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Hi Neil, What I mean by category URLs is that a product sits on a URL like http://www.trophycentral.com/5x7blacmarpl.html, rather than http://www.trophycentral.com/plaques/insertplaques/5x7blacmarpl.html but as I said, the flat structure you are using can work as well. Putting products in structures like that can get confusing if products exist in multiple categories and make way for duplicate content (i.e. a product is found under multiple different URLs). Just worth mentioning though because it's not common to see such a flat structure nowadays with the ecommerce platforms a lot of folks are using, like Magento, etc. I wouldn't worry too much about tabs. If the content behind tabs is a) not incredibly long, b) relevant to the page, and c) available in the source code on page load (i.e. it doesn't require the execution of a JavaScript function to pull the content into the tab / onto the page), Google can see this content and should treat it much the same as if the content wasn't tabbed. Cheers, Jane

Thank you I really appreciate your help

Here's some info I found on second and third-level domains.  ICANN does call third-level domains subdomains, and that's where I got confused before. http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/customer-service/faqs/faqs-en http://www.donuts.co/tlds/ http://www.dotanything.co/tlddetail.aspx?tld=Shoes

Keep in mind that Moz tools use their own resources. We don't have access to Google's index or tools, and we don't have their resources, so we're not going to be able to show you data that's based on every link in existence for every site out there. So, when you look at your competitors and see they don't have strong metrics, it could be just because our tools haven't picked them up. As far as companies go, if you want someone to take an in-depth look at your site and competitors and figure out a plan of action, we have a list of recommended companies in the footer that could be a good place to start.

It sure was right on target too Miriam - a superb piece - can't think of any further questions

The robots.txt would allow the OP to go back into GWT and request removal of the dev site from the index. Password protecting a dev site is usually a pretty good idea, too.

Hi Richard, I'm not a Google Images expert (otherwise I'd offer to help!) but you could check out the companies / individuals listed on Moz's <a>Recommended Providers page</a>. Many are agencies that prefer to work with people on longer retainers, but you may find someone to work with there, or the people listed may be able to point you to a trusted contact who specialises in images. I haven't heard of people specifically specialising in image search but that doesn't mean those people don't exist, or that you won't find someone who has a lot of experience with image-heavy photography / art websites. Cheers, Jane

Check out the source code - it mentions "dolls" almost 200 times.  I know we (as humans) see the page itself but Google doesn't read it the way we do.  Jump into the code and check out what Google is reading. Also, you've bought links at some point in the past. Depending on what you cleaned up, things could still be in strife. According to Ahrefs, you have almost 2k links with about 550 referring domains - that number of referring domains tells me straight away that something is dodgy. 33 incoming .org domains, 23 .de domains, 10 info and 8 russian spam... It's not really a shock that this hasn't recovered, tbh. There's a LOT to go through. Without diving into your WMT, I can't tell you what Google sees that Ahrefs doesn't, as well. A lot of the pages are very small. I ran a quick Screaming Frog crawl on it and the page size was in general just a sentence or two per product. You're probably dealing with a bit of thin content as well.

Hi Andy, thanks for taking the time to respond. Noted about the video, cheers. I think I followed all best practices throughout the site to the best of my ability. I'm trying to rank the product pages for keywords like: brown leather boots, ankle boots for women, black leather boots and so on. Homepage and all the category pages I'm trying to rank for things like: leather boots, boots for women, handmade boots. For the past couple of months I've not built a single link with keyword rich anchors through. Usually we get about 40-70K visitors to our website per month just through word of mouth and social media. As for Google, the website has never really ranked high for any keywords other than our brand name. Please let me know if you have any further suggestions. Cheers, Peter

Hi there, Links do pass PageRank, but they don't drain a page of the PageRank it already has. If you link out from a page 100 times, it doesn't make that page 100 times weaker. Think of PageRank as coming in two forms: that which you accumulate via being linked to, and that which you can pass on because of your accumulated authority. The only way in which adding more links to a page can be seen to be "damaging" is that if you link out 100 times from a page, each linked-to page receives roughly 1/100th of the passable strength from that page (links in footers or similar won't receive as much). However, if you link out 1000 times, each linked-to page receives 1/1000th of the passable link strength. Therefore, if you want a page to rank better, you need to consider whether you're diluting the amount of PageRank it receives due to the high number of links on other pages, not on the page itself. Is this clearer? Sorry it's hard to explain, but we basically believe that PageRank comes in two forms: one which a page accumulates and one which it can pass on, and passing PR on doesn't weaken the page itself.

