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As Chris said, Google has recently changed how long your titles can be, but rather than give you a definite number of words you can use, you now have a number of pixels. The general consensus here is that you have 512 pixels. Screaming Frog Spider has just updated to a newer version that now includes how long your titles are in pixels, as well as words. I don't know if there are other tools that do this yet, as I haven't searched, but they do a free version that you can download and will crawl up to 500 pages of a site. You can download it here. -Andy

Great. Thank you!

Given that Chrome and most header checkers (even older ones) are processing the 301s, I don't think a minor header difference would throw off Google's crawlers. They have to handle a lot. I suspect it's more likely that either: (a) There was a technical problem the last time they crawled (which would be impossible to see now, if it had been fixed). (b) Some other signal is overwhelming or negating the 301 - such as massive direct links, canonicals, social, etc. That can be hard to measure. I don't think it's worth getting hung up on the particulars of Bit.ly's index. I suspect many of these issues are unique to them. I also expect problems will expand with scale. What works for hundreds of pages may not work for millions, and Google isn't always great at massive-scale redirects.

I agree with chris, if its not needed why have it? As for doing harm, Duane Forester from Bing advised not to do it, and said that sites that misuse the canonical tag, Bing will ignore them all together. There is also the line of thought, that we know that canonical tags do not pass all link juice, just like 301's or any request, there is a certain amount of decay, 15% in the original google algorithm. It just may be that when you have a canonical back to yourself, it is followed and that you get that decay unnecessarily

Hi, Thanks for the question. In terms of the two decisions you've outlined, I'd definitely go with number 1. Putting a proper structure in place is essential and it sounds like doing this will remove all of the problems you're seeing with pages not being given enough equity in order to rank. It can also be a bit dangerous to show users one version of the page and crawlers another version. Even though it sounds like you're not being manipulative, the search engines can sometimes think that you're cloaking and penalise you for it. So this is another reason to switch to a proper navigation structure and make it really clean and easy for users and crawlers to get to all pages on the website. I hope that helps! Paddy

For such a massive duplication and linking from the same IP, I would definitely follow the canonical / nofollow route - do you know how long it will take the user to implement these? In the meantime, there isn't terribly much you can do - you definitely do not want to do anything like disavowing the links (you should only do that if you receive unnatural link warnings or have been hit by a penalty or negative SEO attack). The quicker the tagging can be done, the better in this case. Although Google should understand and disregard, I did have a new client penalised back in 2010 because they were sharing a financial widget across a range of Australian newspaper websites that were all owned by the same company and thus all on the same IP. We got the penalty removed with reconsideration requests but were about to implement a network-wide nofollow on these little widgets before we submitted the request.

Hi Armin, Let me give you an idea on what could happen, if Google finds you development/ staging site what happened in a case I saw happen is that the site lost over 40% of traffic for 2-3 months until it was fixed. Costing the site a couple of million visits, guess what that did to the revenue ;-). Edit: a couple of million visits, not money ;-).

Canonical pages don't have to be the same. it will merge the content to look like one page. Good luck

Doug, Somehow I missed your response.  The site has 200 pages or so linked from the navigation.  Thanks for the suggestion.  Adding some links or breadcrumbs may help. Ideally what I would want to do is have google crawl to the important pages and not have juice flow to customer service / info only pages that in most cases have little need to rank in the SERP's. The client wants flat navigation, and I understand the point (you can be anywhere and find these pages).  The drawback is spraying juice to non-relevant pages from a SEO perspective.  If there is a way to block crawling that is not considered cloaking, that would be the approach. Thanks for answering.

