Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi LIttlesthobo We did run a competition/giveaway for around 2 years.  What we found though was that we got the same people entering the competition all the time.  i.e. professional compers. Are you saying that your competitions give you continued social interactions and are generating back links for you? Thanks Paul

Yes, I am trying some catchy phrases and if that doesn't work out, will add the "Coupon for free beer" in the site description.   Thanks again for the input. tb

Do you find the sitemap.xml works better than submitting a sitemap page with all the same links?   Currently I using a sitemap page instead of a sitemap.xml file.

Hi TextMarketing, I just have found on webmaster tool under the Labs-Instant Preview-1  error fetching resources and when I click on it shows this: http://edge.quantserve.com/quant.js  Roboted Could this have any effect on SERPS? What is this? |   |

Hi IC I don't understand well what would be the purpose of anoindex tag there, if your page is blank and have a blog as an iframe, the content ehich google is seeing is blank so no duplication issues there, why are you thinking on no indexing the page? Maybe your purpose is another and I didn't unserstand it well, sorry for that.

Hi Ve, While getting your business listed via Google Places/Google+ Local is a start, it is just the beginning of what you need to do to achieve high rankings. This is an enormous topic, so let me link to some resources that I feel will be beneficial to you in starting to understand the big, exciting world of Local SEO. This is the Local SEO industry' premiere annual report on Local Search Ranking Factors: http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml This is a piece of my own to help you get into the right mindset for a successful Local SEO campaign: The Zen of Local SEO http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1314 And here is another: The Rudiments of Local SEO http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1344 And, as Jason has pointed out, SEOmoz recently acquired David Mihm's GetListed.org and you will find some really helpful articles and a great tool at the link Jason provided. Hope this gets you off to a great start!

Another vote for proactively adding canonical tags to all pages. They're a great preventive measure in case someone else links with unusual parameters. Also, Google is "supposed" to understand the UTM tags and ignore them, but we've all seen cases where Google's actual processes don't work quite like they're supposed to. (I've seen plenty of utm-tagged URLs indexed in Google) (Plus, there's even less guarantee that other search engines would discount them and avoid dupe content. Bing et al may not be a huge traffic source on your site, but no sense throwing it away unnecessarily.) Paul

The music item pages that are creating the mostly empty pages with sidebars are the ones that sound like they should be NoIndexed. Since they're essentially empty pages they would be duplicates of each other, thin content, and a canonical would be ignored because they aren't technically a duplicate of the homepage or a subset of the homepage's superset.

Thanks, everyone, for the responses. They were very helpful.

Having both www and non-www versions of your site accessible is definitely a duplicate content issue, as Google looks at those as different sites. If you have access to your .htaccess file, here is the code you want to add: Options +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch RewriteEngine on rewritecond %{http_host} ^barefootparadisevacations.com [nc] rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.barefootparadisevacations.com/$1 [r=301,nc] This will redirect non-www versions of your site to www.

Thanks for the advice. I'm switching the image out for a whole new one but will keep the filename dimensions and size approximately the same. This is my first post here and really appreciate everyone's help! Thanks!

Thanks! I'm going to re do the navigation and add links at the bottom so hopefully google will now find the pages!

