still haven't recovered for Valentines or Mother's day, which may be the penalty that lasts, but google got their message out about advertorials quite effectively and that is probably what they were after.

In addition I would imagine that Google's Chrome marketing ad from a while back was an argument in interflora's favour. It actually features items being sent to reviewers to review and it's hardly a huge step to see interflora's blogger flower deliveries as the same thing.

Okay, my best guess (and that's all it's going to be at this point), is that different criteria are being applied to each word, or at least google's understanding of the word's emphasis is different.

Sprachreisen seems to be bringing up results that focus mainly on information about language courses

whereas

Sprachreise seems to be focusing mainly on information about "Studying Abroad" (which is exactly what google translate thinks sprachreise means but I believe changes the context considerably)

This would make the first search more transactional, so people looking for courses, and the second a more informational one, people after information about studying abroad.

Based on this I would say get some articles up about studying abroad in general, and see what happens.

Now for the Disclaimer:

Disclaimer I was working pretty much entirely through google translate so the above theory could be utter rubbish. I would probably still stick with Theo's theory because it's simpler and the way to fix it is exactly the same: build some content around the singular keyword promote it and see what happens.

Sorry that's not a huge help, but it's all I've got.

You probably have several incoming now, but I've sent one.

I'd give it a while longer, a week isn't really enough time to judge.

Was it a dramatic change in keywords?

It's also worth pointing out that www.mountain-solutions.net and mountain-solutions.net also resolve separately so may also be seen as duplicates (this is often referred to as a canonical error).

The process is exactly the same as Cocarcea Ion mentioned, just use a 301 redirection in your .htaccess file if you have access to it.

This site may well help: http://www.websitetodos.com/list/websitetodos/webserver/canonicalnameredirect/canonicalredirect-apache

It's a little sluggish at sending notifications currently but that is to be expected.

Sounds like you should be in a position to know fairly quickly then. Give it a week or two and see what happens.

No, and I have to admit I'm curious as to why you would want to. Are you competing with other pages for results or are you just trying to make search as easy as possible.

Happy to, but if anyone else wants one PM me rather than post here. We don't want loads of email addresses sitting here for the world to see.

Happy to reply, it might be sad but I quite enjoy it.

If it was a smaller site I would say pick your best performing page and use that, but given how many pages I imagine you have that's going to be pretty much impossible. I would go with domain/brand/product (provided that the brand is a keyword and the total isn't too long) that way if people link using just the URL you get another keyword into the mix.

If appliance type makes better sense go with that, just don't make it too long.

EDIT: and yes if you provide a canonical link to the page you want credited you won't have to worry about the noindexing (sorry forgot that bit).

This is the second one of these that I have seen when a uk.com domain was mentioned, and I think it's an error like you say.

Here's the one I saw before:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/designed-new-website-with-new-domain-has-for-than-24-million-links-over-night-on-seomoz-how-has-this-happend

Ooops and found another:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/incorrect-domain-authority-result-on-seo-tool-bar-and-ose

It's a tricky problem because the domain uk.com is valid as a domain (this has since proven not to be the case) as well as a suffix.

EDIT: Ooops on my part, see Sarah Bird's answer, she is entirely correct.

Initial error on my part it wasn't inviting as I expected, but they have all now gone.

Sorry for the delay.

That makes sense and it sounds like you're going about things the right way, but do you really need to noindex the items?

Could you not add the canonical URL to all of the pages? So add http://www.mystoreexample.com/brand/product1.html to any page that features the content? That way you preserve your links and keep your site more open to the spiders?

That would be my only suggestion.

It's a bit tricky to give you anything firm, because in very broad terms these things are down to the volume of links pointing at a site, and both the sites in question are low on links (if you were to get a few reasonable external links pointing at KennethLewis.com I think you'd see a rapid change). But going on the data we have I think this is a mix of site structure, content and page title.

Breema has reasonable content relevant to the query you've mentioned on the front page. It's in plain text there is really no messing around, it's nice and simple. On the other hand the page on KennethLewis is somewhat buried behind a slider containing none of your quoted keywords (and it's the last slide as well).

Moving on to the titles Search engines will read in the region of 70 characters of your title, anything more than that and you are likely to be losing the later words in it. In the case of the page Google is ranking the word "marketing" gets cut off halfway. Breema on the other hand has Georgia mentioned twice and Internet Marketing all covered within those 70 characters and this is going to have an impact.

If you were to create even a few text links to that page from other pages on the site using your quoted keywords I think you would see an improvement, it would be even better if you got the text on your slider sorted, right now it's all about cars, hunger and statistics rather than internet marketing.

Links are the key, get a few reasonable external links with the right anchor text and you'll see some results.

Hope that helps.

How established is your site, how long have you been working on it?