Yes that's correct, or even on the same hosting account

Yes !!! I recommend using the brand name at the end of a title tag instead, and there are times when this can be a better approach. The differentiating factor is the strength and awareness of the brand in the target market. If a brand is well–known enough to make a difference in click–through rates in search results, the brand name should be first. If the brand is less known or relevant than the keyword, the keyword should be first. Personally I think Brand on titles are good for the following 1. Brand Exposure (User point of view) 2. Reputation Management (Google point of view) Google also started putting many site's name in the title. I think the reason Google started doing it was to distinguish many of the same titles in the SERPS. Lots of sites, me included, just put "Build Blue Widgets" in the title and the SERPS looked a bit silly with 5 of the top ten having the same title. Nowadays, if anybody searches for your brand and you don't have your brand name in your title tag, google ignores your hard coded Title Tag shows Brand name as your title Tag in its serp. If Google wants to add site names to the title who am I to disagree with them. P.S - However if you do your seo right and you rank on important keywords, everytime user searches in google and find you and see your brand on the google serp, you are spreading Brand awareness and you are building your brand for Free ! and gradually the user will know that this brand sells this product and then if you are not ranked on top the user will still click on your link. So you are killing two birds with one stone. Free Traffic + Free Brand building... Happy Selling !

Thanks very much Jane! I think subdirectories are how I'll go. Effective; organic SEO is HUGE for my initial online success. We market only with direct mail so far. But mailing lists don't address human situations ie: people who've inherited a property AND with it a 2nd mortgage payment AND they're stressed because they can't afford the 2nd payment AND their realtor hasn't sold the inherited property.One last question for all- With effective landing page SEO & SERP being my primary goal; is the web URL structure term "siloing" familiar to anyone and applicable / adaptable to my multiple landing pages? (I found the term  & explanation here: http://www.bruceclay.com/seo/silo.htm) Or is some other method more advisible in order to "pool" my subdirectories for better SEO in SERP? Peter

Remember that a lot of links you had are now no longer, removed or disavowed you cant expect to rank the same. Also how long has it been since you had penalty lifted. It may take a while for all things to equal up again.

All redirects lose link juice, Gregory is correct in what he says, but you would lose a bit of link juice in the redirect, better to use the anchor, it is ignored

Well explained @Jane , that's what i tried to say. But u made it simpler to understand for newbies. Good

Hi, Google has no problem with collapsable Div's elements that are crawlable. I mean if the bot can see and read the content in the collapsable div, there is no issue with that. I have used this 100's of times and never had ranking issues + in the text-only version of google cache, i see the whole content. So, use some css + onclick njs function and u're good to go. Here is a sample hidden content in a collapsabel div , that is totally legimate: derniereminute.net  , you can check this screenshot for more details: http://awesomescreenshot.com/08c2ie9rff If you need more help, let me know

Hi, I had this kind of penalties in a client website. I knew most of the bad links were targeting the homepage + some brand-dedicated pages. Those were the pages that had the big drop in traffic. We worked hard to remove the bad links, and after 3 months or so, we got this penalty lifted. Now we are regaining rankings progressively and our penalized landing pages are climbing in traffic. So what you have to do is simply remove the bad links, use the disavow tool and send a reconsideration request to G (this is a manual penalty). Hope it helps !

The mindset of "get as many backlinks as you can" is now old school SEO.  This type of SEO is likely to be completely ineffective or at worst, can get you penalized or have Google look at your site unfavorably through the Penguin algorithm. While links are still an important part of the algorithm, Google has gotten really good, in most cases, at determining which links are truly earned links and then counting those. One really good earned link can be worth hundreds of self made links.  Rather than concentrating on how many links a day to make, I'd work on finding ways to get people to link to your content truly naturally.

Hi Marc, When you say Wordpress blog do you mean you'll be hosting the WP blog on your own server? Or you're using one hosted on wordpress.com (albeit via blog.yoursite.com) ? If you are hosting it yourself then WP runs on PHP so normally plays pretty nicely with other PHP sites, just install it in a subfolder (so www.yoursite.com/blog/) and you should be good to go (unless you have any re-write rules that could mess with what wordpress is trying to do - just make sure thay they don't touch on  the /blog/ sub-directory). If you are hosting on wordpress.com then why not install WP on your actual site and use the above method? I won't go into the merits of guest blogging as a link building strategy here Best wishes, Stuart

Thank you for the reponses I'll get on this.