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Hi Conor, First off you may find this video from Matt Cutts helpful, he mentioned about blocking the Google mobile bot from your none mobile site. You can also use the rel=alternative and canonical the mobile to the desktop version.  you may find this page super helpful - https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details#separateurls Annotation in the HTML On the desktop page, add: <code><link< span="">rel="alternate"media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)" href="http://m.example.com/page-1"></link<></code> and on the mobile page, the required annotation should be: <code><link< span="">rel="canonical"href="http://www.example.com/page-1"></link<></code> This rel="canonical" tag on the mobile URL pointing to the desktop page is required. The canonical tag only affect search engines and won't affect users so if you're sharing the same content canonical to the desktop. You may find having a URL structure like  m.example.com/product better for organizing the two sites. Hope that helps. good luck!

Yes, high quality links will be what easily makes and breaks any SEO attempt. You're onto something when you say local chamber links, getting links from places like that is usually doable and should be something that you explore.

That is our next step. We discussed it this morning after your original post. Thank you.

What I am seeing for "Nickel Alloys" is the page for nickel alloys under neonickel.com (http://www.neonickel.com/alloys/nickel-alloys/). This page is optimized very well for this and Google thinks it is the most relevant page on your site, which it is. Even if this page has less authority than your homepage, the relevancy of this page is why Google is ranking this over the homepage. If someone is searching for nickel alloys and they get this page which is specifically about nickel alloys on your site, why would you not want them to land on this page? The artificial grass is an interesting case. I don't see that site in the first 5 pages of search but if I search only under that domain, the homepage is ranked near the bottom compared to all your other pages. Was this page possibly just resubmitted to Google via Webmaster Tools or removal of a noindex tag? Your homepage has good authority and relevance so there is no reason I'm seeing as to why it is not ranking. Has it ranked higher in the past and been a big change in organic traffic? Something I would definitely recommend is plugging in Webmaster Tools and check the crawl diagnostics there to see if you can get any insight. You should also submit a sitemap as well if you not have not already done so. This will help Google recognize all the pages on your site and increase the number of pages Google crawls. Hope this can help

My advice is to purchase a domain you can/will build a brand around. Stick to the brand URL/domain as exact name match domains have been flagged by Google for top rankings. Optimize the site for both targeted traffic and local and national/international search traffic. I'm a big believer now of brand domains, and developing links to those sites with links that reflect, brand mentions, KW mentions for correlation, social mentions and inbound related marketing content development to strengthen the domain's total overall market presence. Another reason to keep the domain 'brand related' is about the UI/UX for recalling it. If it's some crazy long typed domain name with KW's and brand mentions, it becomes tedious to remember and type out Using the brand name as the focus and URL will keep it straight to the point for the user and marketing behind it. NOTE: Make sure to research out the social profiles of any URL you are looking at, to build up around as you want to ensure you can lock them all up prior to purchasing anything Either way, your best bet with a completely new domain will be to focus on developing out a local SEO strategy and supporting that with targeted content and social media profiles. This way, when you are ready to gain and target a larger audience (national?), you have the backbone profile on the site to reinforce the effort. Hope some of that helps

Well thats the odd thing the links to the old page were returning 404 page not found error so that and the very low page authority led me to believe a 301 redirect was needed

Sure, glad to help

Sent you a PM

Thanks for your comments Gianluca. I think Google's guidelines are somewhat ambiguous. Here it does state that "if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately." https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en I think you've explained it nicely though.

That's an odd way they set that up. I think you're are right though, you are better off just restructuring the content under one page to avoid duplicate content issues. If you have any external backlinks pointing to those individual question pages, make sure to set up a 301 redirect to your main page so not to lose any of those links. Good luck

Rob's advice is very good in regard to sending people to the more effective inner page. I would not mess around with canonical tags, unless the content is actually duplicated.  Rethinking your internal links might be helpful.  One thing I have done in similar situations is to use a keyword anchored link from the category page to the home page.  Moz Analytics will tell you this is keyword cannibalization, but it does often work to nudge Google toward ranking the home page.  So on a page about "Red Widgets", you could link to the home page with "Red Widget Company".  What is likely to happen is that you will sort of split the searches based on user intent, and searches that are more than just the base keyword. Searches that Google thinks are more informational would go to the Red Widgets page, where someone looking for a supplier or maker of red widgets might be sent to the home page.  Similar links throughout the site where they are appropriate would also be good.  Like, if you have a page or a blog post that mentions red widgets, link to the category. If it says something about manufacturer of red widgets, link to the home page.  Just like incoming links, you don't want to overuse the same keywords, though.  Mix things up a bit within the same topical theme (red widget maker, manufacturer of red widgets, red widget company...)

I have just came across this article which has pretty much answered my question ! http://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool

Hi Dave, There is a wealth of information out there about internationalisation but I'll cover some of the main points here. The first thing to think about is the TLD of the site, e.g. .com, etc. If they are currently running on a TLD that belongs to a designated country, they will need to move to a generic TLD. In other words, you can't use site.ca to target Mexico. You will need to move to site.com, .org, .net, or similar. You can use subdomains or subfolders on the parent site to target different countries. A good URL to target Mexico would be site.com/mx. If you have English language content from Mexico as well as Spanish, you could use site.com/mx-es/ and site.com/mx-en/. No matter how many versions of the site you create for different markets, you will need to use the rel="alternative" tag (also sometimes referred to has the "href lang tag"). This will allow you to create site.com/co for Colombia, site.com/nc for Nicaragua, site.com/mx for Mexico and site.com/ar for Argentina without being penalised for having duplicate Spanish content on different parts of the same website. If you also have the exact same content on the site in other languages, this tag allows you to show which versions are in English and are meant for the US, which versions are in English and are meant for Canada, which versions are in English and meant for the UK, etc. as well. They can go down the route of registering domains in the countries they want to target, like site.com.mx, site.com.ar and site.com.br, but this usually requires a higher level of link development to push authority at all of these sites. For truly local content, the local domains could be best, but for many queries, .com sites rank just fine in South America. Check out these three Moz resources for international SEO as well: http://moz.com/blog/5-dos-and-donts-of-international-seo http://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist http://moz.com/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust

Hi Michelle, It's common to have latest news displayed in a set area of a select few pages, but I would not recommend this being a footer element. Footers have long been used for spam purposes, meaning that Google has a habit of disregarding their content or taking it as possible manipulation if it sees something undesirable in this area. Absolutely no problem having a regularly occurring piece of navigation on pages, but perhaps reconsider placing this latest news section site-wide, especially in the footer.

Wow ! Thanks fir that Vahe, very useful indeed !

It's just a notice, saying "hey, this is here, take a look and make sure all is OK"

No, the two systems operate separately. I would let this ride out a bit longer before you jump to too many conclusions. There are many variables that could have influenced this situation such as new competitors entering the PLA's, a slight algo update wasn't in favor of your site, or seasonality depending on what you are selling. A mix of good organic rankings and PLA's/PPC usually has a 1+1=3 effect because you have more "real estate" on the web, hopefully on the first page.

No problem! Yeah, having a more flexible content management software (i.e. blog/website) with more control sounds like it would make it much easier to optimize the content, url's, and on-page aspects of your SEO. Do you have any other reservations on this topic?

Your good. Moz is simply letting you know where they are.

I hear actually two different reactions, still wondering what's better for SEO. Someone who can help us out?