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Nope, a one hour downtime should not affect your rankings. Here is Matt Cutts on the subject. A) Crawler may not even detect the downtime B) If downtime is detected, crawler will check back later to see if it is a serious problem. Your site would be back up by then and shouldn't affect rankings.

I would Agree with Moosa - Be careful because you may end up with it not ranking what so ever. People may be finding your slide shows through the site and not necessarily via rankings. I would recommend trying to get a link back to your site or even a link in the deck pointing to your site so even if a user finds it they can still get back to you and its not lost revenue (though you won't necessarily get a seo benefit unfortunately) Remember Slideshare is an authoritative site if you strip[ it out can you compete ?

Bingo! My theory was correct. It was the extra // on the product pages in the site map. Once they fixed that, it went to indexing the sitemap again.

There's no way to generalize this, there are a million factors.  I believe rankings these days are pretty query-specific.  Is the search term Informational? Transactional? Navigational? If it's a competitive niche, how many of the competitors re penalized? One disadvantage of aged domains these days is they may have low quality links and may get penalized. From that point of view new domains are better.

I'm going to endorse Andy's answer as well as adding one here. His link to Matt's video is what I would add, but I wanted to address the redirect affecting ranking. The redirect is basically ensuring that you won't show in results for mobile users. You need a page to rank to even attempt to rank. You are sending the signal now that itunes is the right page for users, so that page will rank. The redirect is most certainly impacting your performance mobile and desktop. iTunes has desktop accessible pages as well and you are pointing your authority to them. Beyond that, there haven't been studies that I know of proving this just because it's a bad user experience on top of a bad search decision.

I don't understand if you look at source code and see the text url, then that is how you are linking. Using text rather then a ID gives you a chance to insert a keyword so text is better then ID. Linking to an ID then redirecting to a text url as many CMS do, loses link juice on the redirect.

Hi Simon, Like Andy says, is there a possibility that you can have these windows open in a new tab with a nofollow attribute if necessary? Whether to keep people on site or send them away has been a problem / debate in marketing for a long time (well before we had to worry about penalisation / outbound link issues to go with it). There's a fine line between keeping people on a site they no longer want to be on and accidentally allowing them to forget about where they were before. You might want to test different ways of sending visitors away to see which results in the best conversion metrics (whatever you choose those metrics to be). As a user, I almost invariably open links in new tabs myself, but different people have different ways of handling this themselves and I'd test what works best for your user base in terms of visitor retention / other goals.

If mywebsite.com is 301'ed to some other page, then mywebsite.com will no longer be reached buy requests, so the content will never be read. The content when talking about a 301is irrelevant, all a 301 does is redirect the request. when google follows a link to your old page it is redirected to the new page and the link juice will now fall on the new page. The content on the new page is read instead,

Hi There I would; Noindex your tags Set your title templates for the category archives so they end up unique. Hopefully you're using Yoast SEO. So go to SEO->Titles/Meta and click "Other" to get all the variables for the title templates. Play around until you get titles that are unique, not too long, and make sense to read.

You are spot on, all you are doing to hiding and showing, if you can see it with fetch as googlebot you have no problems.

Where are you getting the data from for the search volume difference? Secondly, what are you using to look at your rankings for both terms? Manual searches do not always give you the whole picture of what is ranking or not ranking. Before you restructure the whole site, set up a few test pages that focus on the non-plural version of your keyword. Monitor the ranking closely. If you see a large influx in traffic, then slowly implement change across your site, although I would not place all your eggs in one basket. Use some of the keyword idea tools available to look at broad match keywords related to photobook(s), and build out your content to cover additional areas. (if you have not already)

I concur. Wordpress is an excellent option for blogging and it would definitely better to put it on a subdirectory of your main site. Something like http://www.awaragroup.com/blog would be ideal.

Since you already know Wordpress, you probably already know Yoast's excellent Wordpress SEO plugin. Yoast has another plugin specifically for video. I'd recommend taking a look -- good luck!

Hi Thomas, I think your problem is partially duplicate content: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22Once+you%E2%80%99re+approved+for+a+ReebokONE+profile+and+you+sign+up+for+the+commission+program%2C+visitors+can+purchase+products+displayed+on+your%22&oq=%22Once+you%E2%80%99re+approved+for+a+ReebokONE+profile+and+you+sign+up+for+the+commission+program%2C+visitors+can+purchase+products+displayed+on+your%22&aqs=chrome..69i57.1682j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8#filter=0&q=%22Once+you%E2%80%99re+approved+for+a+ReebokONE+profile+and+you+sign+up+for+the+commission+program%2C+visitors+can+purchase+products+displayed+on+your%22&safe=off This page is virtually identical to a bunch of others in international subfolders, e.g. http://www.reebok.com/sv-SE/reebokonehome/Landing-Page/, http://www.reebok.com/sv-SE/reebokonehome/ (same page but without /Landing-Page/, http://www.reebok.com/nl-nl/reebokonehome/, etc. It's highly unlikely that Google sees any of these resources as highly valuable on their own, given their duplicated many times. The solution here is pretty simple (in theory) though: the rel="alternative" tag (also referred to as the href lang tag) is meant for the purpose of telling Google that although these pages / subfolders, etc. are duplicates of each other, Version A is meant for the US, Version B for Sweden, Version C for Finland, etc. You can also create, for example, an English and Spanish version of the content for the United States and say: "these two pages are for a US audience but this one is for Spanish queries and this one for English." Here are some resources about the tag: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en http://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool Essentially, Google may be refusing to pick this page up because it's basically already seen it many, many times. Cheers, Jane

Hi Conrad, Aside from internal linking, it is also important to look at the page titles, and these could do with some work. When crafting page titles, you want to remember that Google has changed how they calculate how much is now shown, and this equates to 56 characters (512 pixels). MOZ has a tool to show you what would be seen here. You say that when someone searches for "active new zealand", then you want this page to be returned http://activeadventures.com/new-zealand However, the page title of that page is "New Zealand Hiking & Adventure Tours & Vacations | Active Adventure". This title is also a little spammy, and you need to get your desired phrase in there as well, if you can. Rather than what is there, I would have "Active New Zealand adventure tours | Active Adventure". This gets both key phrases in and fits into the 512 pixel limit that Google now has. Internal linking can also help by explaining more to Google about the pages as well. A strong anchor text around each phrase would be desirable here. If you want a hand with any of this, just drop me a PM and will be happy to give you some pointers. -Andy

Thanks for your help.

Thank you Guys! I resolved the issue! I think it was a caching issue!

Now this may cause some debate, personally I prefer the www version, you can see that moz prefers the non www version and there is a article here http://www.searchenginejournal.com/canonicalization-seo-should-i-use-www-or-not/6950/ that may help you make your own decision. Basically choose one and stick with it.

Hi Mark: Thanks very much for your note. I tried something similar the SEO Browser, and it shows you what the search engines see. Very useful. Cheers, Wes.

Thanks David & Dana, So far, this appears to be erring towards the simple URL's. To address your comment about moving Dana, this is only quite a small site, but I can see the benefits of looking at it in this way. -Andy