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Hi, Just saw this article and recalled your question.  Using exact match for internal linking is still ok; however, it's true only if you use it occasionally. If it's over used, it's still bad for SEO as you can get over optimized penalty.  I guess the best is to mix and match and do some co citation/co occurrence with long tail keywords. https://blog.kissmetrics.com/avoid-over-optimizing/ Thank you!

Thanks, As long as we seem to rank well i don't really see it as a problem, i do track visitors using these links also, Thank you your answer has reassured me, James

Thank you both, I will dig into what the other competitors are doing, cant believe i overlooked this Thanks Bryan i will work through these key things you have pointed out, James

Hi Alan, Handling a Google penalty is a delicate issue as there are a lot of factors that need to be considered to assess the penalty on the site accurately. It is not a black and white issue where there is one right answer and doing that will fix the issues and lift the penalty. The whole process includes an in depth analysis of the site including the on page and off page factors. I would really suggest you to consider hiring an expert on this subject and have them do a thorough evaluation and provide recommendations. I've included links to some resources below that you might find helpful. Recover from a Panda Penalty - QuickSprout SEW Article Cheers, SEO5..

I just did a similar migration Oscommerce to Magento, because the site was so big took a while for Google indexed all the new URLs even with the 301. We lost a little bit of traffic in the first 3 weeks but in the forth week we recovered the same traffic we had before the new site went up and in the following weeks we just kept growing.  Right now we have 20% more traffic. The drop in ranking it's normal right after a big migration, when Seomoz became Moz they also saw a few weeks of drop in the organic traffic. I wouldn't worry too much about it yet. Just make sure your on page optimizations are well done in the new website and wait for big G complete your new website index.

I don't see an upset for keeping rel=next prev, I see only an upside. Google doesn't have to listen to the noindex tag, although they almost always do. Furthermore, adding the rel=next prev tag only makes your code even more correctly developed, and since Google isn't the only service that looks for tags like this I would feel more comfortable with it present. From an accessibility standpoint, it makes sense to have the rel=next prev tag.

There's this Mozinar from Dana Lookadoo that'll give you a good insight into the steps involved when supporting a website redesign project. The worksheets are pretty awesome too: Stress-free Website Redesign for Search and Social Website Redesign Planning Template Preparation is key (which might not be the most helpful advice at this stage!)

Does the platform you are using let you select a default category for the product? Several platforms will let you select multiple categories and make you chose one as a default category. If so, you can just work off the uri of the page and insert the default category as the canonical category in the rel=canonical.

I hated trying to do SEO on Joomla but if you must, try out ACESEF module. Good luck!

Hi Mason, You can use call to actions on your page, even use hellobar.com, etc - then locate all these engagers using circloscope and ask them if it be ok to give you a +1 for the link you will mention in the message. I'm not sure if that is what you meant but I hope it helps.

Thank you, trung.ngo! I appreciate your thoughts. Yes, we have transcriptions and are submitting site maps.

The way to solve this is actually using both Canonical and hreflang tags in all the pages that have duplicates. I remember answering a similar question that I am sure you will find it useful here: http://moz.com/community/q/custom-hreflang-tags-in-wp-using-with-yoast

According to Google's saying on 301 redirect link dilution, you should lose some of the weight carried by those links. However, as Google just revealed that HTTPS sites get a slight, minimal in fact, chance to do better in search results, HUNDREDS of sites are moving to SSL. Of all the pages that I've been tracking and reading, there was no change at all in rankings by switching to HTTPS, anyway is too soon to assume conclusions, the statement was released last week, so all those sites I am reading about are just "too new" in HTTPS to take conclusions. My guts tell me that these 301 should act the same way as any other 301 does (diluting some of the link weight), or it could be yet another way to cheat Google, but will see what happens. I myself moved my site over the weekend to HTTPS with 301, haven't see any change, but I guess what I can loose in the 301 redirects can be gained by using SSL?

Yup, you've got it!

that would depend on your 3rd party agreement and the CMS being used. If it's a CMS like WordPress, then it could be as simple as an export and import from one WordPress installation to the other. Most hosting companies will help their customers migrate their sites from one place to another, or charge a small fee for the process.

Hi Samuel, Thank you for the detailed answer. A couple of things; My two "L" typo is just as written here... not on the site. Sorry about that. On the use of the url parameters indexed, those are used internally, but they're set in GWT as having no effect and to only look at the representative url,.. everything before the question mark. On your point about rel canonicals, one way we use them is in a category pages which are long lists of other pages. In that case it looks at page one of the long list as the canonical. With that in mind, along with all the duplicate stuff in the index (paginated page #s, ignored url parameters), what would you suggest I change? Thanks... Darcy

Hey Doug, had another question for you. A big majority (90% of 18,000+ errors) of our 404 errors are coming from .jsp files from our old website. Of course, it's not ideal to manually update or redirect these, but possibly write a script to automatically change them. Would it be beneficial to add this .jsp to our robots.txt file?

Hi Pete, Links to 2 articles below that reference A/B testing and their impact on SEO. The use of canonical tags is a recommended practice for the URL's being tested: Impact of A/B testing on SEO Website Testing - Google Search Cheers, SEO5..

Let's look at one of the pages ranking higher than yours: http://resources.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/customs/bankholidays.html This site has a DA of 74 as compared to yours with a DA of 18. I would look at the on page and the off page optimization efforts for all the non .gov sites as they are the best ones you have a chance of beating in the rankings. Hope this helps.

Let's put it this way, all of the major search engines in the Western hemisphere have endorsed microdata. It's basically the WordPress of semantic data now. Everyone agreed that it would make everyone's life easier if we all adopted a uniform semantic markup. There may be a plan for graceful degradation of RDFa, there may not. But it's somewhat rare to get such an emphatic endorsement from every search engine of consequence in the Western market. Schema has a pretty solid general taxonomy for many common instances. The types and properties keep growing. The only reason you should go with RDFa over microdata is if there's something you can't do otherwise. Though that is likely doubtful at this point. Scroll all the way to the accordions on this page. You will see something that will make your decision easier.