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In my opinion, it depends if we're talking external linkage here or internal linkage.

Sitewide linking out externally to sites with keyword rich anchor text can contribute massively to making the domain being linked to's link profile looking largely unnatural (if all followed links).

However, with internal linkage, I agree that it's advisable not to link back to your homepage with keywords as the anchor text, but other footer navigation with the appropriately labelled anchor text for each link is pretty acceptable in my view - as long as the reason behind this is for usability rather than for SEO.

Here's another idea. Rather than worrying about numerous 301 redirects, why not just set up a rewrite rule in .htaccess using mod_rewrite (if you're using an Apache server) that rewrites all URL's with a file extension (.htm, .html, .shtml etc) to just end with a trailing slash or not include the extension?

One rewrite rule would then redirect all URL's that have an extension to a version without, and subsequently, this would be the only version that would end up getting indexed in search engines and that anyone would ever see. Plus it keeps your URL structure much cleaner.

Does the file/page exist on your website (/include/vdimgck.php)?

Does the referring URL contain a link to this location?

Looking at some of the search results for a search on that filename, it looks like it could be malicious or your site may have been hacked. Check the location on the server to see if it exists first.

You may wish to explore SEOProfiler and SEMRush, both of which have features that can help you identify what keywords competitors are ranking for.

If all the URL's for your pages remain the same, there is no requirement for 301 redirects at all no.

They aren't software, there is a difference. But I appreciate opinions differ.

I was going to send you to the Google search results for 'SEO Software', I then noticed that SEOmoz rank and they make use of the page title 'SEO Software Simplified' so I feel pretty foolish now.

In my opinion, there is a distinct difference between what I refer to as 'seo software' and a collection of tools that each carry out a specific process to give useful insight into just one area. The tools provide users with data to then go away and work with by whatever means necessary whereas software is generally a suite with features that attempt to automate much of the 'optimisation' process.

Having spoken to Jill at HR on a number of occassions previously and being quite active within the High Rankings forum and Sphinn community previously, I'm pretty certain they are of the same mindset of myself and not perceiving SEOmoz as 'seo software' as such.

Be interesting to hear other peoples thoughts on this of course...

There are so many questions here really before it's clear what the cause could be, some of these include:-

1. Are these from other sites you own? One would presume so if you access to remove the links?
2. If so, are these sites hosted on the same server as the domain they were pointing to?
3. Did the sitewide links contain keywords as the anchor text or were they branded?
4. Why did you choose to remove the sitewide links in the first place?
5. Did any of the other websites containing these sitewide links suffer recently as a result of algorithm updates or decline in rankings.
6. The page(s) that the sitewide links were pointing to, does this have other existing links still pointing to it? What % were they were reduced by after the removal of the sitewide links? And of those existing, are they a mix of nofollow/dofollow?

Often, the removal of mass of backlinks will cause a drop as you've experienced. Normally because it's a major shift in the link profile and doesn't look 'natural', providing there was legitimate reasons and there are no other issues that can be raised against the domain in question, often, ranking positions are pretty much reinstated again.

Incidentally, how we often get round this scenario is to keep the sitewide link in place but write a script to only make the link on the homepage followed - and all the others add the nofollow link relationship.

Not at all, it's more natural for a domain's external link profile to consist mainly of backlinks containing the nofollow link relationship than not. The 67% ratio would be about right and this would not, in itself flag any problems at all.

Its important for a link profile to look natural, a healthy balance of nofollow links with followed links along with a nice mix of variety with the types of pages linking back to a domain.

Hi Kris,

SEOmoz provide tools to assist you in analysing and identifying issues within your site and its pages. It doesn't provide "SEO software" as such. Most agencies/seo's will use a range of tools to aid their workflow, there is nothing wrong with that.

What HighRankings are referring to is automated garbage that claims to build you 10,000 backlinks while you sleep or at a click of a button it will tell you how more times you have to mention keywords a,b and c to rank for them - it's all mindless nonsense but people to still fall for it and purchase the software.

The bottom line is, there are no shortcuts or cheats with SEO, provide quality that people want, cater for your intended audience and engage with your end users. Everything else from thereon is almost a given (providing you have a decent designer and developer that knows what they are doing looking after your website).

Hope that clears that up...?

Are you removing sitewide links on other domains pointing to your website or are you referring to sitewide internal linkage within your own site?

All local listings for Yahoo! UK are managed and maintained via a 3rd party company called Infoserve.

