Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Yes, I'm using a bunch of them: http://visualitineraries.com/itinsitemap.asp http://visualitineraries.com/regionsitemap.asp http://visualitineraries.com/poisitemap.asp for example.  I'm successfully using them with both Bing and Google.

I'd second Erwan's questions - did other signals confirm the Toolbar PR update? Have you lost ranking, search traffic, etc. Not only is TBPR notoriously unreliable, but this could reflect something that happened 3-6+ months ago, and maybe it's reversed by now. It's very, very hard to pin down a timeline from TBPR, and if you were penalized, a timeline is critical.

My guess would be the person in charge of procuring and/or installing the cert took a day of vacation today and Monday things are closed for the Labor Day holiday... just guessing : ) That or just working it into their schedule. Sometimes at larger companies the people managing the website for SEO/Content/etc. are not the same people managing things on the back-end.

Hey Thanks Oliver, much appreciated (& Ron Too)

Doug, That was splendid add up! Thank you very much for the time and effort you've put to help us out. I will do all the things you suggested. Thanks Lily

I would suggest utilizing larger content marketing campaigns geared at the industry / vertical authorities. At the same time, be careful to place too much weight on DA as a metric of concern. DA is a result of high level link and content strategies. It is great for comparative purposes, and serves as a fantastic benchmark, but search revenue, CRO, acquisition and retention for your your audience is probably more important.

I did! Thank you! I wasn't intending to lump you in which is why I kept saying things like "he" and "his post." Sorry for the confusion there. I felt like branding and content had a lot to do with the conversation. I see we agree on this point and I thought we did from the get-go. I don't think the blogger in this case was trying to talk about the micro niche sites that you reference. At least that wasn't the vibe I gathered. He talked about branding and content building and those two things don't seem to match. I agree that what you say blackhat works for is a great example of where it "belongs" or "works" in the short-term. Anyway thanks.

eyepaq, Thanks a lot for your time on studying my site and for your input on this matter. I have never received a message from Google about spam issues on this site and I just checked the "manual" section and it's empty. I'm afraid it could have been hacked as you stated above, I will need to audit all my link profile. Cheers

Thanks for the clarification Everett.

I am not sure if anyone uses CloudFlare, but I think it may be to blame. After doing some research, I believe it may be hurting my rankings as it slow TTFB. Just took it off of my blog. I will let you know if things return to normal.

Hi Steve, So glad my reply was helpful. Good for you for getting the NAP into compliance. You've done your client a major service.

Hey Robert, Thanks for your answer. I understand the confussion reading my question. Yes my client is still in positon 1. It's pretty clear that the lower conversionrate an visits are due to the drop in traffic from that searchphrase. The thing that I find most puzzling is that a keyword that had a volume of almost 50.000 per month in my country got completely removed from the autocomplete. It was a simple two word search term, the new preferred keyword in the autocomplete is the same except, for a space and the last letter.

Hello Taylor, You are correct that there are risks in this strategy, however I think they are mostly mitigated if you use the cross-domain rel canonical tag (i.e. a rel canonical tag with an absolute path pointing to the "homebase" page). You will also be keeping those subdomains from ranking if you use this tag, so if the goal is to have a landing page for organic search traffic optimized for each region then a rel canonical tag probably isn't the best option, as the only page to rank will be the homebase page, or whichever you say is the canonical version. Make sense? Please let me know if you need further assistance with this question.

Hello Pat, I do not have experience merging a Ruby site with another type of site, but I think we are confusing issues here anyway. You can have content in a database that gets served up anywhere. That is, you can pull that content into ten different websites if you wanted to. The database issue is almost irrelevant to the SEO issues, which have mainly to do with loss of pagerank from URL changes, and possible duplicate content issues. A 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one would take care of both of these issues. If you are unable to redirect all of the old content my suggestion would then be to figure out which URLs have external links and redirect those. Let all of the other ones return a 404 or 410 status code so those URLs will be removed from the index since the content will exist on the new URL and you don't want two URLs with the same content indexed simultaneously. Please let us know if we have missunderstood the question or if we can provide more help with your original question. You may want to post your Ruby question in another thread to ensure the right people see it. Thanks!

According to this article http://www.seroundtable.com/farmer-headers-13111.html It sounds like I should be 404ing these pages since I never plan to re-writer them and I want them removed from my site and from the index. According to this article http://www.seroundtable.com/google-robotstxt-advice-12759.html They believe you shouldn't use robots.txt.. Anyone know the best option in this situation? Should I just 404 a handful of the 40k pagination pages every week/month until they are all 404'd?

Hi Mike, Yes, homepage was ranking for both keywords. Find below keywords: Master Spa filter Downeast spa parts h2x swim spa parts legacy spa parts legacy whirlpool filter Thanks Mohit

Google seems to be rolling out changes to Google Webmaster Tools. I SWEAR I saw our results drop to nearly 0 on the 23rd and back to normal today. I just checked the GWT right now and the results look like normal (no drop) AND it seems that Google has updated the reporting on BlogPosting and SiteNavigationElement. Both of them seem to show a 'name' field. I am so confused how the SiteNavigaitonElement is supposed to be marked up at this point. If you use an unordered list for your nav should you markup the , and should you have a span that includes the name property?

Here is something that comes from this article that confuses me. http://www.seroundtable.com/mobile-sites-google-sitemaps-12709.html Yes, with "mobile" we mean the traditional mobile phone browsers, not smart-phones (which we generally treat the same as desktop browsers given their advanced capabilities). Using special CSS/HTML templates for smart-phones would be fine and would not require submitting them via mobile Sitemap. It keeps things a bit easier if you want to focus on smart-phones, but there are still a gigantic number of more traditional phones with limited internet browsing capabilities out there :-). Based on this we don't need Mobile sitemap for Smartphone sites. Its only needed for traditional mobile sites.

That may be because the previous site owners verified that it was a mirror site and have not undone it. You should contact whoever you purchased the domain from and ask if they could double check they still aren't listing it as a mirror site.