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We decided to list replacement parts for some of the products that we sell.  The response has been fantastic.  About 1/3 of our transactions now include at least one replacement part.    Many people who buy replacement parts, also purchase other items.  Replacement parts are willing us new customers - mainly because competitors do not mess with them. It was labor intensive to photograph these parts and and write descriptions for each of them with measurements and sometimes diagrams.  But looking back was well worth it.  If your competitors are not selling these parts and they are something that a typical owner might purchase once or twice during the lifetime of his item then you might get a fantastic amount of sales.   One of our manufacturers said... "We can't believe how many parts you are selling!"

Hi Dave I really don't think the optimisation of Title tags post-Hummingbird changes very much if any at all. Google continue to use the Title tag (up to about 70 characters) as the link in SERPs and the Title tag is still an important factor for telling both human and search engine visitors what the page is about. Apart from, perhaps, blog posts, where you might have a longer-tail title that reflects the subject of the post, e.g. "How Google is Changing Long-Tail Search with Efforts Like Hummingbird", a Title tag can be optimised in much the same way as before. The importance with Hummingbird is focused on Google providing a more intelligent understanding of search requests which might be for a long-tail search request, but the intent of the user's search can still be boiled down to less words. I recommend reading Ammon Johns recent blog post, "Hummingbird – The Opposite of Long-Tail Search" in which he talks about someone, sat in Denver on his mobile phone searching “Where’s a good place where I can get a pizza?”. Google's analysis of that search is that they can work out the person is sat in Denver and it will work out that the connection between the words "place" and "pizza" means a restaurant. The short tail result for the intent of that search can be summed up in a Title tag of "Denver Pizza Restaurant". So you could still use a short Title tag like that and it would work, as long as, of course, other on-page and off-page elements supported the relevancy of the page for the search as did the rest of the website. Another great blog post recently was Gianluca Fiorelli's "Hummingbird Unleashed". In it he wrote one sentence which I found very helpful for understanding SEO for Hummingbird: "We should stop focusing only on keyword optimization and start thinking about topical optimization." I hope that helps, Peter

Wow thanks there is some great advice here - I agree I need to be developing my website for the user but there are many of my competitors who are still employing the tactic of many links on each page to Magican + Location and seem to be outranking me. I keep getting told by various SEO people that google will slap them down soon but it never seems to happen. I am still trying to find the magic formula as I suppose everyone is! Thanks Roger

Thanks Marcus! Appreciate the feedback!!

My pleasure!

Serendipitous timing - this article was posted yesterday about using mark-up, and how Open Graph and Schema.org are used, and why to use both: Facebook Open Graph serves its purpose well, but it doesn’t provide the detailed information search engines need to improve the user experience. A single web page may have many components, and it may talk about more than one thing. Even if you mark up your content for Facebook Open Graph, schema.org provides an additional way to provide more detail about particular entities on the page. http://searchengineland.com/schema-org-7-things-for-seos-to-consider-post-hummingbird-172163

Thanks for your help guys. What we are probably going to do is build the new site and start doing good SEO, and since we don't want to pass the link juice from the old site, I think we will just do a 302 redirect so that we don't loose any customers. Thanks again

I would say that for the latter part of the Title it is better to have the actual name of the company than "Commercial Estate Agents" on every page. Apart from that is on the home page where the format could be "Name of company | Commercial Estate Agents". That way you are reinforcing the company name/brand which is reasonable whereas I think repeating "Commercial Estate Agents" is a little spammy and IMHO you don't need to keep using it as the clear message of the site and the pages it has should give the understanding that the site if for a commercial estate agent. On your other question, I would say: Birmingham Commercial Property Tips | Company Name is better than Birmingham Commercial Property Tips | Help find the perfect premise The latter says what the page is about, presumably "commercial property tips", but the second part is just extra words that I assume are saying the same thing, apart from the first part is more focussed on Birmingham. That's not to say you couldn't use the latter in the page Description tag which could read something like "Company Name will help you find the perfect commercial premises in Birmingham". At the start of the the page itself I would also say something similar. Peter

Cheers Chris. Something like that would be a good fallback plan, but in our case the referral and direct traffic is way more important than organic search. In the absence of any better solution and because we can't ditch the brand and all the non-SEO traffic we've decided to go down the cleanup route.  Even if it doesn't work it's better than sacrificing the referral and direct traffic the brand gets.  Sucks that there seems to be no better solution to this problem, it seems like a common issue.

So, a meta "no-index, follow" tag would be the best advise, here?