You're lucky if you don't get spammed from them every week telling you to list a free business with them.

Learn how to add your business, clicking the link from this page will allow you to create a business listing.

It doesn't sound like they are a developer at all if they can't apply a basic rewrite which is included in the Magento core.

Switch URL rewriting on from the admin panel and add this in .htaccess

RewriteCond %{http_host} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,NC]

(replacing yourdomain.com with the domain).

May vary depending on the version of Magento although if its a new build, I would expect it to be 1.6 or 1.7.

As you can see here, this is an issue as Google are indexing many variations of the same page although this means that somewhere is linking to them unless your site is set up so that even a crawler passing through links to your contact page is creating the query parameter in the URL's.

To resolve this, you need to add the following to your robots.txt file:-

Disallow: ?referurl=

This will prevent any URL's passing that query parameter from getting crawled and indexed ensuring that only the originals of the pages will appear in search engines and not flag as duplicate content.

Hopefully, someone from SEOmoz can add as to whether there is an option for obeying robots.txt directives within their crawler so that these URL's are not listed as I'm not sure.

Regardless of why your question wasn't accepted or not by the system, I'll provide the answer to your question...

The pipe (|) symbol has been used in page titles for many years now, it used to best practice to format your page titles something such as the following:-

Keyword 1 | Keyword 2 | Keyword 3 :: Company / Brand Name

With the keywords being in the order of priority that you wish a search engine to perceive as being the most important for that particular page.

Search has evolved since then and everything Google look for is natural look and feel serving the most relevant and useful content for the end user so it is now advisable to write page titles manually and natural in the sense that it should read well, like a short, descriptive sense describing the particular page.

Check out this for further information which discusses writing page titles that will have the best chance of performing on the web.

Thanks for the information you provided...

I believe the shift in rankings will be primarily due to a weak link profile for your domain but also a stronger backlink profile from some of your competitors which has seen them rise above you in the organic rankings. These changes coming since the additional Penguin algorithm updates rolled out by Google. (Incidentally, have you seen a decline in Yahoo/Bing if you monitor positions at these search engines too)?

When seeking link opportunities, it's not advisable to chase PR - if 95% of your backlinks all come from pages with a PR3+, then this in itself looks unnatural and will have been a signal flagged.

It is also possible, that those domains you have previously sourced backlinks from via building content relationships could also have suffered as a result of the latest algorithm updates - if they look to sell/provide backlinks using their page PR as selling point, and subsequently link out to various websites from sidebar placements (which they do looking at some of the pages containing your backlinks), this could also have made your domain suffer as less weight/authority is being passed through your links.

I would recommend acquiring some new backlinks, don't worry about the PR of a page and don't focus on using keywords in your anchor text. Perhaps consider some guest content at a few blogs, writing a few pieces of content at each related to your products/services using an author byline with branded backlinkS - for example:-

<name>is the marketing manager at RentalInsurance.org for a leading provider of renters insurance in New York.</name>

Perhaps also consider contributing via comments to some blogs, doesn't matter whether backlinks are nofollow or otherwise, just ensure your brand and where possible,link back to your site (using your name for commenting instead of keywords) via making some relevant and genuine comments to other blogs.

Build a few handfuls of backlinks such as these which will counterweight the links in your existing backlink profile and ensure there are some more genuine and natural links being built.

I would expect this to prove a step in the right direction however there is also the possibility Google could also be looking at onsite elements and the practically exact match domain name too which have also seen changes from recent algorithm updates.

Hope that helps for now.

Recommendations need to be based purely on your specific requirements (and budget)...

Undoubtedly, opting for a cheap solution, will sacrifice on quality - as with many things in life.

Are you planning on using a website design / development agency to build and design your store or are you just looking for an off the shelf platform with pre-built templates?

What is the $150 per month for? Hosting? Monthly transaction commissions on self hosted solutions or just monthly fee for usage of the ecommerce solution?

First identify whether an open source platform or a self hosted platform is best for you. If you want everything taken care for you and aren't worried about the endless limitations you will face, then a self hosted solution such as Shopify or Big Commerce may be best.

We've got many years experience in ecommerce having worked with lots of ecommerce providers and there really isn't any case of one size fits all nor are there many that we recommend as the majority have flaws.

Generally we'll recommend Magento as it's open source, extendible, flexible, robust, powerful - but it is also bulky so needs experts to fine tune and configure server, site and a decent hosting package - preferably in a dedicated environment - but this won't always be the best or cheap option for some etailers.

