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Perfect video to answer my last question. Thank you.

Sorry for my late respons. We have decided to go over on https for the whole website that was the best thing to do. The results are good and Google is also happy because there is just one kind of a url we are using within the whole website. We prefer the short url version and that worktout good. Greetings Jacco

I am looking for only post name (url.com/post-name). Is that possible?

I actually had a look at the robots.txt last night to block the effected areas and discovered the dev's who built the site hadn't set it up. We've added a default one which we're going to test over the next week to see how it fares. If that doesn't work then we'll start looking at the parameters. Thanks.

Thanks Alan. By direct mail I mean actual post not email but thanks for giving my both options. So I will change them all to 301's then. BigJoe

Thanks for the great input. I think we have figured out the issue, at least partially. This particular client had a Google+ page that they had kept up for several years - lots of posts with links back to the website. That G+ page was deleted this past week, which would explain the sudden disappearance of links. I doubt the page was accountable for 4,000+ links, but I'm pretty confident that is where the majority of the decrease came from. Thanks for the help!

just looked again and its now saying 15 so seems to have fixed itself, prob just a short term display issue - thanks for commenting

I understand what you mean, but let me explain. For small to medium size stores, this method makes more sense. Why? 1. Easier to add rich snippet markup on pages, due to lower product count 2. Can optimize pages around main keyword, rather than hyper-specific keyword. Example: "custom t-shirt printing" would be more desirable and have more searches than "red t-shirt printing" 3. If the store has enough products or options, the store will not look thin, and also be vastly easier to navigate. 4. You will be able to spend more time optimizing around your higher level keywords. Example: "men's collared shirts" rather than "mens black collared shirts". You can include both content and meta data for the individual details. Sample meta: Yourshirtdomain.com is the number one supplier of men's collared shirts in the midwest region. 'different varaitions here' For some very large sites, they set the sub-pages to no-index and allow the leading page to get them into the store. It's all a matter of how his site is set up, as to what will work best for him and his client.

We went around and around with this question when we rebuilt our site. The conclusion we came to was: We shoud link out to our social profiles and citation links, since they link back directly to us from a trusted network. It was also determined that linking could be helpful, since Google may not have discovered your social network. This was used to jumpstart the discovery of the profiles we had created and further help Google to validate our location and services.

Hi There In general you probably don't need to do that. Here's how I would normally deal with indexation in WordPress (assuming you're using WordPress); Categories - index Tags - noindex Date archives - noindex Author (single author blogs) - noindex Author (multi-author) - index Subpages - noindex Basically all these settings are shown in my post here on setting up WordPress: http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success Yoast is the best plugin to do all this with!

Thanks for the tips! I'll give them a try & report back!

So I am encountering the same problem as Marcel. My meta descriptions are similar to other pages, but not exact matches. There are variables in each description that change depending on the page you are viewing. My main issue with Marcel's solution is that I don't want to put the exact meta description in the content as it doesn't really flow with the layout/design/messaging. The meta desc works on the SERPs but as an actual part of the copy, it does not fit. Any other suggestions? Could I put the meta desc. at the bottom of the page? Would including NOODP do the trick?

Hi Kristina Thanks for commenting and for the link, useful stuff Re the flow chart i interpret that as saying that if we are creating a sub site in a different language to target a different country (on the WP MS network.domain.com/tr network but domain mapped to its own country spedcific TLD), unless that country has multiple language versions used then we don't need to use hreflang and that geotargeting in GWT will suffice ? So really only time i need to use hreflang on top of geotargeting in GWT will be when very similar content in very similar languages (such as US English pages targeting USA google, and UK English pages targeting UK google) Re hreflang though - the dev have already set up custom fields for me so we at least have the option for as & when we may need to add hreflang to the pages: So am i right in thinking we add one hreflang tag to each page for each language version of it ? (so we end up with as many hreflangs on each page, referencing the alternate page relevant to that country code, as there are different language versions of the page ?) If so then the system is now set up for this but their asking me If I only ever want to add one tag to each page - effectively one that defines the language of the page you are on, then I could have a much simpler system than the one they have built! I take it the answer is no since we now have and want the above former solution ? Also the WP MS system uses Yoast that we ideally want for various seo reasons. It adds a canonical tag and theres some discussion out there re using hreflang tag and canonical together may cause issues, so is it best to keep canonical via Yoast or aks dev to suppress Yoast so no canonical ? Sorry for more questions and thanks for your help !! All Best Dan

If the content isn't there, you can setup a 410. That will tell the search engines and users that the pages are gone for good. GWT will also show broken links to your site as well. So you will want to distinguish between the inbound 404s and the pages that are no longer there. There's a possibility that the pages have been gone for so long, they're no longer indexed. So I'm not really sure how much good a 301 will do from a link perspective. However, if you have access to referral data - you may find some of those inbound 404s are worth redirecting to a relevant page.

Great idea wrttnwrd! Thanks so much for your response. We will try this out. Thanks!

TTL is Time To Live (set in seconds), and is the interval that your computer will refresh its DNS information. Usually it's set for 12 or 24 hours. So the day before an IP change, set your TTL to 5 minutes. That way, when you do change your IP, it should only take 5 minutes for the DNS change to propagate. Once it propagates, change it back to its original value.

No problem Derrick, my pleasure. Tom

How long has it been since the change? Google will need weeks and week to recrawl and reindex all the stuff. If it's been a while, this is one of those issues where we kind of need the URL. It can be a lot of different things, and sometimes it's a lot faster and easier if someone just gets in there and digs around.

Thanks for the replies - I think you nailed it JaneCopland! This was our gut, but figured it couldn't hurt to have a few other SEOs weigh in.