Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Yusef you answered fine originally - i know about this bit but thanks for taking time commenting again anyway

Thanks a bunch.  Its really a little daunting when it comes to changing the URL structure. So changing these is ok as long as i have all the 301 redirects in place. CHECK! Look at hosting two sitemaps for a week or two before removing the old one. CHECK! One thing I spotted in your responses was that you said: retain the ending / also the first URL structure i used was adequate. Just wanted to know why? Also in regards to this URL change, my on page SEO tools mentions that i should try to use the focus keyword in the URL.  Is this a big help now?  I know it always was before, so just checking nothing has changed. Obviously if i go back to using - /Locations/uxbridge/ - that doesnt say a lot about the keyword i want to be recognised for, whereas using - /CBT-course-locations/uxbridge/ - on the other hand does. The latter however this does keep me pretty much locked to this keyword forever, whereas using the original /locations/uxbridge/ comes down to content right? Have you any final feedback or guidance on this last point?  I cannot tell you how much it helps to have you guys to bounce off - It gets all a little overwhelming on your own sometimes. Thanks again C

Hey Chris, thnk you for that bit of advice that is something I'll foolow here on in

Hello Lydia. First - I don't recommend it in general but it does work to a degree.  It used to work better. The idea is that if you link to a page dedicated to a subject and cram enough instances of that phrase onto the page (such as in a product list as in your example) that the page will rank for at least longtail versions of those queries. In the example you sent it likely does work to some degree but that's because they're a fairly strong site.  Nonetheless they probably saw their search volume decline as of late as it's pretty thin content.  Focus on this type of strategy and you're basically asking for trouble. If you stick to creating good content people want to link to and work hard to get people to find it and link to it in the first place (pretty necessary) you'll do far better overall.  If you want to rank for longtail phrases - build real pages on the subject.  Sure you can mention and link to products but provide some value for readers - not just a product list. And of course ... GOOD LUCK !

Hi To Leverage browser caching speeds up your site as it will only cause common resources to be loaded once rather than every time you load a page on your site or revisit the site. In order to leverage browser caching I would suggest editing your web.config file if you are on an IIS server or in the .htaccess file if you are on an Apache server. Both of these will involve you making an entry into either of these files and shouldn't require your hosting company. I regularly work with both, but in particular Apache servers and I often drop the standard code in to leverage this and speed the site up. One other noticeable speed enhancement I would recommend is gzip compression which can be carried out in a similar manner. If you have anymore questions about any of this don't hesitate to give me a shout on here

Thanks for the reply

In addition to Neenor and Craigs great tips you also have internal & external duplicate content  and canonical issues. Click for Google result The link above highlights an example of internal duplicate content caused by your paginated pages. Ideally you should be using the robots 'noindex, follow' meta tag so the pages are removed  from Google's index, but the product links on the pages are still followed. Click for Google result The link above highlights an example of external duplciate content where you have used content from Lost & Founds website verbatim. You should make sure all you content is unique. Also looking at the first link above you will see that some of your URLs are being indexed via secure https URLs while others are just via regular http. It appears that the site isn't utlising canonical tags, so you could potentially be having duplicate page issues where pages are indexed twice, once under https and once more under http. I'd suggest you do an in-depth onsite audit, as If I noticed these couple of issues in 2 mins, you could potentially have issues elsewhere.

Good to know dogids. Thanks for the update. Since my response above I wrote a post comparing eCommerce review vendors, including Revoo, on SEO best practices. Here's the link if you'd like to read it, but I thought Revoo had a pretty good system overall. They're definitely not like everyone else - http://www.seoverflow.com/ecommerce-product-reviews/

thanks for the feedback. Will stick to few dynamic footer category links and test it.

Well - he's done more than a few so it's easy for one to go MIA.  Like a Cutts video.

Hi Craig, To me it kinda looks like an 'Exact Match Domain' issue and that over this year's algorithm updates it may have now flagged your domain as of low quality. The fact that your site is very young as well and that this looks like an EMD for your target search query it's likely it is now going against you.  There is low historical data that the search engines can go on so it's likely to be devaluing your site to searchers. Ref. "We have read keywords in the URL might be the issue, even though the page optimizer in MOZ says to do that. We are wondering if this is the issue or there is some other problem we are not aware of." A page's URL yes is used as an indicator of a page's relevancy but this is more about domain name address name rather than a page's URL. This article is somewhat old but still helpful http://www.seroundtable.com/google-emd-update-15776.html Best David

I've had a look at the page and like Martijn said it seems fine to me. I also crawled it as Google bot user agent and it returned a correct 200 status. It could perhaps be a temporary server issue and the page/site is going down intermediately? You could check your server logs to see if there has been any issues? You could also try a free up time checker such as one of these: 10 Free Services to Monitor Your Site's Uptime. If the error keeps happening and the page isn't actually going down, might be best to raise the question on Google's support forums; unless of course someone comes along here with the answer!

It is not required considering what I see in your site. I think your site is good enough on that front. If you were way above 100-150 in the number of links, it would be something to worry about. As is, it is fine. K

Thank you very much Eli Overbey I am pretty sure I have there too much keywords like beach etc. I guess I will need to work on better links, but where can I get such links? Who is normally linking to a website offering villas in Kenya? It is not a tutorial or something educational. I am quite desperate of this:-(

A penalty is something google will have to manually remove and you will be able to see that in webmaster tools. A devaluation is when you are adjusted by the algorithm and lowered as a result because each thing that google does not like acts as points against you but you can quickly change and see your results return. Does that make sense?

I agree! Thank you for your response. I wanted to make sure I gave an appropriate answer.

It would help, but step back and ask yourself if writing a whole new description for a "red" widget is worth it? If color makes a big difference, then by all means go for it. Most cases, you're better with just a single page to list all your options. This page on Amazon demonstrates nicely Unfortunately, I'm not an authority on Magento, but there may be some SEO plugins you could benefit from that might add canonical tags to those product pages. At a minimum, I'd read Yoast's guide on Magento SEO: http://yoast.com/articles/magento-seo/ And you might want to check out this canonical plugin for Magento: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/Yoast/extension/906/canonical-url-s-for-magento Hope this helps!

You should probably set the www.website.com/the-mayflower/ version as the canonical. So the page on the subdomain, and all other copies, would ALL have a rel canonical tag that points to www.website.com/the-mayflower/. I wouldn't block the subdomain based on what you've said, but complicated issues like this are difficult to fully diganose and prescribe fixes without seeing the site.

Hi Jon Thanks for your response. The MOZ bar seems to work weirdly for me: There are certain links on my page that are present in Javascript, and are not being crawled - they don't show up in the source code, and I also checked the same using Screaming frog. These links are relatively low importance, and I don't want the search engines to crawl them, which is why I'm fine with them being left in Javascript. The pencil icon in the Moz Bar highlights, and shows these links as 'followed internal links'. Not sure if this is how it should be - should these not be detected at all (they are present in unparsable JS, and do not show up in the source code either!) Look forward to your response here. Regards

Hi Nathan No, that is not correct. Only 301 redirects will pass value and they don't guarantee to pass all of the value. As 302 redirects nothing is passed. There is information here on redirects: http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection I hope that helps, Peter