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Solid points. Thank you Ryan!

If the home page is ranking for "custom colored marbles" then I wouldn't change it and try to move that KW target to a different page. Your home page is your "custom colored marble" page. Double down on your efforts for optimizing the home page for that phrase, and then work on other phrases on other pages. Trying to switch the page that is ranking for a term when that page is already in the top 10 is most definitely a risky move I couldn't recommend.

Try this: RewriteEngine on <code>RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*\/index\.html?\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.html?$ "/$1" [R=301,L]</code>

gotchya Ian, thanks

That's is fabulous!  I have to check it out.  Thanks again!!

I generally agree with Marisa.  User experience is vital and top priority for successful sustainable SEO.  I would add though, that having your home page be a point of display for regularly updated content elsewhere on the site is a good strategy, as long as it's not the only content on the home page (or unless you only run a news site or blog, and have no other primary product or service content).  While routinely getting new inbound links is vital, that by itself does not say your site has fresh content. it only says "this site continues to remain relevant from an off-site perspective".

I think Sven's essentially correct, although I suspect the word "Shimano" is what we're flagging. You've got the main Shimano page that splits out into sub-pages, and every link for the sub-pages has "Shimano" in the anchor text. The problem is that it IS keyword cannibalization, in a sense, and yet it also makes perfect sense in this situation. I think this is pretty common in search pages, and probably isn't a big issue. Honestly, internal search pages and Google don't always get along in general, so it can be tricky. You could draw "Shimano" out into a header and then not use it in every piece of anchor text (it could start to look excessive), but practically speaking, I doubt it's going to have much impact either way.

The best solution is to be consistent and keep it in context, don't start stuffing title and alt attributes with brand terms as you need to realise the real reason for alt and title tags for accessibility. Use alt text to describe the image, you can insert keywords but don't overdo it. Another good option is to name the images with keywords as long as it is relevant. For example if your image is a size 10 blue shoe then name it in the format: size-10-blue-shoe.jpg This will help when it comes to universal results, the amount of times I've seen my images list in search and actually got traffic through it.

hey! not quite what i was looking for but thx for this share!

Technically, there no set field length generally speaking depending on what you're using them for. A Google snippet truncates anything over 156 characters though in most situations.  What you put in the description COULD be used by their system to evaluate meaning though. I would also say this - if the description "feels" like it's too long from a readability perspective, it's likely that you're not only not helping anything, and you could possibly be sending either diluted topical signals or worst case, signals that you're attempting to game the system. Here's a good primer article on the topic.

Hiya, no it's fine to keep the global nav on all pages... you should do anyway. What I mean is, trim the number of links in that global nav down by placing some of them only within their category areas instead, in a secondary menu maybe. But... you can still use flyouts in the main menu so that the menu items are listed and then a hover-over of a category brings out more items, and again for a sub-category, etc... in which you could use a technology which isn't crawl-able/followed. That way users can still access all menu items from the main nav but Google will only see the top level links, with further links not followed (without using NoFollow) and bypassed. Not sure the best way to do it though since JS and Ajax are by all accounts a lot more crawl-able now.

Hi there, Thank you for getting back to me all help is great. The other site in question (www.nothampton-websitedesign.co.uk) is owned by me, I have created but have not done anything with the to date. My plan was once I was ranking well for the Milton Keynes site then I would start on this site, adding all new content etc. I think I will remove all the content from the Northampton website until I am ready to work on this. With regards to SEO chat thanks, I was not aware of all the comments. I read one comment which was not very nice so decided not to go back. I shall now read all the posts. Once again thank you for your help, this is aprecated. All the best Darren

Hi Dan, sorry, that I haven't answered for so long! Yes, it was the update! The version I used before was ages old... Now it works fine! Thank you André

If you wish to speed up the process, change the header response to 410 instead of 404 for any pages you know are gone.

Hi Anthony, First of all, it is always better to redirect URLs to individual pages than perform sitewide 301 directs. But in this case, if the individual pages aren't getting much traffic, it may not make much difference. If the articles are truly low quality, and you are worried about a future penalty, you may want to simply remove them without a redirect at all. Serve a 410 HTTP response (gone) instead, and carefully watch your traffic/rankings to make sure nothing drops. It's most likely Google is simply ignoring these pages. The best defense is to build up an offense of quality material so the bad doesn't outweigh the good. Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO.

Nobody has any input on this?

Hey everyone! Sorry about the odd crawl test activity. If you don't mind shooting us an email at help@seomoz.org with your PRO email address and the name of the domain that is stuck we can push then through on the back end. I would grab more information here, but we can't since it is a public forum. :S Look forward to your emails and sorry about the wait!

From what Rand said on the last white board Friday, marketing and sites like yours are taking the biggest hit since post penguin update. I would say for sure fix the current errors now but in the mean time it is a fact your new rankings will take time organically ... So I would combine your new SEO campaign with a healthy and aggressive social attack as well. Offering a great give away like play off basketball tickets or something else through your blog/facebook and drive the audience stimulation - this does nothing to much for rankings but HUGE for traffic and word of mouth. * the playoff tickets are a bit of an investment but paying off for clients of mine. Start to push a lot of "fresh" content through a blog tied to your site and also be sure to post the Post URL to - Facebook, Twitter, Google + as they are imperative to a healthy algorithmic crawl. Welcome to the SEO world ;o) -Chenzo

I'm only seeing Google index the "www" versions at the moment, except for 1 or 2 exceptions. When you used full paths, were they identical to your canonical URLs? In other words, if Google is indexing the "www" version (which they are), the full path should be "www." Otherwise, you'd be potentially creating internal duplicates.