Impact of nofollow links from a technical perspective Matt Cutts is a distinguished engineer at Google, and as per him; the simple answer is: No, too many nofollow links have no effect on your website’s PageRank. These links were created to ensure that generating direct traffic to a website could be used as much as needed without compromising the overall quality of the website’s SEO. Therefore, from a technical perspective, the PageRank algorithm will ignore any and all nofollow links. These links are automatically dropped from the link graph as the web crawlers index the web. However, there are exceptional cases where nofollow links will have an effect on the website ranking. Special cases where too many nofollow links have an impact It is possible to use nofollow links to spam websites on the internet trying to generate traffic for whatever product you are promoting. This tactic was once used on blogs where a spammer would post outrageous or absurd comments so as to attract attention and generate traffic. This is deception and manipulation, and where it is done on a large scale, Google will take notice. If many people report you for using nofollow links to spam, Google reserves the right to take action with intent of stopping you. In such cases, they will downgrade the PageRank the offending website gets.

Thank you for your feedback Peter

OK, yes I understand, no problem. It would be good to hear suggestions from others as there may be a better way to represent all of what you want to be able to do. Peter

Hi, my guess is that it is a page extension that is unique to the Content Management System (CMS) you are using but it nothing more significant than that. Certainly it isn't helpful to anyone, human or search. I hope that helps, Peter

I've definitely seen ranking bumps due to fixing this sort of redirect-canonical paradox. XML Sitemap that is inconsistent just adds insult to injury. Your redirects, canonical tags, and XML sitemap should be completely consistent in terms of URL structure, protocol used (http vs https), etc. I highly suggest 'canonicalizing' all of these - agree on one protocol for whole site or for different sections of the site (http vs https), one sub-domain format (www vs non-www), and one method of accessing each piece of content (filter out unnecessary parameters, etc). I find that when you can really consolidate and get rid of diluted dupe-URLs ("index bloat") than you can reach your full potential in terms of rankings. But in short - if URL A has a canonical tag that points to URL B which then redirects back to URL A - it can be extremely confusing to the search engines. Best case - they ignore your canonicals. Worst case - index bloat and serious confusion. Hope that helps!

You'll get way more than 1000 links from WMT.  It says you get links from the top 1000 domains but it's usually quite a bit more.  I have had some spreadsheets from WMT that contain over 30,000 links. John Mueller (Google employee) once said that WMT was all you needed in order to remove a penalty.  So, for over a year that's all I used.  However, in the last couple of months since Google has started to give examples of unnatural links when a site fails, many of those examples are not in WMT!  I think what John meant was that you could see the patterns in WMT such as articles, directories, etc. and then use those patterns to find additional links.  But, if you don't have a list of all of the links that you have made then that is not going to work for most people. So, now, what I do is combine the links from WMT, ahrefs.com, majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer.  It's a pain.  I've written a script that combines them for me but it still takes me quite a while to put them together. With that being said, I have removed penalties from some sites by just using the WMT links.  And then I've had other ones that Google has been really nitpicky on and has not removed the penalty until we addressed every single self made link.

Is Penguin focused primarily on backlinks or does it also assess internal linking/anchor text? In my opinion it is focused on backlinks.   If internal anchor text links would kill a site then wikipedia and any informative site that was built on their hyperlinking model would be dead.   I got a lot of internal anchor text on my sites and nothing has happened. If google wanted to dull the impact of internal anchor text they could do it much more easily by just turning a knob and would not need to put it in the Penguin algo and beat webmasters who have done good for their users by hyperlinking their content.  Google is after manipulation rather than trying to do a "gotcha" on innocent webmasters. My backlink profile also has an over-abundance of affiliate links but that's kind of out of my hands isn't it? You can require any anchor text or linking method that you want.  If they don't like it they can quit or you can turn off their bounty.  You can require nofollow if you want. My affiliate program tells me what I can't and can do.  They have not been telling me how to link but they have their hoops that I better jump through if I want to be paid. You are in the driver's seat.  You just have to decide if you are going to steer or let other people do it for you.

Thanks- we have seen Unnatural links warnings come in as well (other domains) -ranking dropped we left it for a week- and it came back to the same place.... Undecided at this point what i will do- might start with Disavow of links....and go from there...

Just because it works doesn't mean it should be used though. If you are saying "This content is more important on that site", then you could quickly end up with very imbalanced sites. If lots of content on a site has canonical tags to another site then surely it negates the purpose of having multiple sites to start with.... .... but the reasoning behind splitting up a site like that is another discussion entirely!