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A subdirectory and a subfolder are the same thing. The example you gave is a subdomain and subfolder/subdirectory.

For my sites I prefer to use user-friendly URLS so they look nice and pretty when a searcher sees them on the Google results. To keep my WordPress installs nice and fast I use a plugin called W3 Total Cache. Any time the server doesn't have to hit the database it will be much faster -this plugin helps with that. I also use another plugin called CSprites (or something like that) to put all images into a sprite file. This combination, plus a dedicated server, keeps my sites serving very fast even with some dynamic widgets on the page.

Yes, I didn't perceive anyone was talking about text and background the same color. You are right, obviously that would be complete ButterScotch.

Thanks. That's exactly what I have told them so I'm glad we agree

As far as the search engines are concerned, the URLs are nice and clean with relevant keywords, but if a user browses the site in IE then the URLs do not maintain their double byte structure and instead convert to ugly URLs like this: mydomain.com/hk/hotels/asia-pacific/-中國-重慶-579-重慶-Sofitel-2-1-晚優惠-連早餐-1025557/

I've seen exactly the same thing and have assumed that this is down to the SEOMoz crawler not being able to pick up the settings in Webmaster Tools. Have you noticed an improvement in your Webmaster tools reports? I don't know if there is anything you can do at this stage, regardless of whether you're looking at SEOMoz or WMT. I wouldn't be too concerned about it if you have correctly set parameter handling and backed that up with some canonical tags if appropriate. Very often, these alerts are meant to flag something for you to check with a human eye, but this and all of the above is my interpretation of what you are describing from my own experience so I guess you need to wait for A Mozzer to reply about the intricacies of what their crawler is telling you.

Thanks for the HTTP status code analogy.  The comment adds the perspective I need to explain this to my technical manager.

Your site is still indexed, I would suggest that perhaps Google has devalued some of your links. I would have a look at the top 20 or so sites that link the most traffic to you and check that their authority is still recognised. For more information on penalties etc have a look at webmaster guidelines

There are several variables that go into this depending on how you call the interstitial, etc. It'd probably be best to use javascript or some other user based trigger as that would be ignored by a spider.  I.e. try to do it for people, but keep it out of the way of the search engines.

Hi thanks for the input, my only concern with doing this would be increasing load times, I think its a case of one optimisation tactic vs. another. Perhaps something like only loading the product images of the products below the fold would help the loading time issue but this then creates issues of its own!

This question still remains unanswered, why did it get marked answered?

Hey SeoStallion, thank you very much for taking your time to answer our call for aid. The issue has not been solved unfortunately, and we're seeing a massive decrease in organic visits. I hope you can shed some more light on our issue the domain www.goudengids.be doesn't seem suspended as many pages are still indexed, but they won't rank. At this moment we kind of rule out the panda update, as our french-speaking domain www.pagesdor.be has been ranking terrificaly and has not seen a drop in rankings nor visits despite being a copy (not entirely), but in a different language of course. So have you witnessed any case where an adwords account was suspended due to bridge page policy, and that this impacted the rankings on your SERPS? Thank you for your time, SEOStallion, Nikolaas

Good advice!  Very timely considering I just asked a question about expired domains as well!

Some definitely are misspellings, others are just variants.  The vast majority come from public forums where spelling is often an issue (or morons typing shorthand like they do on their mobile devices).  Since google clearly recognizes the properly spelled keyword and then also relates the misspelled variants, I wondered if it was worth the time to write code to fix these if google already recognized them as being the same as the properly spelled version.

Was a bit sarcastic with my answer but yeah the site is added to WMT and nothing funky to discover that explains the penalty.

Are you absolutely sure?  There was a wave of Panda that hit non-US sites on the week of April 11th (or thereabouts).  Does that coincide with your drop?

Is there any equivalent SEO add-on for phpBB3 that people here have used and liked? A quick search shows quite a few out there, some with extremely complex installation instructions, so it'd be great to learn what you guys out there have found to work.