If it's fairly established and older I wouldn't expect a huge amount of change if you were to cut your content somewhat (500-700 is still a lot of words on the page), you might experience a bit of a wobble as google gets used to things, but it shouldn't make a huge difference.

Worst case scenario you can put the old text back and pretend that nothing ever happened.

If you change things and it does make a significant difference it would be interesting to hear about it.

You might want to experiment with your new text first using some sort of A\B testing. That way you'll preserve your current rankings, and test your new text to see if it's going to improve your situation. It's worthwhile testing first before making the switch.

At the most basic end of the spectrum how you have Google website optimizer:

http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer

but there are some great paid for options out there that do an excellent job.

The microsites are a nice idea and could work well in the long run, but you'd be fragmenting your efforts, so your main domain would probably suffer due to diminished updates and attention.

I'd stick with the single domain and as long as the niches are related continue to build on that.

I work on a set of sites that were split from a whole and they are a lot more work than if they were just one site together.

Tom

Yes, maybe I was a little blunt there, sorry about that, it wasn't how I intended it.

Nothing wrong with a sales page as the front page if your clients are mostly direct and you expect that to remain the case.

With that said if they have gone to the trouble of typing in your URL, they are expressing quite a lot of interest already, so it's unlikely that they'll begrudge clicking through to a sales page if you make it an obvious and desirable option.

I would imagine it's going to be very unlikely that you'll experience a knock then, make the change then sit back and wait for a little to see what happens. Expect a wobble, and don't panic if there is a slight drop at first.

In the unlikely event that the text does make a big difference, it's the easiest thing in the world to just put the old stuff back and your ranking should return with equal speed.

1500 words is a lot to have on the homepage, so you might even find it does your position some good to thin it out a little.

In the long run there really is only one way to find out unfortunately.

Links are what you want in SEO, they are probably the strongest ranking factor (at least for the time being), but the easiest way to get those is to visible create content that people want to create links around. This is the reason that content is so important.

If you are doing all your linkbuilding manually, by yourself, you have a long road ahead of you.

Google has indexed your page, so it's been crawled but it only has the one link pointing at it and as I said that's not providing any particular context.

I don't think that anyone is going to disagree with the concept that knowing more about SEO is an advantage, but it's not a game winner.

Your situation will all be solved by sorting out that slider and getting some more links with the right anchor text pointing at KennethLewis, specifically at the page we're discussing.

Maybe it's time for some old fashioned shmoozing? Make some contacts with people that might blog about your articles, or refer to them, or simply tweet about them?

The ablemag twitter account is very dry, so maybe inject some personality into it and build some helpful relationships?

I also think it might be interesting to widen your net somewhat, so your target market is people seeking disability news, that's fine, but there are other people who may well blog about some of the things you write even if they aren't your demographic.

It's an odd subject but people interested in body modification or transhumanism may well be interested in some of the things you write. Both of the following articles would serve as a starting point for some linkbait for that demographic:

http://ablemagazine.co.uk/artificial-pancreas-in-pregnancy-promises-fewer-diabetes-deaths-and-abnormalities/

http://ablemagazine.co.uk/pistorius-eyes-2012-with-new-pb/

PS I PM'd you a few ideas, let me know if you didn't get it.

Whilst I do agree with Daniel Deceuster, subfolders are historically much nicer than subdomains. You're not going to get in trouble for having one on a different IP address. We use a subdomain for our members section (decision was made before my time), customers like that mental partition, and it's not done us any harm.

I realise the main blame fell on the newspapers for what was essentially cash for links, but a separate part of the PR push was sending flowers to bloggers who then blogged about it.

I can see that this could be construed by Google to be a breach of their t&cs, but equally it could be a legitimate action by the blogger if they are giving an honest viewpoint.

Is the Google Chrome "satchel" ad being unintentionally misleading?

If it's all down to the intention that's a worryingly grey area to be stuck in, what do you think?

If it's as explicit as "if I send you something I require a link back" I can see that it completely breaches guidelines, but if it's sent out without that requirement, for genuine review I think you're in much murkier territory.

Should they be denied the option of linking because they received the product?

I'm just interested in the discussion, I know there are plenty of product review bloggers out there (across the whole white\grey\black spectrum) who are now wondering where they stand. From what limited contact I've had with them, many of the more hobbiest bloggers had little or no idea about nofollow anyway.

Much of the PC games industry is fuelled by review copies, and there are some truly sinful strongarm tactics going on for positive reviews over and above any links. Is cracking down on stuff like this even enforcable?

I thought it was a nice public slap on the wrist without severely damaging a brand that probably should be on page one. It got the message out loud and clear and I would imagine that the papers are going to be much more careful.

You're right with regard to the error, but it's not the first time that the Chrome marketing team may have made an error with how they went about their business. To someone with a traditional marketing background I'm sure it seemed very innocuous, which was largely the problem with interflora anyway I suppose.