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Hi Willem, This is a question that's subject to continuous debate. On one hand, Google says over and over again, in no uncertain terms, not to hide text. On the other hand, folks from the Search Quality team at Google have said that navigational elements hidden with CSS wont hurt you if they are there for the benefit of the user. Google will index navigational elements hidden by CSS, and won't penalize you for it, but it's not always clear how much weight and authority is passed through these elements. So I'm not a huge fan of negative indent text. It's only a personal preference but I prefer to use CSS classes of none and hidden. Another favorite technique is to use javascript type menus that degrade gracefully when javascript is turned off. For example, take a look at my member profile on SEOmoz - the part at the bottom which contains "comments" and "blog posts". If you turn off javascript (you can do this with the MozBar) you'll see ALL the menus degrade gracefully and become visible in the browser.

Howdy Spencer! Whoa! Lot's of questions here. Let's see if we can sort this out. There's a lot of debate around this, and for the most part most SEOs consider the use of hashes okay for user experience, but mostly minor when it comes to influencing search results. Here's what we know. Google indexes the first anchor text in the HTML. This is not necessarily the same thing as the first anchor on the visible page, as the HTML/CSS can be arranged so that links appear above others on the page. That said, folks have experimented and found ways to get additional anchors indexed, including the use of hash tags. That said, what we don't know is how much weight/authority these links pass. It's generally believed (and I support this) that they probably don't pass as much value to the page as previous links. If you have a link in your navigation, and another in the text body further down in the HTML, Google will index the first anchor, but most likely not the 2nd in most circumstances. Does this mean Google doesn't pass any value through the second? There's a lot of debate about this (read the comments here:http://www.seomoz.org/blog/all-about-anchor-text-whiteboard-friday) I find it best not to micro-manage your links and simply keep the following in mind: If you want a link to pass as much value and authority as possible, place it in the body of the page. Certainly there's a case made for using named anchors (#). They're good for navigation and user experience, and we see search engines pick them up in search results, but the value gained by manipulating them for ranking purposes is likely negligible. "I've found (in here) a couple of folks mentioning that content after a hashtagged link isn't indexed." Hmm.... I've never heard of that, and it sounds fishy. Love to see any research that's been done. Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

It doesn't really matter what you're use, as long as you're consistent and get people to link the right version.

helps keep the non www version from getting indexed i believe even if you don't have the proper non www to www redirect in place.

I would consider asking yourself what the value of those extra product pages are to the user?  If your primary, properly optimized page provides the best user experience then I would definitely 301 redirect the old URL's. It's very likely that although those extra product pages are in the index they don't actually get traffic b/c they never turn up in the SERPs unless you are performing an advanced site: search. Redirect the traffic via 301, don't worry about telling Google anything, they will remove the old URL's once they read the 301.  If you have any external followed links to the old pages you may want to reach out to the webmasters to request they link to the new page before you do the 301. I highly doubt these old pages are dragging down your results for your properly optimized page but if they aren't providing any value or getting traffic then your time is better spent optimizing elsewhere. Best!

I'll echo the first 2 responses - don't hire a tele/email marketing "SEO company."  Google's webmaster guidelines should give you a good idea of what kind of questions you should be asking an SEO.  Check this out ... and ask the questions, if they're a real SEO they will appreciate that you care enough to ask..... Be very wary of companies that only talk about "links/link-building,"  and not on-site optimization.  I have a few clients who before hiring me, were paying SEO companies $500-$1000 a month for "link building" - and the only thing they have to show for it is a bunch of automated comment and article spam. - (these links are useless/harmful).... Good luck to you, you're in the right place to find a good upstanding SEO!

Hi Alan There are better ways to get people to your landing pages than this tactic. It's a terrible User Experience and as a visitor to your site if I clicked a link expecting an informative article only to be hijacked to sales page I'd bounce and probably never comeback. Is that really worth it?

Yes, headers are needed for SEO. I'd suggest reading up more on the various sections (page title, h1, h2, content, etc.) for on page optimization to better understand how a search engine uses that data. As for not showing it on a page, I don't understand why a header would ever be cloaked - if anything, Google could give you a smack down for having it but not showing it on a page since that's black hat. As for Wordpress, I don't think of it as an editor at all and see it as CMS. I like that it's open source because I can use plugins to create different functions. I'd suggest also reading up more on how the system works to help guide what plugins or hosts you may want to go with. Good luck.

