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Agreed - the "canonical" shouldn't just be a tag - it should reflect the actual link structure of your site, or it's not going to be as effective. Adding the additional keywords to the URL could slightly boost the profile pages, but there's always some risk to making a massive change like that. See my post from last year: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/should-i-change-my-urls-for-seo

Unfortunately there is no way of guaranteeing that Google will always use your META Description, however there are steps that can be taken to help influence Google when it populates the description for search terms. Dr Pete wrote a great in depth post on this topic here - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-wont-google-use-my-meta-description Hope this helps!

I agree, Google is being even more vague than usual on this one. Funny that you mention the Journeyman link... I posted this question right before reading yours. I'll think you'll get a kick out of it. Same basic premise... WTF do we now? The answer is always the same though, in a couple of months we'll have enough research and analysis to have a good understanding of the update, at which point Google will change it again. Gotta love gettin paid to play a game

Thanks for all the great advice guys.  Our new url's will be keyword rich and seo friendly, our category urls will be much more seo friendly as our site we're moving off of only has numbers associated to those url's. If anyone has anything else to add, I'd be happy to listen.  This is a big move for us and a bit scary. Thanks!

Hmmm. Their situation is further complicated by a less than clean link profile (not counting the spam links). They have very few high quality links. Makes me think that a new domain is a possibility to consider.

Hey Robin- I agree with Nakul - no worry about the link juice not flowing.  If you have rel="nofollow" then the juice stops.  The neat thing is you can combine the two attribute values as long as you put a space between them like rel="external nofollow". Hope that helps! John

Hi Cyrus, Thank you for your reply. I have actually removed all bad links from my site ( believe me was not easy) and I have created couple of good reliable links by creating good content. My site actually moved for most of keywords from page 8 and 9 to 1 to 3 and I am very happy about that. After research I decided to actually create a second site advertising our lower end sites and also our print services. Thank you for any help

Hi there There are a few ways to do this, and it would depend on your goals.  Obviously you don't want two different domains with the exact same content so here are some options to consider : Apply correct use of cannonical tags so that search engines know which is the original source, and then put your link building efforts into the original Create and add unique content around the Bulgaria sites property content and apply Bulgaria specific on-page optimisation to them.  The only problem with this approach is that if these properties also feature on the main(buypropertyanywhere) site that you'd be competing against yourself. Redirect the bulgaria site to your main site and make sure that your site architecture is good and has bulgaria as it's own 'section'. Put all your seo efforts into just your main site. You've not given exact URL's which is fine - but if you were looking to rank the Bulgaria site on Bulgarian search engines and specifically for local searches there then the redirect option might be excluded from the above. Hope that made some sense

That assumes they have a fixed IP though doesn't it?

Thanks Mark, I have been researching this idea from Google, but it is only for Google News and not Google Web Search. Also, users would be able to jump the paywall by returning to Google News to search fro more links through to the site.

Hi Matthew, Excellent question, and one we should explore in more depth, research and write a blog post here at SEOmoz. But the short answer is: yes. I've seen a lot of evidence in the past year that low quality backlinks pass through 301 redirects, almost as powerful as if you linked those bad links directly to the new domain. We've seen more evidence of this lately, as Google cracks down harder on bad links, more webmasters are grumbling that that their 301s are hurting them. Of course, the best solution to any bad redirected backlinks is to stop the 301. I've seen sites recover after doing this and heard evidence from other webmasters of this working, at least to a degree, in some situations. Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

First of all, I would say you made the wise choice by removing the 301 from internetgamblingsites.net, especially if it had a shady backlink profile, as I've seen evidence of Google passing penalties through 301s. That said, I'm not sure how long it would take to recover after removing these links. I'd give it a couple weeks to a couple of months to be sure. Google may have to recrawl and reindex all those old pages that contained the bad links before it gives you credit for removing them. Here's another possibility: A few weeks ago Google deindexed several large link networks. Even if you didn't use link networks like BMR for your backlink profile, it could still affect you as a secondary effect if the folk who linked to you were hit. It's sorta like you once had rich friends, but now they are poor because they built shady backlinks, and now they can't pass any link juice to you. In the gambling niche, this is common these days. Regardless, seems like your one the right track. I'd let the dust settle for awhile before making any judgement. One way or another you'll need to work to build up more high quality links. And diversify your anchor text, as it appears like a very highly optimized profile: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?page=1&site=www.gamblingsites.co&sort=domains_linking_page&source=phrase&target=domain Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Kenny, So I have made the Bot crawl this form of url  http://183.2564.2864 and detected multiple errors. So are you saying that I shouldn't rely on what the crawlers has detected? should I then assign the dev team to provide me an actual dev url before sending them any recommendations to fix errors already detected by the bot? Thanks

Hi Just want to let you know. Had this problem resolved and now my website is showing among Top 10 in Google for my Area and Region. Before resolution I was number 10 in few cities and non existant in the rest. Thanks a lot.

Hi David, When did the drop in rankings take place? After the blog network deindexation? After the latest Panda release? After Penguin? From the way you've phrased your question, it sounds like you know the answer already. You have a lot of spammy content, lots of problematic links, and want to do things, as you phrased it, for a bit more longevity. It sounds to me it'll be more cost efficient to start from scratch, do it properly this time, building with long term goals and strategy regarding site design, content creation, and link building, than to clean up everything and work from there. Hope this helps, Mark

A few tips sitemap.xml - I'd create a sitemap - there are lots of free tools out there to do this for you server configuration - you should fix your Apache server's htaccess file to deal with the urls - you're showing capitals and lowercase letters in the URLs - you want to get rid of the capital letters and only use lowercase ones empty pages that can't be good for your site - here's one example- http://contractors.earthsaverequipment.com/index.php/Illinois/ - you don't actually have any contractors in illinois, so why have a blank page on the site? This isn't the only case of this This is just a few of the issues I picked up on. Hope it helps