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thanks for the tip.  I'll get that done.  Will SEOMoz crawler handle the 301 ok?  Its currently one of my flagged issues from the crawl.

Hi Todd, There is no set time limit for the changes to appear. As you say that your pages have been cached i.e. crawled, the changes may get indexed sooner or later.

If you're using wordpress or a CMS of some type, look for posts and tools related to that particular software. The SmushIt tool is available as a wordpress plugin, and it will compress pictures on upload, and will compress (on demand) pictures in the media library. I use Irfanview for batch resizing images (in the same directory).

This is called 'pagerank sculpting'. It was used in the past to make sure the links that didn't have nofollow received a larger amount of link juice (as the link juice that was passed by a page was split by the number of links back then). There was a 'recent' change in the way internal nofollow links are treated, that renders this practice pretty much useless nowadays. Read more about it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-consolidation-the-new-pagerank-sculpting

Thanks Keri. Makes sense to split the article. Keep the top half on the home page and leave the rest of the article on the "read more" link. That way there is not duplicate content and is just a continuation instead of a repeat for the customer.

Product page www.birdproduct.com/birds/blue-bird Blogs www.birdproduct.com/blog/how-to-spot-a-blue-bird-in-spring www.birdproduct.com/blog/what-do-blue-birds-like-to-eat www.birdproduct.com/blog/5-ways-to-prevent-your-cat-from-eating-up-a-blue-bird www.birdproduct.com/blog/the-best-pictures-of-a-blue-bird-you-have-ever-seen On each of these blogs you'll have a link to the product page with a link that has 'blue bird' or some variation of it to the product page. This way your product pages doesn't have to compete your blog for the short term keyword 'blue bird', while you'll still get long tail traffic for your blog titles and have a nice internal anchor text pointing to your 'blue bird' optimized product page. The canonical page in this case is simply the url, as there are no parameters or whatever 'exclude' for Google.

The // is most likely the result of a faulty setting in the (url routing) system and should be something that can be fixed. As for both the // and the /cpage: is it optimal? Most certainly not, neither for search engines nor for visitors, will it harm your rankings badly, I don't think so. Even though it is something you'd rather not have in your url, all other things being perfect you'll probably won't notice this in your rankings.

No worries... you can give me a thumbs up and a "this answered my question" if you like... I want that SEOmoz t-shirt lol.

If as Steve points out we are understanding you correctly then multiple product pages with each one focused and optimised for each product is better than a long page featuring multiple products IF people are liekly to be searching for the product name. Each page gives you a URL, title tage, alt tag and page worth of content to optimise and focus on that product. If you are worried that the page may be a little light on content then perhaps the descriptions need to be fleshed out.

No problem, thanks Peter

I don't know what happened to the url. Sorry about that. Try copying this and pasting it into a browser window: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3579234.htm

Thanks for the feedback folks. The sitemap does hold more pages than the standard one, but then if it comes down to the name not being an issue, I guess we needn't worry. I'm still going to change it though.. makes me yak every time i see it.

I have a feeling that for most it's just a way to try and build credibility by showing 3rd-party endorsement. I think there's a chance is does provide some amount of SEO benefit as far as increasing indexing frequency, as it may be the only section of the homepage that changes with regularity. That said, I think a blog (with a list of most recent posts on the homepage) serves this purpose better. I think unless you're a large organization that get's a lot of 3rd-party media coverage, having a news section can be actually be a negative because: If most visitors are like me, they use the date of the last news post as a judgement of the site or company. Ongoing, it can be difficult to generate updates for the news section. Linking away from your homepage to another site = lost traffic and lost link juice (if you're into that). My $0.02.

Just a note; when I added the facebook plugin to my wordpress install it slowed my page load time dramatically. Make sure to check yours doesn't do the same if you decide to go the facebook route. However, I did notice a large increase in comments once I enabled the plugin. (I assume since the user didn't need to login - even though I didn't require an account to post on my blog, I figure most people are unfamiliar with the wordpress commenting system) I used: http://www.webpagetest.org/

It varies depending on the work I am doing at the moment but generally 10-20 images maybe?Never more than 20 I wouldn't think, except on rare occasions (big premiere, etc.) ... if you look in my profile under "my portfolio site" you will see a link to the site.

I have a spreadsheet where I keep track of half a dozen metrics, and I just add an entry for a date and list the things that I've done. Also like James, I use the annotations in Google Analytics, and that can really help. Be sure to record any outside influences to the site to help keep track of things. Did the site get a mention in a print publication? Record that, so it can help explain an increase in branded search traffic and/or direct traffic. Did you start or stop a PPC campaign? Send out a press release? etc.