Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for all your answers

I run a couple of projects using the WP e-Commerce Plugin.  It took some customization to get it exactly the way I wanted but find it very useful!  I had to rewrite the XML feed for Google Merchant, tweak the gateway and installed several additional Plugins (including the Yoast SEO) but love the e-Commerce functionality. I definitely recommend giving the WP e-Commerce Plugin a try!

I'm not aware of this ever being a ranking factor. There are more than a few high-profile sites that use the noarchive tag, generally because their content changes quickly. Google even gives instructions how to use it, so it's likely okay. That said, we should consider adding this to our list of ranking factors

Thanks for the info John, I've added the tags you suggest. Does anyone know how likely this is to have affected the main sites Google rankings? Also, is there any way to know if Google has removed the zapto site from it's index. I've been doing a number of  'site:<sitename>.zapto.org' searches over the past few days and have seen  no decrease in the number of pages that are indexed.</sitename>

Hello, I don't understand why you redirected your index page to the "about us" page, Don't you want your home page to start at www.towerhousetraining.co.uk? Like having a short intro there and where people can read more by then clicking "about us". Canonical urls are used on pages with very similar content. You basically tell the search engines what page you wishes to rank (of the similar ones).

fyi http://www.seroundtable.com/google-webmaster-tools-reports-stalled-16756.html

Hi Shailendra, How long does this page exist? Probably Google found it somewhere during the process of crawling your Web site. As the Pagerank of a page is not updated very often, mostly 3-4 times a year, it's not the best metric to rely on. So the 'delay' in this updating process could also be the cause that you page has a PageRank. Hope this helps shine a light on how PageRank works nowadays.

Hi Jesse and Takeshi, Thank you for the responses. I found another thread covering this topic in seomoz. In case you guys haven't seen it, here's the link. http://www.seomoz.org/q/us-vs-com

My first reaction was the same as Brads. After looking at the sites themselves and hearing your response, I think it's very normal to operate these sites separately since they are separate brands. I wouldn't worry about that aspect.

Federico--sounds good. Maybe I was focus more on the issue of the websites were difficult to update--and this would provide an avenue to update. My recommendation was to create informational pages that would link into the parent site does add value--and would not be perceived as a doorway page. If the page is low-quality and does not provide user value it could be classified as a doorway page. Have a good one

Thanks for the info. My site has current crawl rate at 350,00 pages per day so will take 10-20 days to crawl the entire sites. Most of organic traffic comes to 10,000 urls while others are pagination urls etc. Now all the traffic 1st inner page of each term disappeared in the results of inurl: command.

Hi Guy, I am experiencing the same thing. We have performed site: searches with negatives to narrow down where all the junk is coming from, and we have disallowed those subdirectories in our robots.txt file. It has worked somewhat but only cut the number of indexed pages in half. We still have well over our number of real pages. If you learn anything new, I'd like to hear about it! thanks, Katherine

Yes, that sounds really plausible.  Thanks for explaining that to me! I'm passing your comment on to my programmer for him to take a look. I have a few "tech smart" people I know, I'll ask them to take a look as well - Wisdom in many counselors! Thanks so much!

Ugh, I was working at 100 Mph this morning and just completely forgot how to do that. Thanks.

Ha, Ha--yes the best way to increase Alexa ranking is by increasing visits to your site by browsers w/the Alexa toolbar instead. Sounds like an accurate metric to me

Just to make sure there's not a technical issue, the page isn't noindexed, or you don't have an images directory blocked in robots.txt, correct?

Thanks Tom. The site map is pointing to the correct pages, and when visiting the pages in the search engines no problems arises. I don't understand why these pages are listed in the crawl error report when I can't see any obvious issue.

cheers for that.

There isn't really any significance to that as far as I'm concerned. You can go here **http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663691 **and request it's removal, but I wouldn't bother. Who looks at that? Certainly nobody I know. I could be mistaken here... I'll be interested to see what somebody else says. Personally I'd leave it alone and move on. Yes the descriptions all need some work. Write them as a tagline to get the potential client to click on your page. Forget about keywords as Google doesn't factor these in. This is your chance to set your link apart from the others: write something enticing for each page to get the user to click your link instead of the other one. Unsure what works? Google something and without thinking about it, click the one that appeals to you. Go back to the SERPs and read the description.. try to decide what it was about the listing that made you click it. Good luck!

What are your competitors doing? Some of my competitors in seasonal SERPs buy links shortly before the season begins.  That pushes them up SERPs and lowers my rankings/traffic.  Then as the season matures they remove the links (to save money and reduce risk). What can you do about it?   Make a stronger site so that you will be harder / more expensive to beat next year.