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Thanks, I think I am better off make some corner stones out of some powerful articles rather than risking time and energy on the tag pages.

Thanks both - it's interesting that there is no 'standard' method, but it makes sense that this would very much depend on the situation.

Hi, I'd agree with both Dave and Tommy but also would suggest you rewrite your on-page copy to make it more clearly about dolls' houses and dolls' house accessories. At the moment it sounds a bit like a random collection of keywords, for example: "With such a huge choice of**: Accessories, Books, Dolls, Figurines, Houses, Basements, Flooring, Glues & Scenic Materials, 12 volt Lighting & LED Lighting, Mouldings, Stairs, Plans, Play Houses, Roofing, Windows** and Doors there is sure to be something that will appeal." etc. While I as a human reader can tell that these are all accessories for a dolls house, taken as individual terms they don't seem to have much relationship to each other (in terms of targeting). This is a top level category page targeting the term 'dolls' house'. So that should be your main keyword/topic. Also a couple of those terms ('Books' and 'Flooring') are links which looks a bit weird with the exact match anchor text (esp since they are actually 'dolls' house/miniature books' and 'dolls' house flooring'.)

besides my comment below the other issue I am facing is that I have several neighborhoods I would like to rank for within a region. Does this mean best idea is to get rid of these neighborhood pages (via noindex or other solution) and just focus on the region, until I am able to add unique content to the neighborhood pages?

In many cases, it is easier to start over than to clean up.  But, no one can really answer your question without knowing a lot more facts. In general though, I would recommend attempting recovery if either of the following are true for your site: -You have a good base of truly natural links to your site -You have a lot invested in your domain name. But, if you're not married to the domain name and there aren't many natural links then starting fresh might be the best option.

Fiona, Just to be clear, what you're referring to are subdomains, and not domains. You're right, though, there are definitely issues related to duplicate content that is going to cause ranking problems. Typically, Google will rank the content that they crawled first: the others will be the duplicates. The best way to deal with this is to decide which subdomain you really want: which will typically be www.clientdomain.com and then 301 redirect all of the others to www.clientdomain.com. If, however, there is unique content on the other subdomains, then you wouldn't want to redirect those.

Armin, Before you tell your SEO company, I recommend that you thoroughly review any contracts that you signed in order to make sure you understand everything. I would make sure that you make backups of any content that has been produced, and make sure you change the appropriate passwords on the site and on any tools that the SEO firm may have access to: Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, etc. Your conversation should be focused around leaving your SEO firm in good standing if possible, because there could be issues later on that arise (if they're mad at you, they could start some negative SEO or cause other hassles).

Absolutely Jeffrey. It is just an identifier so should be no issues with this at all. I have a large client who have done a very similar thing and 18 months on, SERP positions are still in the top 2 -Andy

Thanks for your answer on this, I think this will be the right road to go down. Alex

Thank you for all the comprehensive information OverflowSEO. I am still wondering how I can be #2 in Google and drop to "not in top 50" in Bing. A 44 point drop in one week. Any thoughts on that specifically?

Personally i prefer to go for the longer url because of the breadcrumbs and the easier url navigation structure. A lot of people delete part of the url to get back to a previous step in the website architecture. Your 1st way allows that to be done fairly easily and the url explains exactly where someone is on the site. When someone sees your url in the SERP's this would also indicate that they are finding a product in the proper category. The problem with this is that if the webshop has a product in several categories. I build a female clothing webshop a while back and they had categories for top-wear, bottom-wear, specific clothing articles(blouses, jeans, shoes etc) and for each brand. This meant that a product would be in at least 3 different categories within the site. For this reason i chose to set the canonical to: http://www.domain.com/product/ in this particular case. If your webshop does not have this problem and will not get this problem in the future i would recommend the longer url's.

First off you should go to webmaster tools and make sure that you have verified that you are the owner of both the www and non-www version. After this you can tell Google your preferred version of the page under the site settings within webmaster tools. This by itself will tell Google that it should index the preferred version. Furthermore you said that the non-www redirects to the www version now. Google will pick this up in time and will start indexing the www version. Your question about why only one got indexed is hard to answer like this. If it's not the robots.txt than it could be a link rel="canonical" pointing towards the non-www version?

Thanks Wes Those 2 articles are spot on for what i am looking for! Ash

Hello, I'm working on the same niche (software), the best practice from my point of view is ALWAYS use the same page, and update it according the new release of the product, never remove (you're losing inbound links, Authority and even other important trust factors. Only is recommended "remove" the discontinued products as by including a 301 to the most similar product page on your site and also take care about never redirect all your discontinued pages to the home page (a very common error). I hope it helps Claudio

You can install on windows but its more complicated than Linux. The main thing you need to do it make sure the new URLs are the same as the old URLs (play with the permalink structure). If you do that, rankings shouldn't be affected. If you can't get the URLs to match up exactly, make sure to set up 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new ones. You may lose traffic temporarily while Google adjust to the new URLs, but should bounce back within 2 weeks. If there is custom coding involved, you'd need to convert to PHP.

For product pages, I would canonical the page with the most descriptive URL. For category pages, I agree with you, I would noindex them. I think I just answered my own question!!

Hi Marc I hope you don't mind me dropping you a line, but I wondered what you decided to do in the end and whether it was a positive outcome? We too have suffered an algo penalty and have gone down the link removal/disavow route.  We've also invested into redevelopment of the site.  But, it doesn't seem to be enough and I'm now looking at the possibility of changing the domain as the next step, if things don't improve in the next couple of months. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

I have also been looking for more information on websites that have implemented Health/Medical schema, but they are hard to find.

Thanks @Chris, Sounds totally agreed, one has to know first all about their products/services, employees, audience, market, prices, and competition etc.

I prefer to keep it simple. List a few references and related examples of what you can do and ask if they would like to chat with you in more detail so you can provide an accurate quote and address any specific questions they may have.