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Thank you so very very much!!

The two results you're referring to, the ones with people's names and photos next to them, are blog posts where people have used the rel=author markup to link their blog to their Google+ profile. That can influence rankings. I don't think anyone is sure how much influence we're talking about; part of the problem is that the people adopting this new markup are probably already doing good basic SEO stuff, so correlation and causation can get mixed up. In any case, it's likely that this author markup will become more influential in the future, so adopting it now is a no-brainer.

I do not have enough specific experience with this to speak from an authoritative position on this topic. My experience is manly with the hReview ritch snippet. Hopefully someone else here has more knowledge than I and can help you fix these errors.

yeah i think contacting the linking sites would just be far too time consuming and take too long to impact the site. Its crazy how a expired domain can just clone a site and start ranking so well. MY site has some decent authority in the health sector but its been taken over by this one!

thanks, I'll give it a shot!

First question, it's personal preference. Just be sure you decide early on what you want to do, then stick with it. Changing it after the fact is where you're going to lose out a  bit. Second part, if you're using web publisher, look at the long-term strategy for URL structure before making the switch. ID's will probably still be necessary/recommended, but that's not to say you can't spruce them up with article titles and page numbers as well.

whether or not it's advisable for ranking purposes to noindex any page with mostly 'stock' content, and only allow Google to index hotel pages with unique descriptions? This is what I would do. In the past you could allow those pages open for indexing and google would simply ignore them.  Now you run the risk of hitting a Panada filter that will reduce the rankings for the rest of your site. Good luck in this niche.  Really really difficult.  You need either enormous site strength or lots of unique substantive content (which you are doing).

Thank you

First search engines index your website  and then shows the cache. Cache is actually a snapshot of the page which search engines have indexed. They actually want to show you the copy which they've in their index, so that you can verify and if found any problem then can correct it.

Rel canonical is definitely NOT the preferred way to handle this kind of situation, IMO, Zach. Best practice is to run the 301 redirect to give the Search Engines (and users!) the clearest message as to the Fully Qualified Domain. This isn't a matter of the 2 URLs needing to exist, which is when you use rel canonical. The second variation serves no possible useful purpose, so should be redirected in order to get rid of it altogether.( In my experience, rel canonical also doesn't seem to reliably pass page influence the way 301s do.) For example, by doing the redirect, the URL will always appear in the address bar as the www version, so if someone copies that address, they'll always end up using the canonical FQDN. That said, Richard, you can also use Google Webmaster Tools to tell the  Search Engines that you want your www version to be considered canonical. It's just one more way of signalling to them. Once this is working, you're going to want to be very careful to always use the FQDN yuorself - ie always write links using the full www.weddingdancelessons.co.uk, whether on your own site or when you're getting links back to yourself.

This may be a good case for a private question, as the SEOmoz staff and associates are under NDA and you can share a few more details.

Well if you think you have the means to undertake such a migration project then why not, would be a fantastic bit of experience and potentially a good earner.. Just be careful because it could be a big risk if you dont have the resource to do it properly.

Use: ErrorDocument 404 /404.html where 404.html is your error document page!  If the page does not exist then it should return a 404 status code and then automatically redirect to this page.

I tweaked the title tags and internal anchors to reflect the difference in content between the pages. They are about different things, they were just optimized for the same thing. Plus, I doubt either of them have any external links, so I don't ahve to worry about those anchors. I'm hoping this helps. If not, canonical is certainly something I'll take under consideration. Thanks!

Hi Alexandre, Like the heading says, it's actually a notice, not a warning. It's there to let you know to look at your code and make sure things are set up correctly, and that you're not pointing all of the canonical tags at the home page for example.

You should be using alt tags, not H1 tags. You should only have one H1 tag per page that describes what the page is about (ideally containing the keyword you are trying to rank for). You probably shouldn't be putting any text behind images as this may be treated as cloaking. If you really want to keep the text behind the images, wrap it in the <noscript>tags so that it is only visible when javascript is disabled.</p> <p>Other possible solutions is to overlay (caption style) images with your desired text in H2 tags.</p> <p>Cheers</p></noscript>

if you already haven't, make sure you look at adding a homepage canonical tag too

Hi Alex, Matt is absolutely right - engines ignore everything to the right of the hash (properly called a "named anchor" or "URL fragment"). They ignore fragments for the reason you just described.  Fragments have traditionally been used in web design to build "table of contents" navigation that drops a user down the page to a specific position on the page, whether a different section, or a specific user's comment, etc.  If a page has 10 sections with 10 corresponding fragments, obviously the engine just wants to index the root URL, rather than waste time and money indexing all the fragments, which would be duplicates of the root URL. Fragments can be very useful for visitors who want to link to a specific part of a long article, or directly to a comment they made. There is no problem whatsoever with using lots of fragments for in-page navigation.

Thanks for your response. I am already employing the rel=canonical tag, however I didnt realise I could use Google's Webmaster tools. Ensuring the sitemap is correct will also contribute to clustering the appended different queries as I understand. Yes I forgot the variable when typing the example url & query out! Thanks.