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Ryan, thanks so much for taking the time to answer, and so comprehensively too, I really appreciate it. My client came around after I suggested that Getting quality backlinks to a website full of coding errors was like hanging a crystal chandelier in a toilet!! and that they where tying one of my hands behind my back by not sorting it out. Perhaps not the most expert answer but they got the point. Thanks for some great information and a great answer all round.

Hi, it would be a good idea provided that the sections aren't keyword stuffed like you say your competitors are. Information like shipping, schedules etc. sound like they'll be useful for visitors, so it could be a win-win situation if done correctly. Good luck!

Thank you both.

Try this tool: http://www.feedthebot.com/tools/alt/

When I take a quick look at the site, I'm seeing very little in terms of unique content. I grabbed a phrase from the first two articles in the news section, and they appear to be copies of other articles. A new wordpress blog nobody has heard of is going to have a very hard time outranking the Wall Street Journal by copying their articles. Turned around -- why should Google be ranking this site?

Hey Scott, Sorry that your metrics are looking off in Open Site Explorer. I took a look at your site in OSE and it looks like you are seeing only one internal link because we haven't yet indexed the pages and links within your site. You are seeing information for external links because we have indexed the external linking pages, but we have not indexed the pages within your site yet. You can see that here: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links.html?site=www.expresscasket.com%2Fsteel-caskets.aspx I'm afraid it may take another index update or so before we are able to index your internal links. While the site and links may not be indexed yet, give it some time - maybe we'll see it in OSE next month. I hope this clears things up a bit. Please let us know if you have any other questions. -Chiaryn

Thanks for your reply.  I'll put in a few relevant ones (3) without too much thought, can't do any harm.

For regular websites this is a good solution. Except for the case in which the HTML and assets are quite large for a mobile device to load. In that case I always prefer to use a mobile version of the website on a subdomain. I believe this is the best solution for high traffic websites which need to show quite some content per page.

Thanks! Very helpful. (+1)

My husband has two real estate sites.  My plan, when I made the new one was to take the old one down.  But for some reason it mysteriously ranks well for several terms and continues to bring us business. With that being said, if there is duplicate content across the two sites then one is going to suffer. If the old site is ranking well, it may be ok to keep it.  But, it will be a challenge to optimize both sites.  It's much better to work on one site.  In most cases, I would redirect the old to the new site.  The only reason I would personally keep the old one is if it was ranking well already for them.

Agreed! I had an issue with many PDFs ranking. I've done what I can to clean things up so better pages rank instead (my goal is to sell; I'd rather someone end up on my page that has an "add to cart" button AND a link to the catalog/PDF info). Anyone who says it can't happen - well, it did to me.

I dont think Demoting links will be a good idea!

Google will naturally update the URLs with the new ones if you followed the above steps. There is no need for you to take any other action.