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Hi Alex, When it comes to bad links pointing to your site, definitely remove them as an when you can (i.e. immediately, acknowledging that it will take time to contact every linking webmaster and negotiate the link removal). If you are going to suffer any ill effects in rankings from removing bad links (which does happen if Google was passing PageRank through those links), it's still best to get this done sooner rather than later. What you do not want is bad links that haven't been noticed to suddenly be picked up upon, resulting in a manual penalty.

Assuming that you plan on posting them on your site as pdf files then they are spiderable to some extent. Google does spider and index some pdf's. I wouldn't advise this as a plan because pdf's do not generally rank well in most areas. The only category I can think of offhand where they do are irs forms. They would be much more likely to be thoroughly crawled, indexed and ranked if they are posted as actual webpages in html.

I'd like to thank you all for the input. As it happens, it seems the last google update has completely changed the rankings for most of the EMD we were tracking. So either they really had crappy "other" optimization techniques, or google changes the importance of EMD. Here's what I can take from this conversation: 1. EMD with good quality content and a descent back link will most probably rank higher then a domain without EMD in the domain name, but with similar/same content & backlink structure. 2. EMD with descent content and good backlink structure are probable a good place to have a link to the money site, but certainly not an option to replace the money site domain (which was never the intention) Thank you all for your input.

thanks! i fixed it yesterday. So now i start the waiting proces greetings!

Andy, many thanks indeed for your observations and comments - a great help and I'm now off to do a re write!! thanks again

WOW that's allot of external CSS files and allot of External JS files.I would suggest you try to reduce the CSS to just one file on any one page and also see if there's any JavaScript which isn't required for the page. Some of the images seem to take a while to load on a slower connection too, try to keep the physical size small. Good Luck Dave

OK tx so much!

OK, tx for the advice. About sitemaps, If i want my images appear in google, do I have to leave unceked the option of media in YOAST? On this moz article they suggest to exclude media from sitempas: http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success Whats your opinion suggestion about this and other xml settings?

Our IT guys do the same with our sites and they have no good reason for doing it.

yes, that is the super simple explanation my mind was blanking on. thanks!

Thank you everyone!  I will be building a site for one of our other companies soon... maybe I'll try wordpress to give it a chance.  

Ya, I think that will be the best choice. Good Luck!

Thanks for the heads-up Dan. Its much appreciated. Best regards, Devanur Rafi

Thanks for your answer Jane. The competition is a mix of some sites being very small and more targeted then us, and some less strong domains doing better. I guess this highlights the importance of not having too many narrow pages which end up being weak. Before the homepage started to rank, there was another wrong page ranking in a similar way until i removed the wording from it also, in the effort to make the correct page show, but looks like google just goes up to the next strong candidate.

I want to clarify something that I think would help to better answer the question. Is this showing in the meta description in the source code on the pages or is it just showing up in Google's search results? If it's in the source code then you obviously can change it, although it may be somewhat difficult depending on the cms. If it's only in search results and not in the source code then it's going to be a lot more difficult to get rid of. This is something that Google is detecting on your site and automatically displaying because it think that it's beneficial to searchers.

Thank you for your responses!  Looks like I have some work ahead of me.  A short term fix and a long term fix.  My site is somewhat responsive now, but not all the way down to mobile size.  I need to look at taking it further.  Thank you!

Why not leave the product up (200). Make it clear these items are no longer for sale. For example, pull the 'add to cart' button and use language to cross-sell another product.

I completely agree with this response. No one knows 100% for sure what a search engine is or isn't going to do - probably not even Matt Cutts and certainly not Rand, particularly since they are tweaking and improving the system on a daily basis. And I too agree that you should never post content (blogs) just for the sake of posting content or just for the sake of linking to another page. Updates like Panda will come back to haunt you if this is your practice. Instead of focusing on whether or not a link in a post is going to have more authority than a link elsewhere and using that to determine whether or not you are going to post new content, focus instead on your audience and how you can provide them value. Does the article and/or link provide value to your consumer? At the end of the day, always remember that websites are for people, NOT for search engines.

Thanks a million for the help guys.

Thanks, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't crazy and was missing something obvious.