Some questions you may want to be asking before going with a recommendation include:-

• What is the reasons for upgrading / switching if you already have an ecommerce website?
• How many products do you need to upload and will the filters/options be complex at all?
• Can you design, code or work around PHP, MySQL databases, HTML and CSS (typically)?
• What ecommerce features do you require?
• How extendible does your solution need to be?

Other noteworthy subjects to consider:-

• Support & Service
• Themes & Extensions
• Maintenance & Updates
• SEO / Core Optimisation

You may also find this article on Killer eCommerce Tips for Online Retailers useful too. Whether before you have chosen an ecommerce solution or after...

At some point, someone has hired one of these worthless 'link building' packages online that pays for however many forum profile backlinks. Whilst many of them have been deployed incorrectly (thankfully for you) - You can tell this by the fact BBCode was used on the forums when some of the forums in questions don't accept this and use an HTML editor instead.

This kind of artificially generated link profiling was targeted in the Google Penguin algorithm updates, this could largely prove the outcome of any recent deterioration in your domain's performance as it is blindingly obvious most of the backlinks are from link spam.

Perhaps the company you wrote the article for, once published, then buy useless packages online to build lots of links to their content which then links to their own website...?

If it were me, I would take down the article and request a URL removal from the index in Google Webmaster Tools. It may even be worthwhile creating a 301 redirect to point to somewhere else so that lots of 404 errors aren't triggered on your site (if there is any worthwhile traffic coming via any of the links pointing to the article).

You can view the link profile for this URL here.

Whilst I like your approach in how you turned the blog comment spam into a relevant piece of content for your target audience, any process in outing comment spammers or any other associated processes will result in a lot of wasted time.

Comment spam is deployed in bulk, hitting millions of domains at once. The comments will largely be made using gmail email addresses so that the blog owner can't easily just ban the email domain from posting due to legitimate users of gmail. The entire process is automated, using scrapers, bots or other 'black-hat' software. The email addresses are widely not even maintained (real) - it is really of no bother to the creators, if the email address is added to mass marketing / email lists as whoever is employing them for mass spamming will own hundreds of thousands of email addresses with new ones being created every day.

There really isn't any effective way of manually combating spam, not one that most can really justify the use of their time dealing with... Unfortunately.

Some questions that should help point us in the right direction:-

1. At what point did you see a decline in organic search rankings?
2. What were the last changes made to your digital marketing strategy prior to noticing the decline?
3. Do you or have you previously paid for links? (I'm referring to your link profile here).
4. What do you feel determines a "quality site" (in your words)?

Can also confirm that the domain is indexed in Google.co.uk.

Joomla has all those features included in its core but if you want greater flexibility over what content you want public and what you want private (requires visitors to sign-up/login to view), you may want to check out this extension.

There are a few Wordpress plugins that cater for what you're after - but again, included in the core is memberships, sign-up/login functions so not really sure exactly what you're after but here are some resources that will likely come in useful for you.

http://buddypress.org/

http://ntt.cc/2009/10/13/25-excellent-social-networking-plugins-for-wordpress.html

Those links in 'Related Categories' are not required, not from an optimisation point of view nor a usability point of view - they carry no styling to make it obvious that they are links which can also flag elements when Google crawls your pages.

The 'Browse for more products in this category' section at the bottom of the page is also not required. There is uneccessary excessive use of internal linking which is likely to be considered 'over optimisation' by Google as per the latest algorithm updates.

Effective navigation is key in ecommerce websites, the main navigation and sidebar sub / layered navigation with necessary filters should be adequate in most cases. If you're only including additional linkage to try and rank pages higher for particular terms, then Google will detect this.

If your category structure goes quite deep or is relatively complex, consider including a module to display related categories in the same way you would display related products. In its current form though, it's not required, doesn't do your website any favours and will likely do more harm than good in the long run.

Consider checking our a click through overlay (Google Analytics provide one) where you can see just how many of your visitors are clicking through those links mentioned above.

Hope that helps.

Hi Michelle,

So you're 404'ing the old sitemap URL yet you've placed the new sitemap at the same location...? If you want to private message me your domain, I'd be happy to take a look for you.

There should be no need to 404 anything, just replace the old sitemap and Google will do the rest. Alternatively, just recreate the new sitemap index at a new location such as domain.com/sitemaps/sitemap.xml.

