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thank you for the responses. i'll start with reducing the number of instances of marriage. bounce rate is 40 to 45% which seems OK to me.

I think you're certainly looking at a duplication issue here. Bearing in mind I don't know how your site generates pages, there's a couple of things you could do.  First of all, I can see that you have a rel=canonical system in place, which is a good start.  One option would be to choose the one version of the URL you'd wish to prioritise and then change the canonical on the other version to point to that page.  For example, you might want to change the canonical link on -> http://www.pakwheels.com/used-cars/search/-/mk_Toyota/md_Corolla/ to <rel="canonical" href:"<span="">http://www.pakwheels.com/used-cars/search/-/mk_Toyota/md_Corolla/"></rel="canonical"> Alternatively, and what I'd recommend, would be to 301 redirect the URLs to your preferred address, as the pages are serving no extra purpose for the user.  Implementing a 301 will stop Google from crawling those pages and therefore flagging up any duplicate content issue.

"I would have thought our home page would have at least outranked an internal page." A site's home page is designed to pull in traffic for those who want the general idea of the company / website, while the inner pages offer more optimized content. For example, when I search Google.com for "auto insurance", the first result is http://www.allstate.com/auto-insurance.aspx rather then the allstate.com home page. Ideally, each page targets a single keyword. Your site is not based on a brand but rather keywords. The keywords you have chosen are "passports and visas". That is a particular keyword phrase. A quick glance at your home page shows it is not optimized. A few points: 1. Your domain name is "passports and visas" but you are trying to rank the home page for "expedite us passport". If you were trying to rank your home page as #1 for "expedite us passport" with a keyword strategy, you would want expediteuspassport.com. To be clear, I am not recommending that approach but rather following the approach you have chosen to its logical conclusion. 2. If you wish your home page to rank high for "expedite us passport" then your ideal title would be along the lines of "Expedite US Passport". Instead you have a title of "Expedite US Passport Service & Travel Visa Service" 3. You mentioned one of your inner pages outranks the home page for the term. Well, the inner page title is "Expedite Passport Service : Fast New Passport Renewal". The breadcrumbs show the page as "Expedite US Passport Services". You are cannibalizing your own SEO by having multiple pages compete against each other for similar terms. In summary, you either need to invest some time learning SEO or hire a professional. If this is a site you are starting and are on a limited budget, you likely have more time then money in which case you can start with the Beginner's Guide to SEO. If this is an established business then I would recommend seeking professional assistance.

It should be fine - your site is built in wordpress, and you can just change your wordpress setting to show as www. instead of without the www - make sure your site is configured to 301 redirect to the www version, and you should be fine as far as the search engines are concerned.

As Darin says, I wouldn't worry too much about notices.

I'd tend to agree with Dawn - it's a balancing act. I wrote about it a bit back: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many As for named anchors, though, they should be fine. Google should treat them all as links to "page.html" (as long as they're true named anchors and not AJAX) and basically ignore the 2nd, 3rd, etc. link. They may not even be crawled (I'm not 100% sure on that), but they shouldn't dilute your internal link juice.

I totally agree with XNUMERIK.  I had I site I took over after a "black hat" SEO was working on it and we dropped from #8 in Google to #212 after all my corrects.  We're number #1 now for that same keyword within 3 months. There is no "Data" to back up what I'm about to say, but it has worked nearly 100% of the time for me. Here is what I think happens: I corrected the technical stuff first (on-page) (site structure, internal linking and things like that) The drop occurred when Google Crawled my site before I had a chance clean up all the backlinks, 301s coming into the site. So, naturally I dropped because I basically blew my page authority. Once I had a good fix on all the off-page corrections to match the on-page stuff, I fetched as Google (in Google's Webmaster Tools) and submitted all linked pages. (I only recommend doing this when you've had major changes like you've done) It usually takes 4 to 5 crawls and I'm right back up where I was and usually higher then before. It doesn't take much longer with new links to the pages to rank it faster, especially if there is quality on-page SEO done.

