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Great advice guys re the links they certainly seem like the holy grail - I am not doing too bad creating them - I've only a small number but have been careful to try and get them from reputable sources.Google webmaster is picking these up as being in place; but alas at this stage hubspot , alexa, OSE, and SEO moz aren't recongnising them. I am hoping they will at somestage though! thanks, SInead

Hi MPO, The competitor has a lot of points pointing to his root domain, but for whatever reason they do not point to the subdomain that you are comparing. For example, if I point a link to example.com (no www), then the root domain metrics for the url www.example.com would be strong, but for the specific subdomain www.example.com they would be weaker. (boy, this is so confusing when you try to explain it on paper. Here's a post from Rand on subdomains - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites Does it matter? Probably not much. It depends where exactly those links are pointing, and what's ranking in the search results. Keep doing what you're doing - getting good links from good sources, and you'll come out on top either way.

You can edit the index template inside of wordpress to ensure you have the right H1 and add in some static features. There are not any complete posts that I can find outlining this, but if you know some html and know how to search, I am sure you can make the necessary changes. I'd change: H1 (find feature to identify any current ones and change them, the add your own to the top of the page) Static text (use a plugin for the side bar or just add a blurb above the excerpts that describes what the site is about) That should be all you need.

Did that fix the issue Daniel?

I wonder if you're thinking of doing the option that Google Custom Search has for doing your internal site search? They do have an option to comment out some of the content for searching, but it doesn't affect their main index, just your own custom search.

Hi Nakul Thank you very much for the suggestions and I will start checking  the code on those pages today. Thanks for heads up on the .com.au site as well I will be changing the hosting today to Aus, and thanks to you that site may get pushed up the rankings for a highly competitive term that I have been fighting to get for years As for following my competitors links, I have been doing that for awhile and it would seem most of them either buy their links or have them on pages that are irrelevant to our niche, one of my competitors has even acquired more links than SEOmoz.com but has no were near the content. In saying that I am by no means a pure white hat SEO, more of a grey hat if such a thing exists, simply because I find it hard to get links to an adult site without it being spammy of some sorts. So I have started writing articles and linking to products mentioned, but trying to make the articles interesting/funny at the same time. Hopefully soon I will start to see some improvement. Again thank you for your help and I will let you know how I go with those pages blocked by bots. Blake

Hi Joshua, Written in haste... Firstly if you are going to add unique content to each of the pages that makes them each a best in class page for the terms that you are targetting then the dup issue will be resolved (assuming that you optomise each of the pages correctly). Content about the individual woods, doesn't sound good enough to answer the queastions a searcher might have if they were searching for "Sapele Countertops". In terms of Jquery, it sounds like you need to figure out what you are trying to achive in the first instance. let me know the following and I will try to help further: Have you any evidence that these terms are searched for? Do you have any idea of keyword difficulty http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/keyword-difficulty for these terms? Depending on what your trying to achieve you have loads of options. Hope this helps. Justin

I noticed you made the changes that I recommended except for one thing.  You fixed the 404 error on this page http://www.providenceelectricnc.com/localelectrician.html but did not 301 redirect it to the home page which is where your trying to rank for.  I would say unless you trying to rank for "Charlotte electrician" on http://www.providenceelectricnc.com/localelectrician.html it could possibly be fine but you then have a bigger issue. Both your home page http://www.providenceelectricnc.com and http://www.providenceelectricnc.com/localelectrician.html are duplicates.  Bad Idea!  If you redirect the http://www.providenceelectricnc.com/localelectrician.html to home page with a 301 redirect you should be able to garner most of the juice to home page.

Specific to your industry or similar industry no. But as you suggest - in principle across ecommerce, yes. If your title tags and product descriptions are not unique enough, you will get flagged for duplicate content in Webmaster tools. If you've got a bunch of products with a couple of words or product numbers or colors that make up the difference, you'll most likely get dinged - we have. Will you get a site wide penalty drop in rank, product drop in rank or failure to improve rankings probably depends on how widespread your duplicate content is. You'll want to use rel canonical tags on all your pages. There are other advanced steps to take in terms of identifying product landing pages, % exit pages and sales. Index the producers and no-index others etc. I would also look at top ranking competitors and glean what you can from their structural delivery. If they're page 1, they're doing something right. I'd also do a keyword search of this site for duplicate content and you may find other suggestions more specific to your products and industry. Good luck.

It is a custom built ecommerce site in asp.net.

In which case I guess it comes down to how impactful any disruption might be....i.e., how many links do you have built up against your existing URLs? If there isn't many - then its probably worth taking the jump and re-writing stuff now. Ben

My pleasure. I'll do almost any thing to get a thumbs Up! Im so close to the magic 200 (again). This link http://scratch99.com/website-management/make-money-online/smart-pricing/avoid-smart-pricing-show-adsense-only-to-search-engine-visitors/ This is basically doing the same thing and should show you a decent example of how to do it (except they are doing it to tailor adverts to search traffic). looking over the code on that page, they use an array of values, you could simply replace the values with values such as Google, Yahoo, Bing (ot an exhaustive list by all means!).

Hi All Thanks for all your insight and advice - it surprising the length some people go to in black hat practices to try and spoof the algorithm and try to boost their own sites by hitching a ride on your hard work! Anyway after a long night and help from these guys sucuri.net who manage to blast through the malware and offer insight and advice resulting in the problem on the site going. How long will it take Google to recrawl the site because as of 23:02 UK time the malware is still showing in the SERP

Here's Google's recent mention of how to sort out Pagination issues, which states "With rel=”next” and rel=”prev” markup, you can provide a strong hint to Google that you would like us to treat these pages as a logical sequence, thus consolidating their linking properties and usually sending searchers to the first page".

I agree with Janet. Testing and PPC will help, but more than that your intuition helps most. Bucket those keywords based on intent. Essay editing, booked editing, and resume editing are slightly different so I'd make a page for each (include examples, be specific to that type of project). But when it comes to broad variations, go by the intent. Essay correction and Essay editing should be the same page, and I'd mainly target editing as it sound more like what your product is, but use essay correction in the text. And try to vary the anchor text to the page when you link internally and externally. When it comes to small slice of a big pie or big slice of a smaller pie, that's a call for you to make. Check out the competition on essay editing ... can you compete? Are you better than them for the searcher? How? Make that apparent and push for it with marketing. If you are the same ... but can own "essay correction" (the SERPs are not as competitive) ... go after that first. Hope this helps!

Hi Thanks for answering, but it's not a wordpress site and I am not looking to switch email providers. I am just looking for standalone pop up software.

If at all possible, I would base a decision like this on primary research rather than secondary. Sure, one keyword might get more traffic - but is it good traffic? Is it converting traffic? We have a very similar situation with "us based" + writing terms. For example we rank for terms like "US based content writing service" which has a documented search volume of nothing and is equally as competitive. YET - I get 2 or 3 clients a month that are worth an average of $300 on their first order and $4,500 within the first 6 months. From a purely secondary research point of view I would never have ranked for these terms. In fact, I'm pretty sure it was a fluke to begin with. But so far this measley keyterm has brought a lot to my bottom line. So sometimes... it's about what works for you, not the masses.

Mmm, yes, because the tool is not thought for not Latin alphabets. But that is a problem of the tool not a general problem that also Google may have.