Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Looking at the screen shot I assume that you are using Google analytics custom campaign parameters. To resolve this issue I used the robots.txt file adding the following Disallow: /*?utm_ NOTE: Be very careful when blocking search engines. Test and test again!

I sent a request on Oct 14th and got a response on Oct 18th. I've been removing links around Aug. Responses whether denial or success seemed to range 1-2 weeks.

Hi Jose - I'd suggest reading http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/can-google-really-access-content-in-javascript-really which lays out what Google is picking up in javascript files. You might also want to try some of the tactics specifically designed to make JS content and hashbang URLs more accessible: http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/09/27/searchable-dynamic-content-with-ajax-crawling/ and http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/proposal-for-making-ajax-crawlable.html (Google's original post on the subject). Folks like Twitter and Rapgenius have been making use of these for a while now, and they can help to make that dynamic data directly indexable.

Dupe-content-wise, you should be fine. iFrames just make me itchy these days, and I've never thought they were good for users, but it shouldn't be a disaster for SEO. The biggest problem is probably just that you're not really getting any SEO value - it's really just direct traffic via a referring site. Granted, it's better than nothing, and I know from painful experience that sometimes you have to take what you can get in these situations.

My company site is built in Joomla. It is undergoing a few changes including updating to HTML 5 / CSS 3 and a complete redesign. When it is 100% complete and ready to launch, I will put the site forth for discussion on this very topic. I have always worked to ensure we use valid code and so forth, but I have not used Microsoft's IIS tool to check for violations. At Alan's suggestion, I will do so for this site. I contend a professionally developed Jooma / WordPress / Drupal / etc site can perform as well as a hand-coded site BUT 95%+ of CMS sites are not professionally developed in my experience. Just because a site owner hired a web developer to create the site does not mean it was professionally developed any more than hiring an SEO for consulting means you will receive professional results. This is my take on the topic. I am sure there are countering views.

We currently have footer content contained in a single php include file and is included in every page and contains the following: Most recent 3 tweets from our twitter feed Snippets of our 3 most recent blogs posts navigation links to our main pages (essentially the same as our main navigation in the header) Is this bad practice for footer content?

Hi Jaco, It sounds to me like you may be dealing with duplicate listings, if there is no place to enter the postcard code you received. If you do a phone number lookup at maps.google.com, to do you see more than one entry for the business in question? Look up any previous phone numbers you know of, too, and you can also look up the exact address and see what comes up. If you can't figure this out, I highly recommend that you do start at thread at the Google and Your Business Forum (http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/business) where you can get direct technical help from a Google employee or TC on this. They may well recommend that you start a troubleshooter ticket. Sounds to me like you may have run into either a complex problem with duplicates...though there is a slight chance you've encountered a bug. Google's staff and volunteers will have the ability to verify this by looking under the hood, if you can get a response to your thread.

Exactly. And, the technical build of the site can help reduce duplicate content issues, even if there international SEO for the same language (think: US English vs UK English). Here's some great articles on this:http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33358/9-Ways-to-Completely-Sabotage-Your-Global-SEO-Strategy.aspx,  http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust, http://searchengineland.com/11-considerations-for-international-seo-117798

Well, based on the following post it seems like that is correct: Quote: When you look at Google's cache of a page (for instance, by using the cache: operator or clicking the Cached link under a URL in the search results), you can see the date that Googlebot retrieved that page. Previously, the date we listed for the page's cache was the date that we last successfully fetched the content of the page. This meant that even if we visited a page very recently, the cache date might be quite a bit older if the page hadn't changed since the previous visit. This made it difficult for webmasters to use the cache date we display to determine Googlebot's most recent visit. Consider the following example: Googlebot crawls a page on April 12, 2006. Our cached version of that page notes that "This is G o o g l e's cache of http://www.example.com/ as retrieved on April 12, 2006 20:02:06 GMT." Periodically, Googlebot checks to see if that page has changed, and each time, receives a Not-Modified response. For instance, on August 27, 2006, Googlebot checks the page, receives a Not-Modified response, and therefore, doesn't download the contents of the page. On August 28, 2006, our cached version of the page still shows the April 12, 2006 date -- the date we last downloaded the page's contents, even though Googlebot last visited the day before. You can find more information about this here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.no/2006/09/better-details-about-when-googlebot.html

Great answers guys, I think my mind is now straight and how to move forward, not just with our own strategy but our client strategies as well

Just click on the 404 links in Google Webmaster tools, and then find pages that has link back to 404 pages. Get those links removed or fix the issue and you are done. And not sure what you mean by "google click rate" .. talking about adsense.

Jinx! You owe me a diet coke.