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I suppose it's possible that duplicate content could be an issue if the exact same content is on other sites.  Try changing the content on the homepage so it's no longer duplicate and see what happens. It's hard to say what's going on without doing an investigation into the situation.  It could be a duplicate content issue, but then again Google likes to show the pages (not sites) which they think are most relevant.  Perhaps, for one reason or another, Google just thinks those sub-pages are more relevant to the search query than the homepage is. Kurt Steinbrueck OurChurch.Com

Chris is absolutely right. User experience should come first and foremost - in fact, forget about Google, think about the user. One idea I had was to combine all that great content into a PDF/eBook style download as such things are generally pretty good for link baiting, etc.

I don't think there is a problem in removing the 301s.  You are not doing anything underhand.  The 301 is in place because for whatever reason you have decided it is better for your visitor to reach the redirected page.  There could be many valid reasons why the original pages are now valid, you aren't always to know a redirect is definitely temporary. Just in the same way you may need to amend a 301 to a new URL. However, I would introduce the URLs back in small batches and monitor rankings and traffic.

it's just about the code and how it's applied on your site but mostly it's not that big of a deal unless you are running a huge site. Try out Ron said though if you have time.

alhalinan Seems lot of collegues have issues with it indeed. Regarding the keyword planner tool it takes more steps to have the overview the old tool supplied. Change in data is that the app changed form broad to exact results. I believe a lot of testing is the way to go and to verify this with your old data. Furthermore I came a tool called Seocockpit, may be that helps. Reviews are fine anyway. Hope this helps ..

How about replicating what Amazon is doing.  They do non-stop user testing, and understand SEO very well.  Maybe take some pointers from their workflow.  Its seems they have category open sub-categories and once you click on a sub-category it goes to the item page with various products matching the category. Hope this helps

Hi Hannah, thank you very much, I really do appreciate the response, that is very helpful.

To clear up any uncertainty, I think there are two questions being asked: Link to be disavowed: Do I disavow both the www and non-www versions of a bad link? Site you own: Which site in webmaster tools do I upload the disavow list to - www or non-www? The link to be disavowed is an easy answer because in most cases if you want a link disavowed, you probably don't want a link from that domain (because its suspect, de-indexed, etc.).  Therefore you can simply blanket it with domain:badwebsite.com. This will be sure to get any link from this site to yours, regardless of the subdomain (i.e. www.badwebsite.com, ww2.badwebsite.com, forum.badwebsite.com, etc.) Answer #2 isn't quite as easy. The safest (and arguably proper) way is to link mine both the www and non-www versions of your website and treat each as a separate site (as Google does). Even if you are using 301 redirects or canonicals I still recommend this method. In many cases, one version will have a much smaller backlink volume. In any case, pick out the bad links and try to get them removed by emailing the website. Once the attempt has been made, Compile the remaining backlinks (still in separate lists for www and non-www), and upload them to their respective disavow tool areas.

It doesn't actually help. All this does is bookmark your information for users quickly so they can access pages quickly that they want. I do this quite often when I have a site or page that I want to get to quickly - just a regular bookmark. NO impact on SEO/SEM what-so-ever (but it could in the future if Google added another feature metric/variable to track!)

Hi Keith, I'd recommend starting by compressing the images (if you haven't already). You mentioned that you've had trouble shrinking the images responsively, but you should be able to use a plugin like WP Smush.it. Compressing images is good for desktop site speed as well. I'd agree with Bradley's CSS recommendation to fix the sizing issue; and for load time you can use CSS image sprites to combine multiple images. I don't necessarily think that there's a problem with checking for the user-agent, and serving a different version of your images, but as Bradley pointed out, they still need to look good on a high res screen. Cloud Four wrote a couple posts that go more in-depth into ways of dealing with responsive images (although these are not specifically Wordpress solutions): http://blog.cloudfour.com/responsive-imgs-part-2/ (from 2011) http://blog.cloudfour.com/8-guidelines-and-1-rule-for-responsive-images/ (from 2013) You might also want to consider consolidating and minifying your CSS and Javascript files if you're concerned about page load time. Here's an article with these and a couple other tips: http://searchengineland.com/how-to-tune-up-responsive-design-websites-to-improve-mobile-seo-124370 Hope that helps!

I think there are some great answers here - the social / content / PR suggestions are all solid. I think there may be merit in looking to see if there are long tail queries which you can capture, however I'd encourage you think about how relevant those terms might be. For example 'womens designer sunglasses' (arguably not truly long tail, but let's go with it for now) sounds like it's pretty relevant, however it's still pretty competitive and I'd argue that your client's site isn't a great result for that search term given that they only sell their own brand of sunglasses. As such whilst that term might look appealing I'd suggest that even if you did manage to rank for it, it might not convert as well as you'd hope. In terms of managing your client's expectations I'd look to explain things to them in those terms - their site is a great result for branded searches, and the best way to make more money is likely to be by increasing branded searches. How do you do that? It's a marketing play - likely incorporating PR, social, online and offline marketing activity. I hope this helps, Hannah

Thanks Robert, appreciate the reply.

