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i also run a hundred hotel sites that has that, it doesnt really matter SEO wise. I would test it and look into conversions instead. Good luck!

Thanks Tom, Oh that's your Amazon store too, good stuff then! Haha the niche isn't 'cats in bomber jackets', but may as well be lol! As the niche has many EMD's and matching product URL's I'm paying close attention to the competition in the SERP's. Although, as with many things, testing is probably the best way to find out. I'll see how it goes, with the current structure and if I can only get so far maybe try the 'flatter' approach. thanks again, Greg

Please see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo

I don't see anything wrong with the site. You have good titles and meta descriptions as far as i can see. You have the Open Graph meta tags and i don't see any problems. You said your impressions are going down. Maybe you should broaden your audience? Google+ Communities is a good place if you're not active in one or several communities. I'm pretty sure there are some good communities on 3D subjects. I didn't find a link to your Pinterest account on the site. Pinterest might seed your needs because i see a lot of cool images and videos in your articles. You might find a better audience there. Hope i gave some valuable advise which you can work with.

If your back link profile is good it's just coincidental that your traffic drop, your IP address change, and Penguin2 all happened on the same day, then wait it out--obviously you're doing something well to have all those back links. If your link profile is on the low quality side, it's probably time to start cleaning house and doing the things penguin victims have to do. Here's a little more info on the May 22nd penguin update.

Thanks so much, Mihai! I'll investigate into the rel="canonical" tag solution.

Hi There You might want to give Screaming Frog a shot for creating XML sitemaps. Here's a post which talks about how. Basically, since you can customize the crawl, this will allow you to exclude the parameters etc. I'd give that a shot. -Dan

What areas are going to need canonical? Also, what areas have www and non-www redirect problems? Working on the rest as we speak.

Is there a particular date where you saw a drop because the recent Penguin update (think was 22nd May) took place. If you're noticing a drop here then you may have been hit by Penguin and need to take a deeper look into your link profile. What's your URL?

Something must have gone wrong because my inbox is empty. Perhaps you can resend it?

Hi Pert, Karl and Bryan are right here - "domain forwarding" sounds to me like the common web hosting account feature, and this is generally a global 301 of all URLs of one domain to the home page of the new domain. You want to achieve page-to-page 301 redirects if possible (and if there are external links to deep pages you don't want to lose). The problem with domain-level forwarding is any deep links you've built end up pointing to the new home page, and you lose that nice deep inbound link structure that helps your deeper pages rank. Deep pages are the hardest to build links to, so that can often be a tall price to pay. The Open Site Explorer "Top Pages" tab is a great way to check out which deep pages have inbound links. As for additional concerns, I'd keep in mind that 301 redirects for SEO purposes are a pretty old school trick, and definitely one that Google is wise to. I wouldn't expect you'd end up penalized for it, but the value of those links could easily be stripped. As a bit of insurance, you might want to consider some outreach to those in-linking sites to ask them to update the links. I wouldn't mention SEO or anything related as that can really turn people off - make it about the users. But, in the event Google strips the equity passed from redirected links, you've saved some of it. And I'd also be careful that there are no shady links pointing to the domain you plan to redirect. If they get caught in the next wave of Penguin/similar, the site you're redirecting to could suffer a penalty. Best of Luck, Mike

What did you find out?

Hi Wesley, I am glad to be of help. Hopefully there's a way you can still work with the gentleman and do something that will still generate a good ROI, but does not use the tactics he originally wanted to. I wish you up when you speak with him. I'll all the best my friend, Thomas

Yeah, I think you are right. I am glad I checked 301 on WMT just to make sure there are no issues with the 301 redirect. Cheers, C

Thank you Mike!! I really did learn something today about canonicals Much Appreciated!

Thank you Linda!

If you submit a reconsideration request, the first thing they're going to do is see if you have a manual penalty. Then they might look to see if you deserve a manual penalty. So unless you've got a Webmaster Tool notice that you definitely have a penalty, don't ask for reinclusion. Most likely you've been hit by Penguin and your backlinks are devalued.

That's my thought as well (about link-purchasing/black hat), [insert expletive]. Like I said, horrible situation. I'm waiting on somebody to get me the login details, but even so, I suspect whomever was managing it prior to my team taking over a new site design would have actually deleted any notices to cover their tracks. Short of a whole new domain, definitely no 301s, correct? It's going to take Herculean convincing to get somebody to approve a different domain, we are supposed to launch in a few days.

I have tried using them and didn´t do anything - furthermore, if you check this video out by Google themselves, you will find that using these parameters is a "hint/suggestion" as opposed to a solid directive. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiEYcBZ36po Rel Canonical is also a hint. But Meta Noindex,follow is a solid directive which they have to pay attention to. Hope that helps - been there, done it got the t shirt through a lot of pain and frustration!

Or 5. Shorten the keywords in the url post ie title: Some Post titles are quite long as they are long tail terms url: /parent-category/child-category/post-titles-long/