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I agree with Samuel. I also saw a video in which Matt Cutts was saying that they were removing authorship benefits (photo in the SERPs, showing to people in your circles},  for lots of low-quality authors. So, just slapping authorship onto a page isn't going to be a magic bullet.

I would suggest doing it. I made a module for some of my clients a while back that essentially turned search results into category pages. It worked out very well for them, one thing I did was exact matches redirected to the real categories, because the way the module was written there would be a url collision. One thing I would keep in mind is that the search results should not differ too much from what the category shows. Another thing to keep in mind is that you should have a disallow rule on your search directory and a canonical on your category pages. That should also settle any duplicate content issues as well.

Maybe do half and half. Load a decent amount to start with and then you still have some left to keep a trickle of content coming whilst you create more. If you are sitting on a lot of good custom content you are in a good position.

Hi Jane & Spencer, Thank you for the additional information. Regards Mark

Hi Jane, Thank you for you advise. Regards Mark

Hi. I was curious to know if you were able to find all the urls that needed to be removed, if they were effectively removed, and if your traffic came back. I'm assuming you were dealing with Panda issues.

Thanks Jane! That's the affirmation I was looking for. If I might, one more question: In your opinion, is PA 15 too valuable to leave on a page with no real purpose? Is it relative to the site? Thanks again, Luke Thomas

Hi there, glad to have been of help! As far as how long to wait goes, it really is hard to say but if you see nothing at all in a month, I'd consider other options like canonicalisation (or coming back here, showing what you've done and seeing what people say - as I am only one opinion! ). Cheers, Jane

Hi David, Thanks for your response. That makes perfect sense. I assumed that to be the case but thought it was worth checking before making any changes. I suppose by adding appropriate hreflang="x" mark-up combined with the geo-targeting of root domain and subfolders - that should be enough to inform search engines of our intended geographical targets. Strangely there wasn't a lot of information out there about this specific question - so thanks again. Yusuf

Hi Jordan, I would only stay away from tags related to frames and iframes as they're not good for SEO. Besides that you'll be OK with every kind of tag. Including the span tag. It's ridiculous that somebody would argue that using these tags are not good for SEO as they provide a lot of opportunity to style elements within an element.

Hi Robert, Jonathan has said that nothing will be passed as parameters, but even if they were, I don't see that there would ever be a _penalty _for this (in the true sense of a penalty - algorithmic or manual penalisation for spam). You could flood Google with a million query strings and no canonicalisation if you did it badly which could get dangerous, is the only thing I can think of and even then, this would be easy to fix with canonicalisation on your own sites.

Yep, it's another "it depends" - if Moz links to Search Engine Land in multiple blog posts over many years (as it has done), this is going to count for more than one vote. Those links also undoubtedly go to different pages on SEL's site (new posts, etc.). But if I write one blog post every other day, linking to my affiliate site in every post, this really won't help the affiliate site at all

Egol as always gives a common sense answer. I would not worry about a ratio, unless it is really bad. Search engines have a limit on how much of a page they will crawl, as there is no limit on how large a page may be, but unless you have a huge amount of code before content I would not be concerned. From Bing The page contains a large block of embedded script code. Search engines will ignore script code, but large quantities of script will force the actual text content of the page further down in the HTML. Since search engines may analyze only the first 100 KB of a page, it is possible that the script block may prevent search engines from indexing any page content.

The only way to make the redirects happen, is to renable SSL.  Because you can't do that with adobe catalyst, you have no option but to put a proxy in front of the requests to catalyst. The easiest solution you will find is a CloudFlare Pro account: https://www.cloudflare.com/plans You can set that up with your own custom SSL.  Your client will continue to use Catalyst exactly as they do today, and get all the other benefits of cloud flare. CloudFlare of course isn't your only option for a proxy, but your not going to beat it when it comes to both Price ($20 / month), and Ease of Use.

Hey alrockn, The search engines - Google, Yahoo! & Bing - all maintain multiple indices that run across multiple datacenters. This means if you query different datacenters, you can get somewhat different ranking results. As others have mentioned, other elements, such as personalization, geography and search history (even if you're logged out of your Google/search engine account) can also influence ranking positions. Hence, there can be a lot of variation in what different people, searching from different computers/locations might see in the rankings. Our solution has been to run searches from a variety of IP addresses and IP blocks using non-personalized, search history/location agnostic requests. In our experience, these have provided the most accurate results, showing what the "most" users see, though we know there's still quite a bit of room for fluctuation. If you have suggestions about how we might improve the technical process of fetching rankings data to get better data, please let us know and we'll pass it on to our engineering team. We're always looking for ways to get you better data