Thanks

It sounds obvious but in each account, are the Google localisation settings the same and the geo-targeting in the AdWords tool the same?

This is where many misconceive the concept of guest blogging. If time is spent chasing algorithms, manipulating search engines and following through any process in the hope to get a backlink, it is unlikely that a) you are doing it right and b) that you will really be rewarded well.

As with anything online, a content strategy should be thought through, you should understand your target audience and know how to address the readers and what content to provide within articles. If the only reason for writing a guest post to get a backlink, then the article is probably only low quality drivel and will subsequently only find a home that is equally the same.

I for one would much rather spend the time creating a fantastic, well researched piece equipped with imagery, citations and the like and be rewarded with placement at a high traffic authority blog with a link back to my site that sends targeted traffic that may convert rather than a bland, uninteresting 500 word article at a blog that no-one reads. Of course, I'm not saying that this is what you do however think of it like this:-

Why should Google devalue weight passed through a link from an article published on a blog that receives plenty of traffic, has significant social signals and a high level of engagement. Just because it's a guest post doesn't indicate that the content is any less worthy than anything else online.

Sure, if the same author bylines and anchors in links are used each and every time, then it's going to be pretty easy for Google to spot - but then, if you're doing this, then you're going about it wrong anyhow.

Write quality, unique content, identify awesome blogs to publish at, encourage audience engagement and maximise social potential. Google will never devalue your efforts if you are only thinking about your audience and customers, that's the bottom line and always will be.

You may find this useful: Link Building Due-Diligence: The Guest Blogging Checklist

Sub domains act as their own domain essentially, a separate section which won't share weight unless specifically linked to. Sub domains are indexed in search engines separately to the root domain and subsequently, building links to these will influence ranking.

If you concentrate your efforts in ranking the root domain, this won't necessarily help your sub domain rank, if we were talking sub directories, then this would as flow of authority and weight can pass through the site. Treat the sub domain as it's own website and initiate it's own strategy for this space would be my recommendation.

Potentially quicker to rank well if you built back up on a fresh domain with no poor history, but that being said, whose not to know if Google have methods in place to identify if domain owners do this - potentially via comparing content, code and copy. You might end up redoing everything on your website just to be safe.

Sticking with the same domain just means that you have to build a relatively significant amount of natural links to bring down the same anchor text ratio vs total external backlinks in the profile - do-able though if you subscribe to a few blogs and regularly comment to articles and maybe write some content for publication at toy (or other related) blogs - ensuring that you avoid blog rings/link networks/farms though.

You're welcome Jonathan.

Feel free to see how a lot of other successful organisations implement this on their blogs on the web. Take Mashable for example, see their topics pages, these are essentially what blog articles are tagged with. Looks like they cut off their snippets at about 170 characters.

Also, ensure that you're using the canonical link element for blog article pages too to let search engines know that those are the originals and where you want the weight placed.

View your link profile here.

Links are mostly coming from unauthoritative sources and mostly contain the same anchor text. This will be what you have to work on, start building natural links with varying anchor text to counterweight the poor link profile and history on your domain.

View the source code when on the splash page and you will see that their entire site is there, this is what a search bot is seeing. View in browser and this triggers a splash screen overlay - really, the full website is there, you just can't see it.

Perfectly safe, perfectly legit.

Remove if you can but certainly start building new natural and genuine links to counterweight any previous negative signals on your website's link profile.

No, assigning multiple tags to multiple pages on your website is good practice. (Providing they are of relevance of course).

What you should think about doing is only displaying excerpts for tag / search result pages so that it doesn't flag as duplicate content. You don't need to be displaying the entire post(s) for a tag page, a small snippet with a 'Read More' or similar link will ensure the full original is only ever at one location, it's specific URI.

Google since released a 52 pack of updates since the roll out of Penguin and Panda 3.6 which you may have been stung by almost immediately after the first hit.

SEOmoz provide up to date change history of algorithm updates as soon as they are released.

Any backlinks you have which are associated to blog rings / networks - I would delete as many as you can. If the network has been identified and blacklisted by Google, then they'll be rolling out penalties for any domains that have used them. Parallel to this, build some natural links to balance out your link profile as soon as you can too.

To answer your question specifically, the 70 characters limit for page title recommendations is not important at all for "getting excellent search positions", it's a guideline because search engines won't pay much attention to anything after70 characters. It's not a ranking factor.

