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Any benefit works on the assumption that traffic is an influencing factor for search results.  Everything that I remember reading has told me that this is not the case - traffic is pretty much solely a by-product of increased rankings and not the reverse. Should I be wrong or should that change in the future, I think it's safe to assume that any 301 redirect would pass on most of the benefit. For the record, I think a shortened URL for advertising reasons (particularly in press) is a solid idea.

Hi Tom, I really appreciate your detailed answer. You give a lot of information here. Thanks. Taking into account the 3 main points you mention I would go with the Greeklish. I think I should provide explanations about the term Greeklish. The official language of Greece is modern Greek. Modern Greek has a specific alphabet and it is not the same as the latin alphabet. On the other hand when a Greek person write Greek words by using the latin alphabet, then that is called Greeklish (Greek + english). It is a quick and easy way to write mms, imessages without paying attention on the orthography. A URL in Greeklish is understandable by people in Greece => it can be considered as localised URL A URL in Greeklish can easily be shared with no particular technical implications. On the other hand the wikipedia articles use the encoded Greek Characters in the URL. Well, I think if the SEO benefit is not that big, I would go with the Greeklish solutions. I would be glad to have the feedback of other experts about that subject. Tom thank you very much! Regards, Lenia

If the site got hit in the search engines (I see a major drop in visibility for the site in Search Metrics June 21 and 28 2012), and the client has now moved to a new domain, why would you 301 the old pages to the new ones - don't you want to start with a clean slate, which is why you started a new site? If the 301 passes the penalty or not, why take the risk? Why not build your link profile the proper way this time? I also see a lot of over optimized anchor text in OSE and very little branded or generic - diversify your anchor text and focus on branded, unoptimized, and naked anchor text (www.claims...) in your link building efforts. If you're worried about visitors to the current domain, why not redirect using a 302 and then eventually let the domain die? Instead of switching domains, you can also do a link disavow after a thorough review of your links and then do a reconsideration request, and then start the link building again on the current domain, instead of switching to a new hyphenated domain that just looks like a spammier version of the original URL. I would do a thorough back link review and then disavow and reinclusion request instead of the new domain route. You can refer to this article for how to review your links from Search Engine Journal. That's my two cents - hope it helps Mark

Hi, Getting your URLs to be a little more "SEO friendly" (let's name it like that) is all about URL rewriting, which can be quite a headache if not implemented well. I have done this on a Wordpress website back a few years ago and kind of freaked out when I saw how many 404 errors I have got. The solution to avoid that is to implement URL rewriting and 301 redirects at the same time. My problem was that I had only done the URL rewriting, and have seen from Google Webmaster tools the erros, then I have started to search for a solution and I found that I need to redirect all my old URLs to the new destination. Then I have resubmitted a sitemap to Google and the problem was fixed. I hope you can learn from my experience. Good luck! Istvan

Hi Iain, First of all, there are 3 types of rich snippets markup formatting: Microdata Microformats RDFa Now Google says on their Rich Snippets page that they recommend the first one (Microdata) In your case, in order to have apply the rich snippets you will need to edit the templates of your CMS. For example if you want to add the review for a page you will mark-up the correct dynamic code that displays your reviews. I am not really familiar with webEdition, but if you need help, shoot me a private message and we'll figure it out together, ok? Greetings, Istvan btw: the example from Google's people rich snippet My name is Bob Smith, but people call me Smithy. Here is my home page: [www.example.com](http://www.example.com). I live in Albuquerque, NM and work as an engineer at ACME Corp. My friends: [Darryl](http://darryl-blog.example.com), [Edna](http://edna-blog.example.com) it should look like: ``` My name is Bob Smith, but people call me Smithy. Here is my homepage: [www.example.com](http://www.example.com). I live in Albuquerque, NM and work as an engineer at ACME Corp. My friends: [Darryl](http://darryl-blog.example.com), [Edna](http://edna-blog.example.com) ``` ``` Now your job, in order to have it with your CMS is to find the code that outputs this and mark-up the code itself with correct microdata information.

I'm guessing that in ShopSite 11, that's your affiliate tracking code? http://shopsite.com/popups/associate.html I found another site using ShopSite that uses this Robots.txt to block it: Robots.txt:  User-agent: *  Disallow: /dev/  Disallow: /dev18/  Disallow: /devupgraded/  Disallow: /staging/  Disallow: /rss/catalog/  Disallow: /skin  Disallow: /shopsite  Disallow: /?dir  Disallow: /?order  Disallow: /?mode  Disallow: /?limit  Disallow: /?price  Disallow: /?utm  Disallow: /?gdftrk  Disallow: /?gclid  Disallow: /*?SID

OK - so with that philosophy, should you keep h1 - h4 to the content areas, but leave h5 and h6 to places such as sidebars? I'm guessing in this way, main content remains the focal point semantically while the sidebar should score less importantly...

The 27th of September narrows your list of possibilites down to two likely ones.  The 27th was a Panda update and the 28th was EMD.  Using an EMD domain name is not going to get you penalized, but it's possible that you were previously getting a lot of ranking benefit from having the keyword in your domain and now you have lost that benefit. Panda affects sites with low quality.  Often there are issues with duplicate content (i.e. content that exists on other sites on the web) or thin content. I would guess Panda is your issue, but I'd need to dig in much further to say so for sure.  For example, this article appears on your site and also on http://www.homeinsights.org/house-painting-cost/.  Duplication like this can cause Panda to affect you.

Google almost never indexes hashtags, since they generally point to content on the same page. Typically, Google will just strip out the hashtag when evaluating the link. However, I have seen with Wikipedia that Google will sometimes show hashtags as sitelinks. Wikipedia is the only site that I know of that they do this for. Long story short, it should be fine to leave in the hashtags and Google should just ignore them.

That is easier said than done   We are working on pointing more signals to that page though.

I'd break down your footer link by taxonomies.  Motorcycles: parts, tires, etc. ATV's: parts, tires, etc.  Right now it's not really user friendly, and doesn't provide a lot of value.

You could also make use of robots.txt file to resolve it. Disallow: /*?sort= NOTE: Be very careful when blocking search engines. Test and test again!

We are in much the same position as Taysir is - we have quite a number of 404s that we would like to have de-indexed from our site. Were you talking about 404s that were de-indexed in 24-48 hours or is there another way to have pages de-indexed with Google?  We've been waiting 9 weeks as of now and none of them have "fallen" out.

I've looked everywhere, because I suspected the same thing.  There is nothing on the page, in the comments or in the code that would create this situation virtually across the board. It wouldn't be that big of a deal, but it's happening with tons of content. Unfortunately, with a news media website, we have to have time stamps, but even if we didn't, I would have no clue how Google is assigning the dates that they are.

Hey designquotes - It's been a while since you posted this question. If you got the answers you needed, could you mark as  "Good Answer" whichever answers you found most helpful and mark the overall question as answered? This will help other users who may come across the question in the future. Thanks! Paul

Hey Matthew - it's been a while since you posted your question. Did you get the answers you needed or can you give us further clarification of what you're still needing help with? If you did get the answers you needed, could you mark as  "Good Answer" whichever answers you found most helpful and mark the overall question as answered? This will help other users who may come across the question in the future. Thanks! Paul

I'm not an expert with Joomla by any means, but based on your original post you seem confidant as to what the description tag should be, but then its not showing up in the actual code, so I feel like something with your Joomla setup isn't working.  Or possibly you have two plugins that are conflicting with one another?