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Understood.  I read EGOL for months before I really grokked what he was saying about how to optimize a site for search engines. Best, Christopher

Hi Tom, Thanks so much for your prompt reply, i will get those tags updated and await some help with the 301. Is there anyone who could maybe help me out with the 301 redirect? Thanks again Alec

Many thanks to both Hans and Moosa I have written again to the web developer that has its hosting account with their preferred vendor to look at this issue again, taking into account your valued responses. Really appreciate the input from both of you.

Overall, won't make a huge difference. It you want to be perfect, I think this would be the best setup. Example page: http://www.in2town.co.uk/health-magazine H1= Health magazine - Fitness, Nutrition, News, Weight Loss H2 = The health magazine for men's health, women's health, childrens health & healthy living H3 = Article titles On an article page, make the title of the article H1.

Hello Again, Last night I searched a few keywords and noticed a post which is ranking on the first place at first position. Now this post is having the post slug instead of the entire URL. Here is the keyword liberation from innate darkness - 1st position empathy is the liberation - 5th position Post Title - Empathy is the liberation from Innate Darkness Post URL - http://searchoflife.com/empathy-liberation-innate-darkness-2013-09-02 Also I checked on my localhost after disabling the slug optimizer. It seems that wordpress is automatically redirecting to the new URL so it won't be a problem to change the older post slug URLS yo complete URLs. But I feel I won't touch those posts which are already having good rankings with post slugs. Any suggestions?

Hi RicktheMarkt, The main components of a strong Google+ Local page are that: There are no violations of the Google Places Quality Guidelines You've chosen the best possible categories All relevant fields have been filled out with correct information You are earning reviews, and if the page is fully merged, adding posts Beyond the existence and correctness of the Google+ Local page, there are many, many more factors that contribute to local rankings. These include, but are not limited to, The authority of the website The quality, quantity and accuracy of citations on third party sites (local business indexes, directories, etc.) Traditional SEO metrics like age of site, quality and quantity of links Social Media participation In order to begin getting a handle on all of the components that contribute to local search rankings, I recommend that you and your friends study the Local Search Ranking Factors 2013 survey. There is no better place to get the big picture of all the contributing factors. Now, all this being said, I believe that your friends may need to adjust their stated goals. You write: "I have a couple friends who need more traffic from their Google Places listing" It's very important to understand that there was a very big change recently with Google's display of the Places/+ Local pages. In the past, a single click from the main SERPS would take you directly to a business' +Local page. This is no longer the case. Now, if a company's listing shows up, their will most commonly be a 'review' link attached to it. In the past, this would have taken a user to the +Local page for the business. These days, it only takes them to a popup showing the reviews. In other words, it is now much more unlikely that the average user will ever make it to a +Local page. So, while the accuracy and completeness of a +Local page still play a vital role in rankings, the goal of getting traffic to the page may not be viable, given the fact that the pages have, in essence, been somewhat buried by Google. An odd turn of events, but there it is. It could change tomorrow. In sum, your friends should formulate a more appropriate goal, such as earning higher rankings, achieving broader brand visibility, generating better conversions, etc. I hope this is helpful!

No problem. You can edit the canonical links through Yoast's SEO plugin, just go into the page/post and then navigate to the 'advanced' tab within Yoast - you can then set the custom canonical link. Regarding your links that point to you with no trailing slash, WP automatically redirects any URLs without a trailing slash to one with one - this will then flow the PageRank into the correct URL, so don't worry.

Hi there, Digging up an old question I was asked to respond to. In short - if you're writing unique descriptions on the indexed pages, then those are fine. The non-indexed pages don't matter in regards to duplicate content, though I'm unclear why you would need page 2 or 3 for a single hotel.

Yes that was the only line i could see with a src link to USA. Thank you

Thanks Marcus. I agree, might as well fix it, it's not a big job Tris

Should be different, but you would have to look at them to make sure.

Maybe you should noindex user profile pages until they've been active on the site long enough that a) you're sure they're not a spam bot and b) they're actually active users, with some interesting information to share on their user page? Like Shaliendra said, this is your call. It's really about your website goals, and what those user pages do for the site. Are you getting much organic traffic from user pages? If you aren't, it's probably easiest to just noindex all user pages. But if some profiles are bringing in organic traffic, I'd recommend that you add a noindex tag immediately, but remove it once someone has commented a few times. Does that help?

There is my .htaccess at the moment: <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> I don't want to mess with it because I don't have an access to cpanel.

First off in my opinion you should always have full control over your site. First of all, depending on what's the purpose of the site, find a good CMS which will allow you to manage your site. I'd suggest you to read the following in order to have an idea of how things should be put in place in a SEO perspective -http://moz.com/blog/the-beginners-checklist-for-small-business-seo -http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo http://moz.com/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet-2013-edition These three resource should give you a good understanding of best practices and things to consider in order to create a search engine friendly website. Also check out webmaster tools help to find information about more specific and technical info. If you have any Q's let me know.

Moz has their own list of recommended SEO providers who they vouch for which can be found at: http://moz.com/community/recommended. You can also look for Moz Associates, like Dan Shure of Evolving SEO, who Moz trusts to provide expert advice on the Q&A forum.

hi there, it's actually very simple. You have multiple <title>elements in your code. Fix that issue and your site should pass the W3C.</p> <p>Take a close look at your head and if you have the ability rearrange your data. The cleaner your coding is the easier it is to read.</p> <p>regards</p> <p>Jarno</p></title>

Thanks for this excellent answer. I did a search and my site is the only one that came up in the results. The scraper site is not loading so I guess it is gone. I think I have the rel="canonical" tags on all my pages because I have the Wordpress SEO by yoast plugin. Thanks so much because I really don't have time for letters and lawyers.

That sucks.  I suspect the site is not configured properly, but that it would require cpanel\ftp access to fix properly. At least you have a solution, which is half the battle with Wordpress.  There are always bugs that need to be worked around (mainly from theme problems in my experience). Anyway, glad you got a solution.

I would create landing pages for product categories and use rel=canonical on the actual product pages.

As Chris said, you can rel=canonical pages on the small sites to pages on the portal site--but only if they're identical.  If they're not identical you'll need a temporary (302) redirect will tell google that the page has been moved temporarily but that the new location shouldn't get any of the SEO value of the old page -- or permanent (301) redirect which tells google that the page has been moved and that Google should add the SEO value of the old page to that of the new page. Be sure to read through these before you decide what to do. Canonicalization and the Canonical Tag - Learn SEO - Moz Redirection - SEO Best Practices - Moz