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The timestamp is totally up to you if you think your URL:s will look better without them. However Google tends to give pages with clear indications of when the information was published a little boosts. And they do mention that freshness is key for content. So the timestamp is important but I'm guessing that you'll have a timestamp in the article with the standard WP config anyhow so it's really not that essential in the URL.  But If you have many articles it can be good to have a time indicator in them, if only for your own use. To give yo a better example of how the permalink settings could look in WP: /%category%/%postname%/ If you do it this way you won't have a timestamp in the URL. * Remember that WP will use only one category in the permalinks so I reccomend you to only have one category for the URL. Both way works, just choose one and remember that you need to stick to the one you choose so that the inbound links don't loose effect. best, G

Like I thought, you need to buy another certificate for https://www as it is considered another domain in modern browsers. Thanks to all for responses

Great to get this feedback. It gives me food for thought. That there are differing views actually makes me feel a bit easier about things as it shows that it isn't necessarily clear cut. The advertising content is clearly segmented, so potentially I could test it out on a defined area.

I actually find NOINDEX, FOLLOW a bit easier to implement and very effective in most cases. If you use rel-canonical, Google would prefer that you canonical to a "View All" version of the page (not to page 1 of search results). Practically, though, either will work. I've also had decent luck with rel=prev/next, although implementation is very tricky. One other problem is that Bing doesn't honor it. This subject can get very tricky, and no one (even Google's own reps) seem to have the one "right" answer. I find, in practice, that it depends a lot on the site and scope. Adam Audette has an article that shows just how complex pagination can get: http://searchengineland.com/five-step-strategy-for-solving-seo-pagination-problems-95494

Are you securing a lead-gen form? One thing to test first - have you done an A/B test of the in-page form vs. a large call-to-action button? I've seen testing go both ways. Sometimes, the in-page form drives more leads, but sometimes a clear call-to-action to a separate form is better (really seems to depend on the form and the industry). If the call-to-action works just as well, it would be much easier to secure the stand-along form than your home-page. Going secure full-site would help solve some problems, although you do need full-site 301-redirects then, and you've got to make sure your servers can handle it (https: needs additional overhead). It's really tough to tell without knowing the nature/scope of the site. I'd be happy to close the private question, but if you want to dive into details there, it might not be a bad idea. Seeing the site would really help, since this is a tricky issue.

Got it - saw your other question. This is definitely a bit tricky.

You can write canonical tags dynamically, but you need to canonical to the product specific page. Obviously, don't canonical every details.php page down to one. It could look something like this: $prodDesc = "games-playstation-vita"; $prodCode = "B0054QAS"; $prodURL = "http://www.mydomain.com/".prodDesc."/".prodCode; ?> I assume that the product description and code are generated from a database, so they should be available somehow to the header.

Awesome..thanks for the actionable items, I'll jump into them & see what I can find. Thanks!

Unless you're mega-popular (like Amazon, Wal-Mart, etc), I would expect things like this from time to time. I tend to find that precipitous drops are due to a shift in algorithms. You might be going "well duh", but it's important to note that an algorithm change can cause shifts like this on a temporary basis while either the indexation process catches up or Google evaluates a set of changes (internally or by using quality evaluators). My bet is it's the latter since Google announced they rolled out a lot of new changes (which is not something Google does on a regular basis). That, to me, screams "testing" (remember that Panda did the same thing to a lot of sites about 1 year ago). Eventually the SERPs return to "normal". That having been said, are you sitting still? If so, that's not going to help you in the long run. Add links and content. Keep up with your competitors. Remember, they want to sell your products as much as you do.

School boy error! We've found the problem... Turns out there was a div tag that had not been closed which didn't agree with Google's webcache!! Note to anyone that has the same problem - validate your HTML!

Ian Meta refreshes should never be replaced with 301's, they are actual much worse than a 302 redirect. There are a few redirects you can find - http://www.aowaa.com/5-wordpress-301-redirect-plugin/ and http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-301-redirects/. The disadvantage I find with using plugins is that they extremely slow down your site. For doing 301 redirects it's entirely up to the server your site is hosted on.

Bucky Apologize, misread your first question. I do not know for a fact, but the original webmaster tools article says "site speed" in several places (not "page" speed) so I would assume the average speed of the entire site. -Dan

Google has been doing this for many sites. I haven't seen mention of site owners being able to change or disable them doing this.

Hi Tyler, did Alan's response answer your question, or are you still looking for some more help?

We had offers from a quite a few well reputed News sources to syndicate our content but we declined those for exactly this reason. These media sites are usually of very high authority and there is nothing much you can do about as of now to prove that you are the original source of the content as Google unfortunately still allows higher authority sites to outrank the original provider. I believe Google Authorship will reduce this issue to a good extent but right now if you don't want them to outrank you, just don't let them syndicate.

Hey Juan, I'm afraid there's no easy solution to this one. Google only allows you to submit one video per URL in the sitemap, which makes it tricky for anyone who has a dedicated video page on their site. Think of it as like traditional keyword targeting - you can't try and target the hundreds of keywords with the same page content and simply having an index of videos shouldn't be able to change this. My suggestion would be to create new pages for each of your videos - targeting all on-page elements to the relevant keywords for the videos while providing some supporting text and images. Use these pages to define the URL element in your video sitemap and then just submit the indexed page with a single video element. You should then be able to get video results for all the relevant terms, albeit not to a single page. If you really need users to land on your video index page, then you could think about adding rel=canonical to all the individual pages, but i'm not sure how this would play out regarding video results. Perhaps better would be just to ensure they can access the video index page from the landing pages using good internal linking.

I'm not sure why you wouldn't want to send individual pages to the corresponding new ones on the new site. But a really crude way to just point an entire old domain at a new one is to use "domain forwarding" - you'll set this up with whoever you manage the domain name with. Explanation from GoDaddy

Hi Ryan, I believe this was a bug we had in the crawler that's fixed now. If you're still seeing this, please send a note to help@seomoz.org and they'll get it straightened out for you.