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I'm not sure that I totally understand your question: are you building a site and wondering if you should make it beautiful with AJAX or readable for search engines with a clear category structure? Or do you already have a site with AJAX and now you've taken the time to come up with a category page structure, but you're hesitating to implement it? If it's the first, I don't think that you should think that your choices are 1) be usable/beautiful, or 2) be search-engine friendly. There are a lot of ways to make an HTML site beautiful. You can use new enhancements in HTML5, or build a standard HTML site and then use JavaScript to make elements more interactive. If it's the second, I'd go with Thomas's suggestion and test your AJAX site to see how readable it is for Google. AJAX isn't readable by Google, but the underlying HTML is, so there may be enough HTML links that Google can still get around your site. Once you've tested how readable your site is, then you have to decide if this interface is worth pages being missed or ranked lower by Google. My guess is that you can probably keep your site the way it is primarily, but you'll have to make some tweaks. It's hard to give specifics without knowing specifics, though. Good luck!

Hi Mark, Agreed, you should definitely change the contents for the duplicate websites; however, you don't have to remove the duplicate contents from those sites as it might've generated a few links, authority or bookmarked.  I would suggest using 301 redirect from the duplicate site to the Main site's content.  Make sure content A of duplicate site redirects to content A of Main site.  Another method is to use cross site canonical to tell engines that the content on the Main site is the original. Good luck creating new contents!

You aren't doing poorly at all!

these pages' only unique content will be the dynamic statistical data. So I may have 100 different pages that all have: Median Price Nr of Properites Sold year 2013, 2012, 2011 $ Volume of Sold Properites year 2013, 2012 etc etc Obviously $ and number amounts will be different for each neighborhood, but otherwise same writing and layout across many pages. I wonder if good enough, as just offering value to the users do not always seem to be all we should keep in mind, as I see many websites perform very well taking a simple approach writing a general blurb and nothing more.

If you are showing the content to only your own URL dependant on how your accomplishing this Google would be none the wiser. I have applications which cannot be seen by anyone who isn't on our IP. Done the right way Google wouldn't see it either!! Unless of course you work for Google!

I would personally try and move away from Wix, you'd be surprised at how easy it can be to create a website, even if you're not technically minded. I'm sure there's plenty of youtube videos / books that could help. Once done, you're in a position to make your SEO as strong as possible, without limitations.

The latest company is applying a better practice for your site.  Your previous company's methods may have worked a very long time ago and very likely creating a negative impact today.  Since you are accessing MOZ, you can test the validity of their work using the on page grader.  Hope this helps.

Suggest going back to the basics - Generate sectional sitemaps and submit them to WMT. Check which sections are not getting indexed to the fullest 301s to the home page might be an issue in cases in which the URL numbers are lot Code clean up, use gzip compression, call all JS and CSS files externally, improve text to code ratio Implement self canonical tags along with Syndication and original source tags, this is just for hygiene purposes Check for duplicate content, see if anyone is scraping your content Check at server levels, sometimes some CMSs generate scripts that block search engine spiders at the server level If you can clean WMT HTML improvements that would be great Check if rel=next and prev tags have been implemented in case of paginated series I am assuming that all the other SEO basics are in place, no spammy on page and off page techniques. Hope this helps. Sajeet

Kim, Thanks for the update.  Most people just do what ever they decide to do and never report back.  So, thanks! I'm glad you were able to get the penalty removed.  I actually was just helping someone out who got a penalty and saw something similar, a bunch of blog sites that were nondescript with a ridiculously wide range of topics and even languages, which screams private link network to me.  The client said they weren't responsible.  It seems that negative SEO is something being done more often. Thanks again. Kurt Steinbrueck OurChurch.Com

You can try to focus two KWs on that page, so the two you provided. It might take some trial and error to make it work but I know that it's doable.

Thank you for your responses. Just to update you all to say after the rankings dip, they're more or less back to where they were, fingers crossed the rise continues. Regards

That does help, thanks much!

Glad to hear it, Chris, and welcome to the community!

That is a very open ended question and one I wouldn't even try to answer. Tell your client that there are hundreds of factors at work with Google's algorithms and this is something that is completely out of your control. Even Google couldn't tell you the answer to that one. If they want to know more, then tell them that each of the 200+ primary ranking signals, have their own set of criteria. I think it was 'assessing how links appear on a page', had something like 2,000+ individual signals that Google used. Now imagine that each of the 200 primary signals each have 2,000 of their own signals - this is hundreds of thousands of possibilities that Google will be looking at when ranking a site. -Andy

Thanks for your great answer David. Just to make sure I've understood this right... In your opinion would a high volume of people pogo sticking back to the SERPs after clicking on a paid ad adversely affect the organic search performance of the rest of the site? Or do Google discount this high bounce rate for paid ads?

I would spend a lot of time on getting the links removed than just disavowed, at least for now. We get better results after doing disavows that had a bunch of links removed versus just relying on the disavow. To answer your question, the link detox score is a good estimate. Since google treats each niche differently, you might want to look at that as a goal number to reach so you are within the average of the niche. But obviously, you have to still follow through with even better links. It's a pain!

Thank you Martign! That makes sense. I'm excited to see how using the HREFLANG markup helps with multi-lingual users.

Hi Noah, I think the first issue here is actually going to be that Google+ Local doesn't consider rental properties as appropriate candidates for inclusion. Here is the language regarding this: Ineligible Business Models Rental or for-sale properties, such as vacation homes or vacant apartments, are not eligible to be listed on Google Maps and should not be verified. Instead, verify the listing for your sales or leasing office or offices. If you have a property with an on-site office, you may verify that office location. Does the company have an on-site office? Otherwise, they will not be able to fully participate in typical local search activities. They should definitely not be using another company's phone number. Google will be aware that this phone number belongs to the booking agency, and actually, having the client publish this in index-able text on their own website will harm the NAP consistency of the booking agency. In order to fully participate in citation building, the client needs a physical, staffed office and a unique phone number at which the person who answers the phone answers with the company's name - not the name of a third party business. I think you've surfaced a really interesting case here. You've made me wonder how many vacation rental companies are in this same boat!

Hey Daniel, I doubt that sending radio traffic to the old URL would have any impact on which page is ranking in Google. Another thing you should do is add canonical tags to all of your pages. That will also help Google tell which version of the page is the correct version to show, and also helps prevent a lot of common duplicate content issues.

Sorry, Juan Carlos, I'm still not clear on the differences between the 2 sections of the sites. You say "The blog will be to do post about anything (tech, fashion, beauty, etc..) ... but the website don't talk about that". Then you say: "The blog is made to generate traffic from google and 1 way to get more sales in my site." If the blog isn't specifically about the same topics and targeted at the same web visitors as the html site, then it's not going to help get more sales and should be completely separate. It sounds to me like you're doing a general blog, but hope it will generate traffic for the specific sales site. This almost never works, as having a lot of off-topic content on the blog will confuse the search engines about what the sales site is about. It will also be attracting visitors that aren't interested in your site's products, which is a waste. My suggestion would be to have the blog completely separate, and then when you do write a post that actually is about something the html site sells, link to the page about that product. Alternatively, (and this would be far stronger for SEO of the sales site) leave the blog where it is and limit the blog topics mostly to things that relate directly to the products you are selling. Make sense? Paul