Welcome to the Q&A Forum

URL Readability = Clickability (providing the URL is not too long.) When you see results in SERPS, the readability (reading ease for a human reader) can help your click-thru rates. It helps the reader to understand if they are interested in your content. Also, it helps search engines to know what your page is about. Underscores are not nearly as good. Category names are often automatically hyphenated by most shopping cart systems, no?

Thank you Miriam. Yes those posts did help and have set me straight on H1 tags.

It would be ideal to have the first paragraph of the press release as the meta description, as this is usually a summary or outline of the news being announced. You'd then have to truncate that to approx 140 characters to fit inside a Google result. How that is implemented depends on the type of site you have, what you are running on etc. Ash

2 years back....that's going to be right in the middle of a lot of Google algo changes, both Panda and Penguin.  It might be just a coincidence that your traffic drop was around when the hacking happened. Have you done a backlink analysis?  It could be that the hackers also planted a ton of crappy links in the hopes of short-term getting your site to rank well for whatever they're trying to inject into your site and sell. Sounds like you're doing the right thing with the URLs though.  To do a double-check on the duplicate content side, you could run Screaming Frog against it, and check for duplicate page titles and meta descriptions.  If your pages are getting spit out with multiple URLs, you'll see them all show up with duplicates.

The easiest thing that often gets overlooked is optimizing image information like descriptions and alt text.

If an English page doesn't have an equivalent Spanish page, it's best not to include hreflangs. Hreflangs need to be bi-directional, meaning if site.com/en/a.html hreflangs to site.com/es/a.html, then site.com/es/a.html also needs to hreflang to site.com/en/a.html. This can't be done if you refer the homepage. I'd make a note to add them later when pages are translated.

thanks for the reply... this is pretty much what i am after. And thanks for your advice... makes perfect sence and i sent an email to the developer.

i did

Yep!

Looks pretty spammy to me. You say breast actives 4 times in about the first 50 words ! Plus in your title and your description. J

I'll refer to a question we had no very long ago on the same subject - http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-tell-the-date-a-link-was-created Quick note even though you didn't start using them the bot still would have crawled the site etc. you just wouldn't of been able to access the data.

I wouldn't for the cart and checkout, I would actually no-index them. The reason being is depending on what measure you are using for cart abandonment, having people land on those pages will skew your results. Also at the same time there is no good reason for them to enter on those pages so it will increase the overall bounce rate if people are entering on them. Privacy policy, shipping, and return policy, I would not specifically no-index them, but I would not try to optimize them for anything other business name - page name. That being said, if you are like Costco and offer some amazing return policy that someone can return a product after 10 years for a full refund and it is a popular product; I might consider optimizing the return policy for that as well. Or if you are the only person that offers free international shipping on a large item like a baby grand piano or something. But if you fall in line with the rest of the industry I would just leave them as is and only optimize them for your business name - policy type. So then if people search for your business and return policy those pages will more than likely come up.

Thank you very much

Unless your category pages pull together a group of products that formulate some sort of unique point of view that benefits the sales process, then there's no real reason for your category pages to stand out, in which case, minimize their overall impact on search and focus on making your individual product pages stand out in search. Do you actually get so many return visitors coming to the site looking for what's new since the last time they were there that you need a "new products" category? How about "hot products", are visitors indicating that they are at your site to find out what others are actively buying?  I wonder. If you were able to come up with categories that actually add value to the visitor experience, I'd be willing to bet that you wouldn't have this canonicalization  issue or this pagination issue.  In the mean time, what you describe might be the best way of doing it.

I just now found this conversation and I want to commend Travis for digging in. Some other things to consider: Age of the domain and also of the local campaign. If Lifepoint got an earlier 'start' on the web than Sylvania, this could have something to do with it. It does not look like an industry centroid is at play here, because both churches seem fairly equally distant to what I see as the cluster for 'churches in tyler tx' Could Sylvania have any negative issues like duplicate listings that could hold them back? You might like to check out: http://moz.com/blog/troubleshooting-local-ranking-failures

Thanks Lesley, That is the call we went with. I had to think about it for a minute. Also realized that a search engine would not pick up the content on that page they would only see the feed code and would pass authority back to the blog page.

Hi Bruce That's great thank you for the information and all your help.

Hi Try  SEO Optimizer bit slim on fetaures at the moment but:- Allows you to add more rules to ROBOTS.TXT to exclude unimportant and harmful pages. Allows you to set a unique META DESCRIPTION on the home page to remove duplicate META DESCRIPTION across pages. Uses the recommended image optimizers of Google PageSpeed Insights (jpegtran.exe and pngout.exe) to losslessly compress images before serving. Link There are also a few common issues with Nop such as duplicate meta descriptions, etc see the links below nopCommerce SEO Pitfalls and How To Solve Them - Part 1 Couple Of NopCommerce SEO Tips

I have never used it, but I have heard a few people mention that they like it in local meet ups and things like that. For a blogging platform you are not going to get much better than wordpress. It might have the problems that wordpress blogs normally have with some of the indexed pages, but those are easily solved. The good thing I hear about the module is that you are running a full featured wordpress installation, not a sandboxed type. So it is basically like running wordpress with a magento connector.

ah , my bad. I would think that any attempt of that sort would constitute a copyright /image licensing infringement.