As Zeph points out, search results will only display the first 70 characters so anything longer than this won't be seen by your intended audience anyhow. Much more focus is giving for the beginning of page titles, and then it fades, the longer it gets - hence why it is recommended to structure your page titles in order of relevance and importance.

So page titles longer than 70 characters will not hurt search engine positions directly, but will prove more likely that their is wasted opportunity and contain stop words unnecessarily.

We are a creative design and development agency as well as a search marketing agency, we can build and develop ecommerce websites and look after all migration, hosting and configuration - we can manage everything basically. We are based in the UK though so unsure if you are looking for someone a bit nearer to you.

I also appreciate that it's not really a recommendation if we are pushing our own services to you so if I were to recommend another company that I have no affiliation with, in terms of anything Magento related, Inchoo would be my recommendation.

Glad you identified the setting, thought it looked something like that.

Site is looking a little better, is there any way you can change the layout of the product pages, perhaps putting the price and options alongside the image gallery or anything similar to that? Any kind of layout options available from the admin panel?

Appreciate your decision to stick it out with 3dCart for now, can sometimes prove a daunting task migrating to a new ecommerce provider - it should be a relatively smooth transition if you hire the right person/company if you decide to do so in the future though.

Happy to advise on your current site as required based on what the platform will allow you to do though.

It amazes me that there is still discussion about dofollow social bookmarking websites, article spinning, automated backlink sourcing and the like.

Focus your attentions on other efforts that matter, other efforts that will prove genuine, legitimate and natural.

Sure, if you feel a social bookmarking websites such as Mister Wong will drive targeted traffic to your website, go for it. The likelihood is, it won't. Social bookmarking has had it's day really, few of them are really great traffic drivers and even those that are, the value of the traffic is questionable.

I wouldn't recommend wasting your time on sourcing dofollow links only, it's not natural, it only indicates to a search engine that you're trying to game their system. A handful of relevant nofollow links that send traffic is going to prove far more useful than a handful of dofollow links from websites that no-one ever visits.

There are plenty of automated tools on the market to produce what you're after, but expect to get penalised further down the line.

No problem Bill, glad you sorted it - what was the cause in the end?

No it isn't, not really.

It's still not an open source platform which means you can't make any customisations to the code and you're limited to what the pre-built ecommerce templates they provide have to offer - and looking at a demo of theirs, the way the platform is built, is still far from good.

It's similar to 3dCart in this sense. It's self hosted meaning there are various fees for data transfer, limitations on quantity of products etc etc.

Our recommendations for both an open source platform and self hosted solution are as follows:-

Open Source: Magento - We're worked with pretty much every open source ecommerce platform there is, we've had issues and nightmares with most of them - very few are flexible and bug free however after 6 years of expertise in the ecommerce sector, I would recommend Magento every time (if it fits with your ecommerce requirements). It's free open source, very extendable, anything is possible and can be customised - all you need is a decent developer / agency that knows the software inside out. We generally charge anything from £1200 / $1900 ish for a Magento build depending on specifications (as an idea of costs).

Self Hosted: Liquidshop - If you want a solution that is fully looked after for you, managed, hosted, with a support department you can just contact when you require to action anything on your ecommerce website, then by an absolute country mile, I would recommend Liquidshop by Sitemakers (based in the UK). Monthly fees are involved (as with any self hosted solution) and may prove to be a bit steeper than others on the market but you get what you pay for, they are at the forefront of consistent development, well coded, well optimised, clean and correctly coded platform stacked with tons of features.

Ultimately, it comes down to budget and requirements, but these recommendations would be based on our experience within ecommerce - and we've worked with most providers.

Either specified example is fine and one won't rank better than the other based on the domain on it's own.

Is your actual company called Electric Scooters 4 Less though? I would recommend a branded domain name in an ideal world, not having the keywords in your domain name is not going to hinder the rankability of the pages providing the content is quality.

This could potentially cause your website to suffer but it's all about ratio and balance. If the majority of your website's link profile is made up of these types of links, then it would be a good time to build some natural links to counterweight the existing ones.

As long as the positive metrics outweigh the negatives, generally, you should be fine. Just building some links with varying anchor text to the same page should ensure that you're website doesn't get hit further down the line by one of Google's black and white zoo animals.

You're welcome

Rich Snippet Markup should be implemented on the page containing the information not on links pointing to the pages.

Difficult to really advise on which approach would be best because from what I can gather, it doesn't sound like you're implementing the markup correctly.

