Welcome to the Q&A Forum

That would seem a bit longer than I would have expected.  I would consider adding 301 redirects for all of the "temporary" pages so that those point back to the original/current pages.

Hi Jason, I need to start by saying that I typically work on the other end of things - trying to get local rankings for businesses. I've never had a client in your particular situation of wanting to build national authority while trying to keep local rankings. For your installation services, do you have a unique office in each city from which staff goes out to install your product at client locations, and if so, did you create Google+ Local pages for each of these offices? If so, do these Google+ Local pages link to unique landing pages on the website, such as mysite.com/widget-installation-san-diego? Also curious to know how many physical offices you have - 3, 15, 100? And, are you currently getting local pack rankings for these various offices, or have your good rankings been organic rather than local? Lots of questions! The sample URL I've written would typically be how city/branch landing pages would be structured for an SAB (service area business). I wouldn't typically recommend creating a subfolder for this. Google has stated that they don't care if you use subdomains or subfolders, provided they can be crawled, but I typically utilize subdomains as I find them easier to manage and keep track of than multiple subfolders. It is possible to rank both nationally and locally (think of major brands like McDonalds with a corporate headquarters and multiple franchise locations around the globe). As Todd says, national rankings depend on building a very high level of authority (again, think McDonalds) for your brand. If you would like to provide some further details, I will be happy to stop back by. And perhaps some members will also pop in who have accomplished, first-hand, what you are hoping to achieve.

Cool, I'd be interested in the outcome! Let us know how it went:)

Here are some more links to make sure you are indexed properly with Google you can use this submit URL tool https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url I think this article by kiss metrics is a fantastic how to http://blog.kissmetrics.com/get-google-to-index/ https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34397?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1352276?hl=en I hope these answers are of help to you. Sincerely, Thomas

I agree with everything from Dan, but I wanted to add the following: I was in the same boat as you a few months ago, when I got my first report. If you're like me, you're next step might be "should I touch a page, if it's ranking well?" I optimized all the other pages first, and then, eventually decided to go ahead and optimize the ones that were ranking well, too. I was nervous this would somehow hurt my rankings, but it didn't. Everything stayed the same or moved up where possible. At least, now I know, I have that step taken care of in case someone else starts trying to go after the same keywords.

No this will work.  It is important that you maintain your categories the right way.  A lot of people confuse these with key words when your tags are your categories that signal the search engines about which category oyu think the content falls into.  It is important to think this out on the front end.  We are in the middle of cleaning up 1200 blog entries that were not categorized properly.  It is a big job at that point.  You don't want to get to this stage.

I think this video from Matt Cutts can help with this issue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHSqLYUPq8w In a nutshell: pipe is ok as a separator and it dosen't really matter if it's glued or with spaces but you should do it the way it's easier for the users to read - and that will be with spaces. Hope it helps.

The anchor text is for the whole site. The home page is not the only page I am seeing crazy rankings for. The site name is http://plasticplace.net. Thanks so much for taking a look!

I agree with chris. It's called a title tag for a reason. the best seo in my book is to use things for the purpose they were designed. By all means optimise but adding content to a title will only dilute your seo and waste your time.

Okay, a few points: 1. In addition to using Yoast to noindex archive subpages, you may want to also consider seting it to noindex both tag and category pages. These are found in Yoast under "Titles and Meta > Taxonomies" 2. While the Yoast plugin will put a "Noindex" tag on the page, this doesn't remove it from Google's index right away. Google first has to crawl the page. Using the index removal tool does help. 3. If your site dropped from 320 visits a day to 30, you may have different problems than duplicate title tags and/or content. Not sure what to tell you to look at, but backlinks, penalties or something else may be to blame. If you're interrested, here's a great (free) webinar on Wordpress SEO http://moz.com/webinars/advanced-wordpress-seo

Hi everyone, Thank you so much for your advice. I really appreciate your feedback and that you have taken your time to answer.  So, 2 separate pages it will be then! Kind regards, Jeanette