Wow - looks like folks kinda missed the part where you asked to keep it simple, Ve Because you site is built using WordPress software, it's actually simple and straightforward to do what you're asking. All it requires is the installation of a small plugin called "Redirection" to your website to automatically handle what needs to be done anytime you wish to change a page or post's permalink. (just to be sure - this is all assuming you're talking about changing the permalink right on the edit page for a post, not changing the permalink structure on the settings page for your whole blog) In case you haven't installed plugins before, here's the step-by-step process. Don't be intimidated - it only looks long because I've made every step it's own bullet point for clarity log into your WordPress as if you were going to create a new post, but instead, look for the button called Plugins on the left sidebar hover your cursor over the Plugins button, and click on the Add New link that shows up on the new page, type Redirection into the search box and click the Search Plugins button beside it the plugin you want should be right at the top of the list - called Redirection (no other words) and in the description you'll see it is written by John Godley click the link for Install Now located under the name of the plugin you'll be taken to a page that tells you it's installing the plugin. (If WordPress gives you empty boxes to fill ion this new page, post back here. Depending on your site's configuration, sometimes WordPress needs a little help at this point.) Once WordPress has done it's thing, you should see a successful install notification on that page. click on the Activate Plugin link that now appears at the bottom of the "successfully installed" page you're on WordPress will again do it's thing and then take you to the page listing all your installed plugins. The plugin is now installed and activated! now go the post or page you want to change, and edit its permalink, republishing the post when you're done. go to your live site and click on one of the links to the page you just changed, to confirm that you end up on the correct new page at it's new address DONE! Go have a glass of wine (or other celebratory beverage.) The background (if you want to know the "Why" as well as the "how") When you change the permalink of a page in WordPress, you are changing its actual web address (also know as its URL). Even though you know you've done this, the rest of the web (and even your own website) don't know about the change so they're still looking for that page at it's old address. When your site's server gets a request to display that page, it can't find it so it sends back a 404 error, which basically says "there's no page at the address you're asking for and I have no idea where it might be". To fix this, you need to teach the server where it should send everybody who's looking for the old address. You do this by writing what's called a 301 Redirect into the server so that when it gets a request for that old address, it can say "there's no page at that old address anymore - it's now moved permanently to this new address and I'm going to automatically send you there." This all happens instantaneously in the background so the visitor never sees it - they just end up on the new address. In addition, this redirect tells the search engines to give the ranking value of the old address to the new address so it doesn't look like a brand new page starting from scratch. (helps keep your page showing up well in the search results) The Redirection plugin automatically notices whenever you change the permalink of a page and automatically writes the code necessary to give the server the 301 redirect it needs, instead of you having to muck about with all the coding the other answers were talking about. YAY for WordPress! (Still, best to change the permalinks as seldom as possible though) The method I gave you installs the plugin directly from the WordPress parent site , meaning they've checked and approved it so you know it's safe. The plugin can also do many other powerful things, but those are for another post Do let me know if anything's not clearly-enough explained, or if you run into any problems Good luck, and let us know how it goes! Paul

I wouldn't have exact content.  If it is just one website use the same site structure but change the content.  You can vary your content and messaging, but portray the same theme.  Google doesn't like duplicate content anyway you look at it.  Just my opinion though.

Yeah, that's the general consensus around blogs, subfolder >subdomain.  Reinforced in this Moz guide. However, I recall someone dispelling this myth with backup from Google or Matt Cutts that they are treated no differently from each other. There's also this post that concludes that there isn't a difference. Aaron Wall, well respected in the industry, thinks subdomains are arbitrary and aren't treated as a separate case. My preference is to remain with a subfolder - I genuinely think it looks a bit neater.  Consensus is somewhat split over the whole "which is better for SEO", I'd stick with a subfolder if it's easy for you to implement and you're not too bothered about presentation in the URL.

I actually have related question. I'm trying to find solid information on Google's criteria on showing a "mini Google search box" within sitelinks? Example: if you type-in "wikipedia" on Google.com, a mini search box appears within the site links. This is for organic listing not paid listing. The Google Support page on Sitelinks does not state any info on the mini google search box. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47334 Any help? k1yO9Ub.jpg

The more content that ends up ranking for it's own topical focus, the better the whole site does - it all gets a lift.  The critical key though is topical relationships. If the content becomes too diverse across a site, it can weaken the site's topical consistency.  The exception to this concept is if the site is intended to be a "general information" site covering a vast range of topics.  However even in that case, when a site gets too diverse, it becomes increasingly more difficult to get individual topics to rank because only so much time and energy can go into supporting any individual topic.

I appreciate all your responses. Paul, thanks for your detailed reply. Best Nic