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Hi You can use the URL removal, which should work fine, but I think this issue was you were blocking crawling in robots.txt for /?id=13 http://thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/robots.txt and www http://www.thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/robots.txt If the crawler is blocked it can not see the redirect, so you would want to remove the /?id=13 from robots.txt and let Google crawl it to see the redirect, and that URL will drop out over time. Something unrelated I just noticed - you should have a better 404 template http://thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/kjhf - one that uses your site's template/design and provides something a little more useful. -Dan

If you use your website content on ebay verbatim.  Then you might have a duplicate content problem that could result in your site being filtered from Google's search results. If you author content on ebay for the same topic that appears on your website be prepared to see ebay.com above you in the search results.  It is very hard to beat ebay, it is awfully hard to beat them.  Did I say that ebay is hard to beat? Linking from your ebay pages to other domains is against ebay rules in most situations.  If you are trying to refer buyers to your website ebay will take action against you. When I sold on ebay, links from their auction and store pages were not allowed unless that link was to a reference only page that did not attempt to refer the visitor to another page.  The rule is probably the same now but you should read their rules to be sure. You are allowed to link to a website in a few situations.  One is from your "about us" pages.  Links out of ebay are OK there.

Hi Ricky, I may not be understanding your question correctly. If a business is local and wants local traffic/business, then optimizing the website will include use of the relevant geographic terms. Regarding keyword research, while the new Google Keyword Planner tool does a better job than the old keyword research tool at indicating volume of searches based on geography, it may still not be totally accurate. You can bet that people are searching for common services in any city, whether they are simply searching from a device based in that city or are actually including the city name in their search term. Thus, inclusion of the city name is key to optimizing the site to help Google understand it is a relevant answer to these queries. Does this make sense, or did I not correctly understand your question? Please, let me know!

Sorry, I only gave a brief look at your site, but my first impressions was that there was very little content, and many outgoing links. When I try to rank keyword pages I have a minimum of 500 words within the content area, but mostly try to aim for 700 - 1000.  Of course this is not always possible, but you have alot of duplicate pages, plus very little text on each of those pages.  I have tried to rank local seo keywords with very similar content like that, and I find it takes alot longer to get indexed and might even bounce in and out of the serps for a while. Gaining more authority will help, as will inserting more text as you can insert more keyword \ keywords variations without appearing spammy with the keyword density.  I think ultimately without unique content you have to be prepared to wait a while for them to be all indexed, and even then there is no guarantee (although better site authority should help). Also might be worth checking your sitemap structure.  I believe there is a limit on what each sitemap can have, so you may need to split it up over several although I believe some plugins do this automatically.

"Do you recommend scrapping the subdomain in such an instance and hosting them all in the main domain in a folder?" Yes. "Would that impact on page load and speed?" No. This PDF is a perfect example of why not to do this, but the same can be said for images. Say you create an awesome infographic that people start linking to/sharing, and it's sitting on your subdomain. There goes your SEO benefit, much like you're experiencing with this PDF. If you have the right hosting service, none of this should impact performance. Looking into a CDN will help for sure. I've heard good things about cloud flare, for example.

PixelKicks gave a good answer. In theory you shouldn't see much, if any, change in rankings, but in practice, any time you move pages, there is some risk.  I don't know if you can do a slow migration or not, but if you can, I'd suggest you do the following. Start small: Move a portion of the pages (maybe a couple hundred thousand for your big site) first, track their traffic and ranking and see if there is any impact.  I'd probably watch the pages for 3-4 weeks just to make sure.  If you see a drop, you may want to keep watching them longer to see if it comes back on its own.  This should give you an indication of what to expect for the other pages. Setup Canonical Tags First If you are able, setup the new pages (or entire new site) and then add canonical tags to all the old pages, pointing to the new pages.  This will actually start the transition process for Google and others and you may see the pages with canonical tags having been switched in Google in just a few days.  After you have seen that most or all the pages have been switched in Google, then setup the 301 redirects. You can see Rand talking about this process in the video on this page: http://moz.com/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday How Long to Recover: You may not see any drop in rankings.  You may see a little shifting for a few days, but then everything settles back to where it was.  If you do see a drop, it's likely that it will recover after a few weeks or months (as PixelKicks indicated).  If, on the other hand, you see a drop and it doesn't self-correct after several weeks, then the recovery is a matter of having to rebuild some authority to your site.  The time that will take will depend on how much work you put in to doing that and what your competition is like. Good luck.  That's a huge site. Kurt Steinbrueck OurChurch.Com

Hi Rav, If you want to PM me your site and example, I'd be happy to have a look and give you any ideas that come to mind. Trying to get kids to bed and just easier if I can look directly vs. following example data.