Yeah, I have all of that in place.  I found 1 external link from an https , and 1 on my blog that was just an error one of my employees made.  2 Links total, at least thats what I found.  Robots blocking everything you mentioned.  My header uses absolute paths. I do agree with you on one thing, once kicked, the little things that may not have mattered over the past 15 years all the sudden pop up as problems... At the same time I have heard the complete opposite, people are kicked and then they are right back where they used to be a few weeks after being included. Competitive sabotage is positively happening, unless a random person who happens to live in the same city my competitor is located just went awol and decided they wanted to spam my offsite forums, attempt to hack the website multiple times, and add me to a spam link rink. Anyway a webmaster says he has changed the canonical on their end to http , although it hasnt changed yet.  I'm sure this could take a few days or longer to take place.  Hopefully that is the fix, we'll see though and thanks for the advise!

Howl, 1. I would mark all up as a food establishment. Under menu/cuisine where you serve no food I would simply put an alcohol menu or link or on cuisine put we server beer, wine, tequila. etc. The reason is this: you are using schema because it is good for you and the search engines. Within the various schema are other properties. So for FoodEstablishment there is ... Bar or Pub. A bar or pub is a food establishment. So is an ice cream shop, winery, brewery, etc. 2. This is the page url. For me in Houston... http://www.howlatthemoon.com/locations/location-houston 3. I suggest you put in your own review schema and make the site where your customers can review you. Why would you want to serve yelp?? What do they do for you? Your site is using Joomla and with a quick check I found several review plugins you could utilize to make life simpler. We do not use Joomla as much but we often use a review plugin with our WP sites. And, it passes the markup test with Google. 4. Opening Hours - Here is the schema for opening hours. Pretty easy. If you look at the bottom of Local Business, you will see what will or will not work. 5. Here is the actual event schema from Schema.org Upcoming shows <div< span="">itemprop="event"itemscopeitemtype="http://schema.org/Event"></div<> <a< span="">href="foo-fighters-may20-fedexforum"itemprop="url"></a<> <span< span="">itemprop="name">FedExForum</span<> <span< span="">itemprop="location">Memphis, TN, US</span<> <meta< span="">itemprop="startDate"content="2011-05-20">May 20</meta<> <a< span="">href="ticketmaster.com/foofighters/may20-2011"itemprop="offers">Buy tickets</a<> <div< span="">itemprop="event"itemscopeitemtype="http://schema.org/Event"></div<> <a< span="">href="foo-fighters-may23-midamericacenter"itemprop="url"></a<> <span< span="">itemprop="name">Mid America Center</span<> <span< span="">itemprop="location">Council Bluffs, IA, US</span<> <meta< span="">itemprop="startDate"content="2011-05-23">May 23</meta<> <a< span="">href="ticketmaster.com/foofighters/may23-2011"itemprop="offers">Buy tickets</a<> So, you are going down the right path, I have never been to Howl in Houston but will check it out. Best, Robert

Could you explain that second paragraph? Why do you want to buy a domain that's not only penalized, but whose links are entirely coming from a site you already own? I think I'm misunderstanding the situation.

You could put the content in an iFrame and then noindex the iFrame (or robot.txt it). That way you are not allowing Google to browse that part of the page as it is actually from another page you are blocking. I honestly like the image option.  I think you have more options that way to make it "pretty" and it also keeps it pretty much out of Google.  Google can do some OCR work, but could not see why it would penalize you are you are trying to hide keyword stuffing  The solution with the iFrame would for sure keep it out. Good luck!

Thanks a lot everybody for your input. In order to make the decision it would be great to learn more on how google determines the topic of an ecommerce site. Many of these potential factors should be relatively easy to test, by watching ranking changes after additions of new product segments to a site. Did you ever see any article/post on the topic or did you notice yourself drops of rankings after adding a limited number of new product segments to a site? Main factors could be: related keywords on index page/title percentage of products with related keywords percentage of links from external topical related sites Anything else? By considering these, I could increase likelyhood that google considers my site relevant for all 3 segments. So maybe by offering just a limited number of 3 different product segments, disadvantage for ranking on keywords may not be so significant compared to single topic site.

Michael, Yes, that's what I have in mind, maybe I didn't explain it well but that exactly the idea ...I am just not so sure how to 301 redirect the main domain, I will discuss with my programmer the code you provided on your answer. Cheers

Hello Bob, Considering you are selling stickers regarding supplements, etc. you really do not have a worry. First, no poison words and second, the search engines have already said, "we need your help with this and we would like to provide a solution." Since you are selling a product: use Product markup and there will be no question as to what you are involved in.  Even if you did not, and you were still selling stickers. The robots will look at a lot on the page and they will semantically infer who or what you are / are selling, etc. So, if you have supplements over and over and discount preceeds it, the inference will be that you are selling discount supplements. But if you have stickers for supplement bottles. Stickers for supplement boxes, etc. you will fall elsewhere. (Yes, all, I am being simplistic.) Good question though as I have heard the 'rumors' of the poison words, etc. Just never seen any proof.

This is all to do with the technical handling of non ASCII characters and how they have to be presented in the URL.  If the browser is set to UTF-8 then it should be able to read the percent encoding. Take a read of these: http://www.jamesburton.net/url-design-for-international-seo/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3907995/how-to-support-utf8-japanese-arabic-spanish-urls-in-php