Hi. I know I'm a bit late to the question, but Google favours unique content. Google will issue warnings in GWT if you have just copied and pasted from the page content. You should be looking to write a compelling message that informs viewers of the content of the page and urges them to click through to read more. I found this [relatively] recent article useful. I just so happen to be looking for more examples when I came here. http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/62553-33-examples-of-great-meta-descriptions-for-search

To directly answer your question, Erin, a 301 redirect will indeed prevent users from accessing the https versions of your pages and is not the recommended approach. Is there a reason you want to prevent users/search engines from accessing the https versions of your pages? Simply ensuring that all links within the site navigation point to http versions, and setting a rel=canonical on all https versions back to the http versions, should do the trick. Best, Mike

Hello Pikka, The paginated pages each have a self-referencing rel canonical tag and content that is duplicate to the main page. I think this could be your problem. Example: http://www.bookatable.com/uk/101917/oxo-tower Rel canonical = http://www.bookatable.com/uk/101917/oxo-tower http://www.bookatable.com/uk/101917/oxo-tower?reviewPage=4 (same content as above) Rel canonical = http://www.bookatable.com/uk/101917/oxo-tower?reviewPage=4 We could make this as complicated as can be, but I'd be willing to bet money that if you simply made the rel canonical tag for the paginated pages the same as the canonical page (e.g. http://www.bookatable.com/uk/101917/oxo-tower) you would see some lift in rankings and traffic. Good luck and let us know how it goes!

Read out loud what you just wrote "12 footers on the bottom of each page" and "these sites are part of the same large company but are not related in any way".  I am frankly surprised you get traffic from this as if I see 12 footers and many of those are non related to the present site that would not be useful to me as a user. Forget traffic referrals.  Does that traffic convert?  Figure out if is does, the "considerable traffic" may not convert at all and so while you have less traffic, it does not impact your bottom line.  You may also find a middle way from just deleting everything etc. Generally site wide links are not useful or can be ignored so you are really not doing yourself any favors.  It may be that if you update, you rank better in Google and get traffic that way.

Honestly, I wouldn't use base href's to fix 404s in links - I'd fix the links. It depends on the scope, I guess. If the pages are dynamic or we're talking about a few dozen, fixing the links should be pretty easy. If you have thousands of static pages, then that's a bit different, but then you'd have to edit the base tag across all those pages, anyway. I'm having a hard time envisioning a scenario where fixing the links is much more difficult than putting in the base tags, but it's hard to give specific advice without the details.

If they are paginated and you are showing say 100 pages of blog posts, I would use rel next prev to connect one page to the other and show the relationship then I would use the same title on all of them, but on pages 2 through N, I add the page number to the title and the description. So if your title is "Worlds Greatest Widget Posts" and description is "These are the best posts on widgets on our site." you would use that for the main index page. Then Page 2 title would be "Page 2 of Worlds Greatest Widget Posts" and description is "This is page 2 of the best posts on widgets on our site." You get the idea.  I use this very effectively to tie them together but make them unique.  Another pointer, if you use Printer Friendly versions of pages, you can add "PF" or "Printer Friendly" in the title and descriptions of those and then you can also use the canonical link to canonical the PF version to the actual version.

SVN = 86% difficulty / 18185 global Bing search volume. Subversion = 83% difficulty / 3164 global Bsv. Both keywords have the same difficulty; SVN is more searched than subversion. One of your popular page is https://help.cloudforge.com/entries/22483742-Setting-up-svn-externals Most people search "svn externals", not "subversion externals". For each important page, you should check what is the most important keyword, SVN or subversion; it looks that SVN is far more popular. Good news: it will be easier to stay under 70 characters :).

If I understand correctly,  by adding multiple categories to each product, you should get the search functionality your looking for.  Both systems allow the products to be tagged with multiple categories.   I'm sorry that I'm not terribly familiar with the technical side of either system, but both are easy to use and all the products (and variations) seem to be indexed by search spiders. Definitely check them out!

Oh sorry, I didn't check any of the other pages. I would always create a unique H1 for every page. So not use the same H1 on every page as you want all of your pages to be as unique as possible.