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Just wait. As Alick said, it hasn't been updated in an absolute age, so is probably not a good indicator on how a site is perceived. I know that MOZ have their own scoring, but this is pretty much an industry de facto now, and with everyone being scored based on their algorithm, this is a good measure. -Andy

That's something you'd want to test with your users.  Generally though, the easier it is to get from Point A to Point B to Sale the better.

I agree with Kevin, use what is common for those that are searching for the information, and think using both is a good idea. In my industry it is common to see both city and airport code in the URL Example of what I commonly see: http://www.kayak.com/flight-routes/United-States-US0/Seattle-Tacoma-Intl-SEA http://www.kayak.com/flight-routes/Los-Angeles-LAX/Seattle-Tacoma-Intl-SEA http://flights.expedia.com/flights-from-seattle-to-los-angeles-sea-to-lax/

Hi Patrick, Thank you for your response! On our local websites, we have specific meta-descriptions in place. Do you know another technical solution to do this on a corporate .com domain (meta-description per country)? This domain is used in the whole world but we want to test multiple meta-descriptions for this .com domain.

Something of a sticky one, because Juhn Mueller said: “We don’t have a duplicate content penalty. It’s not that we would demote a site for having a lot of duplicate content. So to answer your question: I was wondering if there are actually any penalties for this No - there isn't one. This doesn't mean that duplication is not going to result in a penalty for another reason though. Too much duplication may result in a page quality issue that triggers a different penalty. Too much is also not good for a user experience, but that all depends on where / what content is duplicated. Have a read of this article over at Hoboweb as there is a ton of great information there. -Andy

I have lots of articles that are updated with I get new info.  Some started out as very short pages with a photo, slowly they have grown to 2000 words and lots of photos, graphs, data, sometimes video. It is much more efficient to update an article than it is to create a new page and set-up redirects.  Those redirects place a small load on the server that can add up over time if you accumulate a lot of them.

SEO Quake has a really neat Google Chrome extension that will show you the Keyword Density on any page that you're browsing.

Yeah - it doesn't seem to match known updates, but it's certainly dramatic movement. This isn't some seasonal shift or cyclical thing - these are clearly steep climbs and drops. We don't know the dates of most of the Panda data refreshes, but we do pin one at Sept. 23, 2014, so even that's not lining up cleanly here. Are you seeing a lot of losses in the long-tail? The site doesn't seem to have much authority, but you've got 10K+ pages indexed, and I strongly suspect that many of them may look thin to Google. It feels Panda-like, for lack of a better word, even if it isn't quite Panda (maybe just a very strong filter). Meanwhile, if the links you have our problematic at all, you could be hitting a double-whammy. It might not be a single update, but you could be getting hit by a number of different changes over time. The trend-line certainly isn't promising. My concern is the individual definition pages, like: http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/dictionary/word/barrio/ While it looks to have a lot of content, the definitions come from online dictionaries (or, at least, are shared with them), and the examples seem to be drawn from publicly available web pages. So, it's very possible that each element on these pages looks duplicated across the web to Google. With a strong link profile, it might not be a problem, but if you're struggling on links and with content, the odds could end up stacked against you. Truthfully, you may have to see where your strongest ranking pages are (are they top-level or long-tail) and consolidate. If you've taken losses on individual word pages and most of your traffic is coming from pages like this: http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/word-lists/words-with-a/ ...then you might want to consider not indexing those lower-value pages and focusing on what's working. This could help concentrate your link equity on a stronger offering. It's a difficult choice, but I don't think you're looking at a technical problem here or a clear, single-shot penalty. I think you're looking at a systemic problem. Looks like you've got a chunk of 404s in your category pages, too, such as: http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/word-lists/words-with-z/10-letters/ Not sure what's up there - if you're trying to de-index those, or if there's a technical issue. Unfortunately, I suspect this is a complex, multi-layer problem and there probably isn't a single solution. I hope I'm wrong, but that's my gut feeling at a glance.

Definitely true - was just wondering your stance on that "general belief". I go back and forth in what I believe on that. I can see it going either way, especially from the idea of spamming, but my guess would be that somehow it depends on the site's history or layout. But, again, who knows!

Thanks for the suggestions hectormainar.

Hello Sandi, That was just one example. I came across several others in which there were multiple versions of the same page with self-referencing rel canonical tags. I would fix that as soon as possible by removing and redirecting one of the versions or choosing a single canonical. I think a directory called /buy-isagenix/ is a little bit spammy, but not so much that I would worry about doing a bunch of redirects at this point. You can probably just leave it as-is. Make sure you have 100% uniquely written content on all of your pages, including the product pages, to avoid these situations: http://tinyurl.com/povmkr9 . Hopefully fixing the duplicate content problems from the non-canonical URLs and the manufacturer-supplied copy will help your rankings a bit.