Thanks Miriam. Another thread suggested (and a couple reputable users said it works) to optimize the site for major city A and create a sub-directory for 2, 5 or 10 other city pages.  I get the approach but what do you do with the footer NAP? I asked for clarity in the other thread but got no takers. So I'll ask here. For this type of optimization to work, would you have to strip the NAP from the footer for big city A site optimization AND the sub-directory individual city optimization? Or can you leave the NAP on all the pages (sub-directory pages included) and just have strong page optimization above the footer throughout? I'm not knowledgeable in root/sub-directory setups so I may not be asking sensible questions.

Now it's clear. Thanks a lot ThompsonPaul!

Just wanted to clear up a bit of confusion. There is a difference between what can be redirected and what will be indexed by search engines. It is absolutely possible to redirect the old URL to the new one that includes the local anchor (hash). In this way, user experience is preserved as for example, the old "what is matcha" page can be redirected directly to the new "what is matcha" tab, landing the user exactly where they expect to be. This is done in .htaccess as normal, but don't forget to escape the # symbol in the URL when you write the redirect. But as Schwaab says, Google will index all the tabs' content as if they were all one page. If you look at the page source for any of those the tabbed pages, you'll see it's actually one primary page that includes separate sections for each tab - you can use GWT's Fetch as Googlebot to confirm this. So getting the main URL indexed means all the tabs' content are indexed, just not under separate URLs. Having separate pages each targeting different but related matcha-related keywords can be beneficial, but so can having a single, longer-content, authoritative page with many more incoming links (as would be the case if the old separate pages were redirected to one primary page, consolidating all their separate link authority). That becomes a judgment call and is where the "art of SEO" come into play Hope that helps? Paul P.S. Little quirk of local anchor URLs. If you're adding parameters to them such as Google Analytics tracking for incoming links, you need to add the hash after the parameters, or the local anchor won't work. e.g. mysite.com#localanchor becomes mysite.com?utmsource=foo&utm_medium=foo&utm_campaign=bar#localanchor

Hi Chris: Thanks for your response. 301 redirects were implemented properly. The redirects were to pages that contained the same content as the original ones. Previously out of 50 target phrases maybe 15 were in Google's top ten ranking. Now maybe 3 are. You are probably right, no going back need to focus on improving the Wordpress site. Thanks, Alan

just something to note for others and for future, you get the notice IN JUNE 2013, and you are posting here asking about in almost in September... this can generally cause mayhem and result in what has happened, a lost message. Gotta be on toppa the game man, notice, next day or same night better get into it!

another method that can hint at this stuff is using the visual view (IN PAGE ANALYTICS) of google analytics (granted link percentages will be calculated from all links to that destination from the page you are trying to analyze, but if you have only 1 link per destination, this will be rather accurate.)

Hi Pushkar... one more question: the site is targeting a Google different from the .com one? Because if it is so, then - despite of all the chat about the EMD Update - that update never rolled out out of Google.com and English, hence the EMD in all the other Googles and languages had been not touched directly, if not because of Penguin and only if their link profile was very poor.

Thanks to you all for taking the time to answer my very long question, it is very much appreciated! I will post updates regarding my my progress! Andy

Yes, it's over a month, and for the most part of the month our page speed score was 66 ave for the 3 seconds. Now, with the adjustments I've made and switching to a new hosting company, we're at an 81 as of this morning. So, I guess if 3 seconds at a 66 isn't terrible, we'll probably be in an acceptable range following the improvements. Either way, thanks so much for the industry stats and the article. It's easy to find "how to make your website faster" info, but MUCH more difficult to find an article that I can trust. Thanks for the tip! Ruben

Hey Carlo I would go for a separate domain but try buying an aged domain that's clean with some existing back links. Failing that a new domain with keywords in the domain. Yea it still works! Hope that helps steve

You should be able to use the Google Places API to include ratings and reviews. Or you can check out how to Embed Google+ Local Business Reviews On Your Website In 3 Easy Steps - which might be easier than tinkering around with their API. Hope this helps. Mike

Hi Rubix (and everyone else!) I actually posted a question of my own that is similar, and another member Vadim Mialik referred me to this video by Matt Cutts (Google) on subdomains vs. subdirectories-- in a nutshell, Matt says that there is really very little difference, and it is up to what you prefer. What do you guys think? P.S. Would be keen to know how you got on with your implementation Cheers, Carlo

Try using ScreamingFrog (app for mac and pc). It's free and will crawl your site and list all the errors an dresponse codes 9inc 404s) you can export these as a CSV file. HTH Steve