Hi Israr, Since your site is properly targeted to Pakistan in Webmaster Tools, don't worry about having a .com domain as opposed to .com.pk. The WMT configuration does that job perfectly. I would be tempted to guess that one of a number of things is happening: It could very well be that the US results are being affected by recent updates and those updates haven't rolled out to the rest of the world yet (the US usually sees updates first; in the first Panda roll-out, it took Google a long time to extend the roll-out past the US. I remember being at a search conference in Poland over a month after Panda was released in the US and people kept bugging the Google rep about when it would come to Europe!). In this case, you might be in for a good ranking improvement in Pakistan soon. It also might be the case that there is more competition for the term you want to rank for in Pakistan than there is in the US. If the query pertains especially to Pakistani audiences (mentions location, is about a product or service only available in Pakistan, etc.) then other competitors might have fared better in providing adequate localised signals, whereas your site might be appealing to a more general audience (as far as the signals it gives Google are concerned). Is your website hosted in Pakistan? The location of a website's hosting should not be a major factor at all, but it can make a small difference if Google has trouble figuring out what the intended target country is. Your WMT geo-location should have taken care of this though, even if the site is hosted in the US or elsewhere. Also, do you have a good number of links from other Pakistani websites, whether they be .com.pk domains, sites hosted in Pakistan, and sites with a lot of Pakistani links themselves? Again, not a massive ranking factor, but if most of your links come from the US or other foreign countries, this isn't as good of a location signal as if you have a lot of links from other local websites. To be honest, I think that the first scenario is more likely and that a movement upwards in the US results is a good sign...

Third vote for using the site and not redirecting it here (pending a re-brand of sorts to suit the fact that it's now owned by your company). You have the opportunity to take up a lot more real estate in the SERPs than you do now, whereas redirection at worst removes the old site from the results. At best, you might see a small improvement in your rankings, but you're already ranking better than that site to begin with. As EGOL says, PageRank is logarithmic so if you're dealing with what is a weaker website (whether in actual PR or toolbar PR - the latter of which is a fairly outdated metric but still gets used for basic comparison purposes), it may actually be many times weaker than your stronger domain. At best, using both site might allow you to target different sections of the same audience, appeal to different needs from the audience base (very large clients versus smaller businesses, etc.), and for results where you rank top 10 with both sites, you're about 20% of the results, not 10%

Hi Damien, So if I'm reading this correctly, the consultant is saying that due to the size of the site (tens of thousands of pages), and the need to categorise its content, that subdomains are the best choice. I would say that there are far bigger websites using categories within subfolders, notably big retailers, e.g. http://www.marksandspencer.com/c/beauty, http://www.marksandspencer.com/c/food-and-wine, http://www.marksandspencer.com/c/mands-bank http://www.waitrose.com/home/inspiration.html, http://www.waitrose.com/home/wine.html, http://www.waitrose.com/content/waitrose/en/home/tv/highlights.html (<-- the last one being a crappy version, but a subdomain nonetheless) and so do websites that deal with providing content for very different audiences: http://www.ncaa.com/schools/tampa, http://www.ncaa.com/championships/lacrosse-men/d1/tickets, http://www.ncaa.com/news/swimming-men/article/2014-03-29/golden-bears-and-coach-david-durden-earn-third-national-title, http://www.ncaa.com/stats/football/fbs Has the consultant provided examples of other websites doing this that would take on the same structure? There are hundreds of examples of websites whose structure / categories are properly understood despite existing in subdirectories, so I'm still sceptical that this is a necessity. This is not to say that a subdomain approach wouldn't work and is definitively bad or anything, I'm just not really convinced that the reasoning is strong enough to move content away from the root domain. I disagree about user experience - from a user's perspective, the only difference between subfolders and subdomains is the URL they can see in the address bar. The rest is aesthetic. You can do or not do everything you'd do with the design of a website using subdirectories that you'd do with a website(s) employing subdomains. For example, just because content sits on www.icy-veins.com/wow/, its navigation wouldn't have to link to www.icy-veins.com/hearthstone/ or mention the other brand in any way if you don't want to. You can still have separate conversion funnels, newsletter sign-ups, advertising pages, etc.

Hi Martijn, Thanks for the real quick response, I thought they were fishing there, I have been reading about SEO practices for the past 2 years and haven't heard of this issue at all, but wanted to be 100% before jumping to conclusions. Thanks very much for the response I appreciate it.

Well the good news is, after all that, the development server is now safely behind authentication and the level of traffic to the site has returned to previous levels for the last three weeks. Fingers crossed it won't be going anywhere. It has been a wake-up call for the client though and it's started some useful discussions. Every cloud... Thanks for the support!