Hi there I would say your plan is pretty fundamentally solid. Moz offers some great resources: The Beginner's Guide to SEO The Beginner's Guide to Link Building The Beginner's Guide to Social Media Moz Academy All of the above will help you build a solid foundation with your SEO, link building, and social media. A lot of this comes down to knowing what your audience is searching for, what kind of content they like, and where to find them. If you can nail all of that down, you're golden. You're providing value to your audience with great content, and that's when people want to link to you - when they see you're providing REAL value to your industry or niche. It all comes down to research and aligning your business goals with your audience goals - take the time now to get a good gameplan going by learning as much as you can, test it, and tweak as needed. Hope this all helps! Good luck!

Hello Toby! First of all, Screaming Frog will search for every type of links in your site, even if they are images or external. So you need to analyze better this data. I've checked here and screaming frog reported to me 107 inlinks. Your second query is not a real problem, but I would avoid have those links. Hope I helped you Lucas

Hi Andy No, it is a Webstore site.  We have no access to code or to the site folders, so we cannot do anything at all with the current .co.uk site at all, but repoint it and then 301 the pages we had.

Thanks everyone, very helpful.

I like Patrick's answer and agree that you need enough words to be able to orient visitors and search engines. While there is no best practice minimum, I personally aim for at least 100 words.

Toby There are two parts to optimizing titles and meta descriptions. Deal with the later first - Meta descriptions should firstly be optimized for clickability as they hold no significant SEO value.  So use your 156 characters to create a great CTA. Titles however are a different beast as they hold significant SEO value. In creation of the perfect Title you need to weigh two competing factors - SEO -v- Clickability. In the title SEO has the priority or should come first - hence identify the keywords chasing.  Then you work out the most clickable way to present those words. Here is a link to another post that answers your question. http://moz.com/community/q/how-should-be-a-perfect-seo-title-description-h1-and-h2 Moz has a snippet tool you can use. https://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool Before getting to that use Semrush or another keyword tool your prefer to identify the keywords you are chasing and than start playing with the snippet tool. Let me know if you have any questions. If you create a title and a description - happy to review it for you.

You shouldn't be penalized if these are simply sister sites that are linked together in the header. This is common practice with a number of media websites, for example: xojane.com nav links over to xovain.com msnbc.com runs footer links to nbcnews.com, today.com, cnbc.com, and breakingnews.com cnet.com runs footer links to cbsinteractive.com foxnews.com runs header links to 7 other properties etc. To be conservative, I would suggest linking with the brand name of the other site - don't use a commercial anchor text. In other words, link to it as "brand name" or "brandname.com", but don't link to it as "sports news".

Hi there I would suggest marking up every product you have. I would focus efforts onsite via Schema - I would imagine your product pages are set up on a template, so if you add the code into the template, it should automatically add markup to all of the products. I would take to your web dev team about that though. The reason I would focus on Schema - having Schema markup can potentially increase your rankings and improve your click through rates via enhanced snippets; not to mention, this markup is recognized by more than just Google, so you are marking up for multiple search engines, not just Google like you would be if you do it through just WMT. I would also suggest looking into a secure protocol for your site (https) as that is a ranking factor and you are an ecommerce website. It's important to let search engines know that you are protecting information from customers and value their privacy. It's thought by some that having a privacy policy page (among others) is considered a good trust signal to search engines - but either way, it's comforting for a user looking to make a purchase. Don't forget to do some competitor research to get an idea of opportunities others are taking advantage of. Lastly, be sure to avoid common ecommerce SEO mistakes - here's a great resource on those. And be sure to check your Pagespeed Insights - the site seems to be loading slow for me. Hope this helps! Good luck!

The test will be to see if google will index these pages, if they will rank high enough for anything to pull traffic, and if Google sees them as a Panda problem.  I think these definition pages are risky.  Go out and look at what the dictionary sites (that rank for anything) have done on their definition pages.  There is a lot more content. ================================ On this page, Google sees a one sentence definition and one sentence that uses the word.  There is also a lot of characters that Google will not understand. http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/dictionary/word/haboob/ I copied some of the definitions and searched for them in text on Google.  The definitions that I checked were found verbatim on over 1000 websites. The example sentences that use these pages are also not unique.  They are found on other websites. These pages are risky for another reason.