Hi Gianluca, All good info - thanks! One followup question; What is the point of the rel="publisher" link? If a site is linked to it's Google+ page, aren't all pages in effect rel publisher? Also, does it do anything rich-snippets-wise? Thanks.. Darcy

Hi Pedram, It looks like 508 compliance is legislation in the US referring only to federal agencies and their information technology properties, so unless you are building for a federal agency, this won't be something you need to worry about. Looking at your profile, it looks like your company supplies government clients but isn't a federal agency, is this right? (I was looking at this page http://www.learningtree.com/government/.) If you are building for a federal body, the act refers mainly to accessibility issues and is part of the Rehabilitation Act (not the Americans with Disabilities Act as might be assumed). Sorry to link to Wikipedia, but information on the full act (with links to 508) is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_Act_of_1973 Hope this helps! Perhaps check with an internal person at Learning Tree who knows about compliance issues relating to your government work, but I do not see where contractors to government agencies are included in this. I could be wrong though.

As others have mentioned, it sounds like these links have little potential value. You could always drop a few comment URLs, tweets, G+ posts to those pages to help them get indexed, but they would still pass very little authority and I can't say it would be worth the effort. Perhaps you could contact those same Suppliers and offer to give them a testimonial or find some other way to get your company linked on a more prominent page of their website. Think about what you can offer of value for their website.

Hi there, I see the page indexed when searching for its URL: http://i.imgur.com/dhCnlqK.png However, there is a huge amount of duplicate content when looking at the leading text on this page: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22We+have+exciting+plans+in+place+for+supporting+our+students+and+are+committed+to+a+high+level%22&oq=%22We+have+exciting+plans+in+place+for+supporting+our+students+and+are+committed+to+a+high+level%22&aqs=chrome..69i57.613j0j9&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8 As such, Google could well be filtering this page when it comes to more competitive searches, as it sees the same content over and over again. Have you noticed the URL being completely de-indexed and not appearing, even when searching specifically for the URL?

No, you can't migrate the video. in terms of embedding - an iframe is super lightweight. Just embed a YouTube iframe and you should be fine.

Hi, Going to agree with Fuel Interactive here - the best practice is to redirect page-by-page if you are combining sites, unless you are set on deleting / consolidating content from the merged sites into one smaller, tidier website. In that case, it's still best practice to redirect to the most appropriate page if one exists, rather than just to the home page. It can be a real pain to go through a consolidation / redirection process like this, so only do this if it's really necessary and will likely cause a big uplift in either performance or your ability to manage each area of the business. Dave is right that IIS can do a URL by URL redirect for you, or you can do this in your .htaccess file if you are using an Apache server as opposed to a Microsoft IIS server.

Hi there, Just to round this question off, you could canonicalise the query-string URL searching for black iPhones to the iPhone 5s listings page and keep an individual phone's lising at /123456 separate, yes. It's best to keep the canonical tag for truly duplicated or near-duplicated pages, so you would not want to canonicalise an individual product page to a listings page or similar.

Content needs to be good enough to share, and to be shared in the first place you need to be aggregating that content through social channels relevant to your target audience. Try - Wow, Why and How Content to "Wow" and stop them in their tracks - A big enough "why" to stay - A big enough "how" to meet their immediate need. I agree with much of what has already been said here, however quality is not always engaging! Its nice, but it has to be attractive enough that it wows your visitors in the right way, and this is not easy, but definitely worthwhile. Another problem with content that answers questions to quickly is bounce rate - if the answer arrives to quickly your audience will leave too quickly. finding content that slows down a visitor and holds their interest is important, but its a fine wire to walk.

Thanks for your help Jane! I will get on to it and make the changes. Ash

I would have to say that the best software to create videos is going to be either Final Cut Pro which is available on the Mac operating system only. http://www.apple.com/final-cut-pro/what-is/ you can use Adobe Premier and get the same level of professional capabilities when tied to its creative cloud makes a pretty cool set of tools. http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere.html on online only tools I would look at most likely http://www.powtoon.com/ it allows you to do quite a bit and has a lot of animation capabilities built-in other online tools are http://animoto.com/business http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-5-tools-to-make-a-home-movie-online-for-free/ I did not know if you were looking to use YouTube only however I would recommend Wistia over YouTube for a lot of projects in order to show you why please check out this link. http://wistia.com/learning/advanced-seo-with-distilled I hope this is of help, Thomas