Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Just real quick... You have a few validation errors: html css You could use placing your keywords onsite as anchor text, and in image alt text. Also you should style your text BOLD and Italic with html tags: and , instead of with css how you currently have it: You could use a keyword rich tag. Also the site ranking #1 has about 70,000 more followed links to their site than you do yours. Check out this post on a clever way to insert more onsite text when hovered over images. Hope that Helps!

Thinking it through I think that your ScrantonAutoGlass.com and ClevelandRealEstate.com suggestions are bad advice. I appreciate your opinion though! For a local business the disadvantages from this type of name outweigh  the one advantage you gain by having a better chance of ranking for popular search term. IMO. This discussion has helped me think it through. Thanks all Neil

Hey There 1. This depends on how the site might grow. Will it always only list DJ's? In other words that's the core "topic" of the site? Will you ever create a directory of well known gear, MCs, venues, album etc? If the content is always going to be centered around "DJs" than I say NO subdirectory. If it may grow at somepoint - you should be mindful of that, but honestly I don't see this being the case so I' still say no subdirectory. 2. Seeing as I'd recommend not using a directory, this answer is set Going off of this - all DJs are artists, but not all artists are DJs. (In fact not all "artists" are really musicians - they could be painters). So I wouldn't go with artists. All DJs a musicians but not all musicians are DJs - so I still think something like djz.com/musicians/skrillex doesn't make sense. 3. See above 4. 301 Redirects are fine. You just don't want "chains" of redirects - for example; DON'T do this; Page A -> Page B -> Page C DO this; Page A -> Page C Page B -> Page C - So to sum up - it wouldn't be a huge detriment to leave it just how it is - but to make it perfect, you could put all the DJs at the root level djz.com/skrillex using 301 redirects. Hope that helps! -Dan PS - Side note: HUGE music / DJ / electronica / hip-hop fan Nice site!

If you have 404 errors listed on your report it is because somewhere on your page is a link to a url that is either mal-written or no longer exists. You can export the data from your report or run a manual crawl using the research tools and the 404 error will be listed along with the referrer (the page the broken link is on). Go to that page and either correct or remove the link.

Thanks doford again for your answer, yes that makes sense. I wonder if i can pick your brains on this. I did make another post here on this.. http://www.seomoz.org/q/weird-404-error you can remove mywebsite.com and replace it with mine if that helps? Regards

Hi GMan, Thanks for your feedback. I have since checked analytics and organic traffic for that keyword mentioned has not decreased drastically. In fact, it has highlighted that the landing page for that keyword needs quite a lot of attention. Overall, organic traffic has fallen, but only slightly, andisn't a cause for concern. Probably a storm in a teacup! Thanks, Stuart

thanks for that. what i want is for google to see that the site is getting refreshed with new content and for people to see all the new articles instead of not knowing where to look

Thanks for the response. However, second question: I've not received an unnatural links warning in Google Webmaster Tools. Should I still clean up links I don't like the look of with Link Disavow? Or should I go with Google and do nothing?

Thanks Gman! You're exactly right. We should never be linking to these pages in the first place and as you say serving up the same message if its the regular (viewed if logged in as admin) or error one (everyone else!). Many thanks and have a great weekend.

Honestly.  Being really honest here. I would find a different industry for my focus. Your target is really really really really tough.  You have arrived late to this fight and your competitors are fierce, armed to the teeth, occupy ALL of the highest ground and have spent $x00,000 or more to acquire their positions.  Lots of them cheat too. The only way that I would enter this niche is if I was Mr Mortgage, had a really big company with very deep resources behind me and I was able to service all of the clients myself.  This ground will be very expensive to attack if you expect to be even marginally competitive. My money says that you will get your ass kicked.  I think this is a very safe bet.

Thank You for the Links !  Mine Increased PA  3pt and DA 3 pt on Dec 2012, recently noticed my PA is decreased by 1pt. I am confused about the C-Blocks ? in The OSE, Internal inbound links internal Links ? the tip they show me - can't understand ! How to increase the C-blocks links to my domain, i have seen some blogs has large number of c-blocks - while Comparing them in OSE. Mine is a design blog !

I think it can get pretty complicated, but a couple of observations: (1) In my experience, NOINDEX does work - indexation is what Google cares about primarily. Eventually, you do need to trim the crawl paths, XML sitemaps, etc., but often it's best to wait until the content is de-indexed. (2) From an SEO perspective (temporarily ignoring Panda), a 301 consolidates link juice - so, if a page has incoming links or traffic, that's generally the best way to go. If the page really has no value at all for search, either a 404 or NOINDEX should be ok (strictly from an SEO perspective). If the page is part of a path, then NOINDEX,FOLLOW could preserve the flow of link juice, whereas a 404 might cut it off (not to that page, but to the rest of the site and deeper pages). (3) From a user perspective, 301, 404, and NOINDEX are very different. A 301 is a good alternative to pass someone to a more relevant or more current page (and replace an expired one), for example. If the page really has no value at all, then I think a 404 is better than NOINDEX, just in principle. A NOINDEX leaves the page lingering around, and sometimes it's better to trim your content completely. So, the trick is balancing (2) and (3), and that's often not a one-sized fits all solution. In other words, some groups of pages may have different needs than others.

From my experiences and from the case studies I've read, schema.org generally helps with rankings. If it's a products site, then there should be no harm in using product specific semantic markup. Rich snippets such as review ratings can also increase CTR. You're not going to fool Google into thinking a product site is a news site. If you want to compete on news, then create a separate section of the site that is news focused.

I'd keep the canonicals in place. Always double-check using multiple sources when you have the ability to do so. SEOMoz crawls and error reporting are great but there are the occasional hiccups. When I logged in and saw that I had something to the effect of 1900 new duplicate content errors showing up, I freaked out too and got worried something went horribly wrong. I looked over a random sampling of canonicals, checked that they were implemented correctly, checked with my web team to see if they made any big changes without letting me know, looked at Webmaster Tools to see what it said, and tried to find answers here in the Q&A as well.. Then I was pointed to this post on the blog http://www.seomoz.org/blog/visualizing-duplicate-web-pages.