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Good idea Journeyman. I started to wonder if it is maybe the actual sub catagories that I chose rather than the structure. I'll dig into that more. Thank you! Karen

One of the questions Google is trying to answer with fresh content is "is this site still relevant?"  If you're not updating your home page regularly because it's not necessary for your users, continuing to get new fresh links is a great way to keep sending the signal that your page is still relevant. I would definitely advise against making a bunch of random changes to your home page just for Google's benefit - but if there are ways you can include more fresh or dynamic content that would also be good for users, that might be something to explore.  Maybe have a link to your newest or most popular blog post that updates when you post?

If you add the redirect correctly, the old web page does not need to exist any longer. Can I simply edit the URL and create a redirect after the fact, essentially killing the old URL? Yes. Be sure to always test any redirects after they are made.

This isn't an answer to your question, but it's adding one more thing to think about. Your URL structure can be helpful when it comes to using Google Analytics. There's a good post on this at the Lunametrics Blog that you might want to check out. From a metrics perspective, it can be helpful to have that category in the URL -- you can look at the analytics for that entire folder at once, which isn't possible with your preference (I'm assuming that there would be multiple contact lens manufacturers in your case).

Thank You, I will begin this process next, this is the one that will take some time. The main categories shouldn't be to big of an issue to switch around but we have a LOT of subcategories. In the end it will all be worth it. Thanks again for all the help!

Hi Miriam, Thanks for the tips, i'll tkae on board what you've said and speak to the client and see if she has any input on the matter, if she genuinely can't I think i'll start off with one page targeting a few locations and try and build out more as time goes on, but hopefully she will have done something worthwhile locally (or maybe I can make her!). Many thanks, Stuart

I tend to agree with Catalyste - in theory, those links will help you, but in practice Google is probably going to devalue that blog network over time. It's just too easy to link to your own sites that way. Contextual links like that are definitely safer these days then obvious, sitewide links (like footer links), but I'd definitely proceed with caution. At least make them relevant and vary the anchor text - don't over-engineer it. In most cases, it's more of a filter issue than a penalty. If you link a handful of blogs you own to your own site, it'll probably help for a while, and then Google may turn the volume down. If you're cross-linking 20+ sites, then you're risking a more severe problem.

There is only one article, but 2 unique links to it.  In most cases we do know how they are created, but don't have a solution for it.  In the meantime, we need to redirect those urls to the correct url.

I used to have a site with a huge beautiful image in the banner.  It looked great.  But it dominated the above-the-fold real estate.  My content was pushed way down, so were the ads that bring revenue. So, I made a small, sleek banner that is simply the domain name, search box and social share buttons. After that was remove my pages had a big article title shouting at the top of the browser window and a beautiful relevant image at the top of the article. Instantly..... people were staying longer on the site average pageviews per visitor went up my bandwidth was cut by gigabytes per day revenue went up Should you do this?    I would make a quick test that does not require a lot of work, toss it up for  a couple of days and let your analytics tell you if it is a good thing. You can get a quick answer with two hours of work and two days of statistics. Try it.  Then use data to make your decision.  The actions of your visits will instruct you. Also consider this.... After you remove the banner will  you have anything that is beautiful above the fold?  Almost every page of my site has a big juicy colorful image at the top of the article.  This eye candy pulls people in.   I don't think that my results would be the same if I had a big page of boring text and no images.

There is also something called the Google Dance. It is when google is making changes to its algorithm, indexing new sites, de-indexing sites and just trying to figure out where a site should rank. You can also use your google analytics to check your site.

If I want to target a keyword phrase to a particular phrase, but do not want to change the URL of that page, will that negatively impact my rankings? A better way to say it is you are missing an opportunity to make a change which can positively impact your rankings. A page's URL has a very minor effect on rankings. There are two larger secondary effects. First, if you offer a clear, relevant URL your click-through-rate may increase. Additionally, when others link to your page by copying and pasting the URL, you will naturally have good anchor text which is very helpful, especially in our post-penguin world. Stefan correct shared there is not a reason to create a new short URL.

Ok I see, understandable - thanks for posting the Rich Snippets data instead. In our experience, Google isn't showing stars in the SERPs for Organisations/Corporations, but they are for Places. This makes it possible to use schema.org's LocalBusiness with your company reviews, for which Google is showing stars in the SERPs, and this is how we've seen many companies serving up their ratings. To my mind, it's perfectly legitimate to use LocalBusiness on pages that relate to real world locations, on your homepage if you have a single location, or on outlet-specific pages for businesses with multiple locations. My assumption would be is that Google first interpreted your aggregate rating data as relating to a product, which is why you got stars showing. They subsequently determined the data was related to your organisation instead, and removed the stars. I have absolutely no idea whether this would have been algorithmic or manual, but I've certainly seen a bit of a cleanup in the SERPs in recent weeks, and murmurings in the SEO world to that effect too - see http://www.seroundtable.com/less-google-rich-snippet-15216.html for one example.

You will need to do a block in your robots.txt based on a match: **User-agent: *** Disallow: /variable= I think the above would work. The other approach would be to add a line in your page code itself to generate a 'nofollow' robots tag when that argument is present. This link should help you, by the way: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449