Most SEOs these days don't believe that there is such a thing as a sandbox.  If these are new pages that are still not ranking well, then it may be that they need to attract some links.  Or it may be that they just need some time to reflect the link juice that they have. If these were pages that used to rank well but no longer rank then there are a few possibilities: 1. Honeymoon phase.  Sometimes pages get a honeymoon boost and then settle into a normal ranking. 2. Penguin.  If you were ranking on the power of an overoptimized link profile then you may have been affected by Penguin. 3. Competitors are beating you. There are other possibilities as well.

I (finally) see the confusion - a good reason for me to be careful in word choice. I didn't say "duplicate content" I said "duplicated" content.  What I meant was "repetition" not duplicated but I guess because we see "duplicate content" every day as SEOs I chose the wrong phrase.  What I meant was the duplication / repetition that can happen in the title, as in my example: "Brisbane SEOs and digital marketing services in Brisbane | SEO | Marketing" I have many times seen replaced title/description if keywords are repeated in the titles.  I have always cleared it up with noodp and noydir.  In this case I stated that I didn't think that was the real issue but it is one that causes problems. So the examples I copied in didn't have to do with "duplicate content" as it relates to rel=canonical but it has to do with "duplicated" title keywords. Obviously I wasn't clear enough in the original post and I'm glad to know that.  I still think my advice will work and for the reasons I stated, just with better phrasing.  I definitely didn't mean to be confusing so thanks for pointing it out. Hope that clears up the misunderstanding and thanks for helping me give better advice - appreciate it. ~Matt

Thanks so much, Donford. Hate it when you write something and it is erased! Nevertheless, your post is very helpful and I really appreciate it. I'll look into these items and report back. Thank you!

The ideal scenario would be to set the site up as a subfolder however they have a site which is based on shopify so we will be building a separate site/hosting on blog.domain.com. Unless there's a way of using sub-folder that has different hosting to the main site?

I would try to externalize a tremendous amount of your coding and comments within the code. If you can use internal links more effectively to direct your users to the interior pages within the site, also your content isn't organized in a themed website ( with silo structure reflective of the main topics). I would most certainly, review your on page coding for crawlibility for the spiders. Update your sitemap and organize your content into themes that are cross linking based on the main relevant topic and of course your keywords. I would also move your content up higher on the page, so it is clear that the text is answering the user query, not just retail website. Review your main competitors who have outranked you in the latest decline, my guess is that your rankings have dropped due to at least two updates from Google. Including the ever popular muffin top.

It really doesn't matter. Anchor text as a ranking factor is on it's way out as far as we can tell. I would call yourself whatever works best. If it makes sense to call your business Isle Paddle Boards, cool. But if you sell more than that, you might do something more broad. When you link, just make sure you're describing the page and why people might want to visit it. If the story is about paddle boards, you might link to your paddle boards page with "check out [Isle Paddle Boards]" with what is in the brackets as the anchor text. Make sense? Don't worry so much on what exact phrase to focus on. Does you page pertain to just stand up paddle boards? Or all paddle boards? Or are those the same thing? If they are the same (and I don't think so), then use the longer term.

Hi Gary, Great Question. I have made a video response with an answer for you. http://youtu.be/uLvuTjFkQMU In summary Don't 301 the page. You will lose the traffic for the .ie site. Instead, add a button to the end of the post offering more information on the UK site. Or if you are feeling fancy build a piece of javascript that detects if the user has been on the same page for more than 3 minutes then produce a popup offering more information on the UK site. Hope this helps uLvuTjFkQMU

Here's how to achieve what you need through an IIS URL Rewrite: <rewrite><rules><rule name="ForceLowercase" stopprocessing="false"><match url=".[A-Z]." ignorecase="false"><action type="Redirect" redirecttype="Permanent" url="{ToLower:{R:0}}"></action></match></rule></rules></rewrite> Translation: If the URL contains any uppercase letters, convert it to all lowercase, then continue processing other rules.  (You can name the rule whatever you want.) These rewrite rules are stored either in the ApplicationHost.config file or in Web.config files. More info and step-by step instructions: creating IIS URL Rewrites. Note: Compared to the [ISAPI_Rewrite] filters (httpd.ini), I've found that the IIS URL Rewrite (web.config) rules seem to match the syntax of Apache more often. As a result, it's easier to find RegEx expressions already written for what you need. It also helps to focus on debugging the actual code versus some strange IIS exception. Good luck!