Better to mark up the content on the location pages themselves with the address, locality, city/town etc as per my example above.

Might be worth reading up on exactly how Schema data works.

Just block /premium-content from your robots.txt page then (or include a meta noindex on the page if you can). There's no reason for it to be indexed I presume if it only redirects to your registration page and can't be access without authentication?

Disallow: /premium-content/

Hi Bill,

I did just type out a long response to you but it got lost when I posted the message, I think because the message I was replying to was deleted as a duplicate.

In short though, I described how the current template is better from a design perspective but all the issues are still apparent though. I checked out a product page form a 3dCart demo store and the issues are there too. The software is not open source either so unfortunately you're limited with their poor design / development whilst you host your store with them - just one of the many issues with hosted ecommerce solutions.

All you can really do is ensure page copy is clean, tidy and optimised along with ensuring page titles are unique, descriptive and optimised (required on the page in question).

We're actually building an RC Model ecommerce shop for a new client in the UK from within the next month or so if you would be interested in checking it out when it goes live.

The design of the website / product pages are poor and would be unlikely to convert well due to the layout and presentation of the information.

Just a redesign of the page would make a significant improvement to onsite behaviour I would expect.

A few points include:-

Conversions

• Design is not fluid.
• Too much whitespace.
• Everything just appears in one wide column, needs to be split into easily digestible sections with call to actions.
• There is nothing catching my attention and no existing call to actions.
• Ask yourself - Why should people buy from you?

Optimisation

• Page contains stacks of CSS / junk type tags from MS Word
• Majority of page is built with tables rather than external CSS and DIVS.

Competition

• Are your prices competitive?
• How does your website compare against your competition?
• What can you take away from your competitors websites / business model?

Analytics

Have you analysed the data you have to learn:-

• Where visitors are leaving your website.
• Whether they are viewing any other pages other than the landing page.
• Are the pages driving the traffic the most relevant for the queries / referrals?

Overall, the website doesn't install trust in the consumer, this on it's own, won't necessarily produce a non-converting website but coupled with various other onsite factors, it's not going to prove overly successful.

Often, many ecommerce stores make very initial poor choices choosing poor ecommerce providers / solutions and this can lead to more design/development and conversion optimisation / SEO later down the line.

Hopefully that has been of some help to you though.

Is the problem that you have old URL's still indexed in Google or that Google Webmaster Tools is just displaying / accessing your old sitemap?

1. Delete your old sitemap from the server.
2. Delete your old sitemap from Webmaster Tools.
3. Submit your new sitemap to Webmaster Tools.
4. Ping your sitemap to Google here.
5. Check your web analytics to see what old URL's are still being accessed.
6. If the old URL's still won't leave Google's index you can either block them with robots.txt, request a index removal request within Webmaster Tools.
7. You can also add your new sitemap to your robots.txt so search engines know where they should be looking.

Let me know if none of the above answers your question.

What exactly are you trying to achieve? No rich snippet markup from schema.org is required to embed a testimonial into a page. If you are intending to provide additional information to a search engine which helps gather a better understanding of what your website is and does so they can display markup in the search results, then this would be where you would use the appropriate markup.

You may want to research the rich snippet markup for reviews to see if this is appropriate for what you're trying to achieve. It may be useful to read my other response to a schema related question I wrote a few moments ago too.

What are you trying to achieve? Do you have a page per location on your webstite and on each, this is where you're implementing geo/location based schema?

Which is better depends on its purpose, schema markup is intended to provide as much information to search engines as possible, anything of relevance to a website's products or services.

It is likely what you're after is the organisation markup, this can also appear in Google Places listings too. Look at the Microdata link at the bottom of that page and implement what is relevant to your website from there.

Currently rich snippet markup won't have a direct influence on rankings, however the correct implementation will make results from your website appear more prominent in search results.

It would be worth looking over the specification for Schema's organisation / local business markup too so you can see what is available to you.

Something such as the following should be relevant to what you are trying to achieve...

Business Name

Address Line 1

Address Line 2

City / Town

County / State

Post / Zip Code

777 888 999

me@mywebsite.com

http://www.mywebsite.com

Anything that you require testing to see if it is implemented correctly and will appear in the search results as you intend can be done with Google's Rich Snippet Testing Tool or this Microdata Tool.

Hope that points you in the right direction for now.

You'll have to rewrite the URL's rather than just remove reference to the path generally unless your CMS can cater for the required alterations.