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Thank you Amelia

As far as "search-engine-spider-stoppers" does this also go for "%" in on-page copy?

Many thanks Andy.

If you prospects are querying Google for a certain term, Google wants to display relevant information to the best of their ability. If these terms are longtails, finding a relevant page may be difficult for them. So creating optimized & valuable landing pages that focus on the user experience is GOOD. Creating this type of content can be difficult and resource intensive. So, I was pointing out, you can look for clusters of contextually related keywords and create landing page for those clusters. A content farm (is usually defined) as sites that focus on content that they can monetize and typically written strictly for search engines and not visitors. Also, many of them "repurpose" content is from other sources. Since much of the content is not unique/valuable, typically will get dinged.

Hi Dom, Here is my opinion for your query: You can have 2 separate landing pages for your organic & paid visitors (visitors from your paid marketing efforts like AdWords). For your paid marketing, you should create a page where you can accommodate both important aspects- Content & Functionality on the same page. Content is equally important even if you are using landing page for paid ads. A perfect combination of both can give you better quality score, higher rank at low cost & more conversions. Here, I am not suggesting you to write big paragraph on your landing page but you can just highlight very important aspects which can compel the visitors to take action. I would advice you to write little content with catchy headlines along with functionality. A modification in page layout should work here. For your organic visitors, you can make your landing pages content-centric to make it more informative from search engines & users point of view and then can lead them to the main functionality page via creating a button as suggested by OlegKorneitchouk. Content will help SEs to find you and help visitors to understand more about your services and then take necessary action. Please avoid to push "Call to Action" below the page as many a times visitors don't want to read too many content and they can leave the site without taking any action. One more suggestion: I noticed that you have provides Login button on the top right on http://www.rentcollegepads.com/marquette/search. I would suggest you to make it Sigh In Button coz there are chances when visitors not member of your site already. Hope this will help.

If it were me and my client, unless it was a huge monetary purchase, I would just redirect it to the current domain. The reason being is that you can 301 redirect everything and the link juice is suppose to stay very close to the same; but why would you? Sure it might be easier for people type in the browser. But people already know the name more than likely. What I would do is redirect the new domain to the current domain. Then I would use the new domain in print advertising. That way you can really monitor how many people are coming from the print advertising (if the company even uses it). But from everything I have learned when you change domains and 301 everything the traffic tanks for about a month or two. If this is ok, then it might be viable to switch.

I haven't worked in that vertical so I'm not entirely sure what triggers these particular snippets. But here's a little more from Google about the subject. I managed to get them to show up by searching 'ticketmaster events'. Though the results were definitely skewed toward my location. At any rate, look at how Ticketmaster marks up their pages. View the src, hit ctrl+f (if you're using Chrome - I don't use any other browser, unless I'm doing some cross browser tests.) and enter 'itemprop'. That will take you directly to the markup. Seriously, if you don't do this - you're missing out.

Correct, thanks for that correction. I do not think this would be considered blackhat.

Gotcha - so are you all set for now? FYI, Google will re-crawl 404s in their index even if they are no longer linked to.

Could you use Mozscape to check for links to the three sites from the 50 domains? E.g. you could look at who links to three sites and filter out your fifty?: http://moz.com/products/api/pricing Otherwise, you could run multiple Xenu reports and leave them ticking over?

Thanks for the suggestions!! I'll keep you updated.

Seems to me if the posts were valuable enough to link to, maybe you shouldn't be getting rid of them. You should noindex or redirect them instead. It's probably best to create a list and decide on a case-by-case basis what you want to do with them. I'd customize my 404 page to explain that a site cleanup was done on XYZ date and if you (a visitor) are here because you can't find the post you were looking for, I recommend ...  and point them to your human readable sitemap or the main blog page. Then I'd go thru the post inventory and redirect the pages with links and/or social mentions to the closest related page or main blog page. The other ones I'd noindex. Any you miss will land on the 404 page and understand what has happened.

That's what i expected to hear. Thank you very much

Bump

I agree with alecfwilson, especially the part about superfluous directories. One thing I'd add, since it's probably a wash whether you use "products" or "shop". See if either word gets used in searches for the products your selling. This won't be the case in everything you sell online, but sometimes the words "product, shop, store" get used in the searches. If everything else is equal, I'd pick the url structure that includes the words most used in searches ... ONLY if you can also do that while maintaining a natural, semantic, streamlined url path. B1Xn2Tt.png

In most carts they aren't an actual add to cart per se. They are link to the product that uses ajax or a query string to add the product to the cart. So basically if people enter in through that link they will have the product automatically added to their cart. I think most people see that as bad e-commerce practice. Plus it really would make it hard to do any evaluation on abandonment.

Duplicate content isn't that big of a deal for ecommerce sites, especially the kind you're talking about. Backlinks are likely why the pages rank so poorly.

In my experience the smaller niche directories are a little different to those that are very large, generic and spammy which any Tom, Dick and Harry can feature on. As it focuses a bit more on the manufacturing industry It will most likely be ok and in essence actually probabaly provide a bit of a benefit due to its relevancy. If it is a paid for directory the links should really be no followed to avoid any penalties, I would also try not to use directories for link value but more for brand awareness and driving relevant traffic. It is the aforementioned larger none niche specific directories I would certainly steer well clear of. Hope that makes sense. Cheers Tim

Me too!  Where all my mozzers at?

Thanks Chris... they have virtually no backlinks but definitely operate within niche and quality is middling - there is some useful content on the site relevant to the niche, but not shedloads of content. Almost all outbound links (and not many of those either... perhaps 200). Finding it a tough one to call...