Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks. To clarify: I didn't want the content from the old site's homepage to go on the new site's home page, so I put it on a different page on the new site. I'd originally intended to 301 the old site's homepage to that new page, but forgot, and instead redirected the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage.

I think WMT is sometimes annoying about it, but it makes sense. If you're pointing the whole site to a different site, I guess it makes sense that they want to verify you control the domain, and not just that one specific subdomain. One other thing I would do is review your backlink profile - if there are some juicy links in there that you want to preserve and not lose some of their strength due to 301 depletion, I'd contact the webmasters and inform them of the change, asking them to update their links to the new URL to make sure you don't encounter any issues in the future.

What you described here is the same content on multiple subdomains. If you add no index, no follow, you'll prevent the other pages from being indexed and from passing link equity. Firstly, even if you would go this route, I wound't add the no follow rule - that just means you're losing any juice that passes to the page from links, not something you necessarily want to do. In this case, I'd recommend changing your canonical tag - the birmingham subdomain uses the canonical tag on itself, claiming that it should be credited with the content, when in truth, you said you want the credit flowing to the www version of the site. So you need to change your canonical tag on the location based subdomains to point to the www subdomain. So for http://birmingham.styleblueprint.com/food-and-entertaining/recipes/kale-salad-quick-healthy/, the canonical should be  rel="canonical" href="http://www.styleblueprint.com/food-and-entertaining/recipes/kale-salad-quick-healthy/" /> Hope this helps

Geoff is right, the H1 is for your pages main target, could be seen as keyword stuffing too.

Is there a way to redirect those old links?

The .htaccess file is in placing directing www to non www, so I don't see what else I could do with that.  I forgot to mention the website was recently overhauled by someone else, and they are having me help with SEO.  Not sure if that has anything to do with it.  It looks like the .htaccess should be reversed so the non www points to the www which has more value.  Someone else designed this site and they are having me do the SEO on it for them.

We have done this, finding areas of a wiki that includes our niche.  We link to a relevant article or resource.  Th

Nathan please see my response to this question in the Private Q&A section. In short, I don't think this has to do with Google's goof-up a couple weeks ago, or with some of the other shifts, but I do think you are in violation of some of their guidelines on a pretty massive scale, although unintentionally and with good reason. I'll go ahead and paste my answer below, but the Private version includes links and other information that could identify the site. Hello Nathan, There were some pretty major shifts on the 16th, 19th and 24th-26th so the time-frame raises a red flag. However, with the little information I have (basically your indexation count) I think you may have a problem that isn't related to any of the recent algorithm shifts. Assuming you are talking about ####.com, I show 462,000 indexed URLs from that domain. Nearly half a million URLs is quite a bit to index and you can imagine that Google might want to thin that out a bit and focus only on the ones that are important and original. If you have 460k + pages, but most of them are duplicate content or significantly duplicate content, and most of them have no external links, this would put you in danger of being affected by several different algorithms/filters/penalties put in place by Google to keep such pages from bloating their index and outranking what they think to be "better" content. That can be a hard pill to swallow because you know your content is good and people like what they find there. But let's look at this from the perspective of an impartial machine... The following EXACT phrase appears, word-for-word, on about 22,800 different pages, most of them from within your site: "PHRASED REMOVED FOR PUBLIC VIEWING" The following is typical of the "Related Terminology" section of your pages, which could be interpreted by Google as being keyword spam: "You may have searched any one of these terms to find this product: Keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, keyword4, keyword5, keyword6, keyword7, keyword8, so forth and so-on for a few dozen keywords". A lot of these pages, possibly most of them, have very little unique/exclusive content. Instead, they list out features and uses from a database. Because of this you have many thousands of pages all with the same potential pool of words, each choosing to show more or less the same words in various orders and combinations. Furthermore, it is obvious that the pages are generated by a machine. Looking at this example, a "better" page would be one that has an introduction telling the visitor what "Polybenzimidazole (PBI) is and what it's used for in paragraph form, in addition to the list of features and uses: http://www.###.com/###/ . I'm sure most of your users will know what PBI is for if they search the site for it, but remember we're dealing with machine algorithms designed to detect spamming attempts, such as article spinning, which uses pretty much the same technique of switching around the order of words to generate hundreds or thousands of "articles" from a single original. I wouldn't venture to provide specific advice on how to fix these issues without knowing more about your business. My suggestion is to look for a reputable outside SEO agency who can help you overcome these issues, which may involve removing a lot of pages from the index, allowing more content to be seen on each datasheet, or some other measures. Good luck!

It took over four months for authorship markup to work for our blog. It seems Google are rolling our rich snippet inclusion into the search results very gradually, and their could even be a domain queue based on authority - either way, I doubt the utilisation of the Google+ network will do you any harm at all whilst you're waiting.

Many websites have incorporated the necessary development that allows query parameters from their internal website search to be indexed by search engines - with the view of essentially driving more traffic - however untargeted it is likely to be - it also builds many thousands more indexed pages from their domain in the search engines. A common way of doing this is by monitoring incoming search term referral traffic and then adding a widget on page to contain these search queries linking to the same search query processed via their internal search, hence how so many of these pages can be indexed for a particular domain. It's very common with torrent / file sharing websites. You unfortunately can't control what methods another website is using but it sounds like there is more to it in the sense of what they have done if they are outranking for a completely unrelated term to their domain yet have identified that your domain is authoritative for this same terms. Without knowing the specifics, it's hard to elaborate further on this... Happy to look if you wanted PM domain/keyword.

You're welcome!

In this instance that is good news. I want the div to be clickable, but not claim the link juice. Thanks

My sample size is small (I am currently maintaining just four sites) but all of them include a large banner on top, which leaves 95% of text content below the fold. None of them have been penalized for this so far, and all of them rank well. As for the original question, such ratio does not seem to affect standings of the sites I've worked on. However, keep in mind that such heavily skewed page interface tends to look bad, affecting your customers' UX. I would try to keep your footer at most as large as the body of your smallest page.

Alan is right, it is rubbish!

Hey Linda, They most definitely do count as duplicate. I build several Joomla websites a month for clients and whilst you can use a rel="canonical" link such as suggested by Todd, I prefer to remove the issue by replacing the standard joomla .htaccess file content with the following content:- Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On prevents people from accessing anything with phpMyAdmin RewriteRule phpMyAdmin - [F] Remove index.php or index.htm/html from URL requests RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /(([^/]+/)*)index.(php|html?)\ HTTP/ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/administrator RewriteRule ^([^/]+/)*index.(html?|php)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L] force canonical www if request is for non-www or has port number etc RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www.example.com)?$ RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L] redirect 301 /home.html http://www.domain.com/ RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} mosConfig_[a-zA-Z_]{1,21}(=|%3D) [OR] RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} base64_encode[^(]([^)]) [OR] RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (<|%3C)([^s]s)+cript.(>|%3E) [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} GLOBALS(=|[|%[0-9A-Z]{0,2}) [OR] RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} _REQUEST(=|[|%[0-9A-Z]{0,2}) RewriteRule .* index.php [F] RewriteBase / RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/index.php RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/[^.]|.(php|html?|feed|pdf|raw))$ [NC] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . index.php [L] Before replacing your .htaccess code with the above make sure you take a back-up copy of the original code just in case. Replace www.domain.com with your domain. Hope this helps. Ade.

Unfortunately, they don't have GA setup (new client) which would definitely give greater insights. Stupid clarification but you mean URL address within the alt text? Thanks