Google bot definitely won't ding you for duplicate content based upon you sidebar, header, and footer links. I've managed several ecommerce sites and have never had this problem. However, it may still ding you for duplicate content if you have several matching pages with you main column being the same.

Hi Matthew, thanks very much for your reply.  I wish I knew where some of the bad backlinks came from - I have hired a couple of seo companies over the past 10 years but thought they were highly reputable.  In terms of the dropped links over the last year, this was done after the problems with Google started.  We had hundreds of links coming from two sources - our search provider who was saving search pages with our header, etc. and our hosting site where we store our engraving files, etc.  I was actually pretty sure these were causing the problem, because there were over a thousand links from these two locations.  I thought they might have viewed them as spam even though they were not, but removing them didn't seem to do anything. Out of curiosilty, how were you able to see the change in links - is there a sw program that you recommend? In terms of the new backlinks to the site, I "panicked" and started adding more (at the recommendation of someone on this site!) and hired network solutions to add us to more directories.  I stopped the service last month.  I also have been writing a bunch of articles and press releases. Is there something that can help tell me which backlinks are "bad"? Thanks again!

You can use 301s or canonicals even if it's driven by one template. You'll have to set up the 301 rules based ont he URLs themselves or create dynamic caonical tags in the code. if the CMS can drive multple URLs, it can drive multiple canonicals. If you can't sort that out in the code, you can't use NOINDEX either. You'd end up no-indexing every version. Your other best bet may be to ignore the ID= parameter in Google Webmaster Tools. Personally, I consider that the worst of the three options, but it is the easiest and it should help a bit.

It's certainly true that EMDs can still have an impact (it's declining, but they still matter), but it's rare for a brand new domain that's redirected to rank well, because there's nothing to redirect. You can't redirect the name itself, just the strength of the link profile. I suspect they may be doing something a bit more elaborate behind the scenes. They could be redirecting older, more powerful sites, or they could have a link network set up, as Matthew said. Long-term, though, it will eventually burn out. It's frustrating, because these tactics can work for a while, but Google is definitely taking a dimmer view of them over time, and it's a risky play.

Sent you a PM

You are most welcome! Good luck to you

I'm ashamed to say that accidentally I had a large number of 302 redirects on pages on one of my sites for a while and inadvertently missed them.  Once I spotted them I changed them to 301's and the impact was significant for rankings.  From experience, I would definitely recommend them.  It's best practice and if there is any link equity to be had, it's easy pickings for your client.

Hi BWRic, Sorry for getting back to you so late, the problem seemed to be resolved but the website is having troubles again, anyway, thanks a lot for your help and advice. Best regards, Daniel.

Howdy You'll need to block the SEOMoz crawler in your robots.txt file.  Edit the file and insert this bit of code: User-Agent: rogerbot Allow: / Disallow: /forum/ If that doesn't work, you might want to add a Wildcard too, making it: Disallow: *****/forum/ If you're not too sure about editing the robots.txt file, then it might be an idea to check the SEOMoz guide: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt - if you're really unsure, it's best to get someone else to do it for you, as you don't want to block all of your site to all of the crawlers Hope this helps

ahh, I see.  I think there can be cases where it's valuable to pull in a feed.  Perhaps an index of relevant headlines around a topic, or maybe headlines from a users blog posts.  I wouldn't use it as the primary basis of an SEO strategy though. Also, one tip if you're planning on doing something like this.  It's much better to cache the results of a feed on your server, rather than pulling in a live RSS feed every time a user loads a page.  Given the value that Google places on page speed loading, you would probably have a greater negative impact on page load speed by adding RSS feeds to your site, unless you have a cache system in place.

Thanks for the help Steve! Just to be clear, the site we are running is a marketplace site, so we have thousands of vendors selling their products on our site. Each vendor has a Profile page and we are soon to launch a premium store-front that is white label. Many of these vendors will want to point a custom url to their premium store-front and we are trying to get an understanding of how we should instruct them point the url in a way that will give the main marketplace site the seo juice. Thanks!