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I agree with Rui. If the 301's are in place, this should not be hurting the rankings anymore. WordPress can be a little slower, but you can use something like WP Super Cache to really speed it up. I think the issue with the site now are things like the design, content, the on-site optimization, and also back links as Rui pointed out. I would refocus back onto making the site as best you can, and definitely don't shy away from using WordPress. -Dan

Mat is correct, to put it short. A weak site about dogs, may beat a strong site about cats for the search term "dogs"

Some great tips here! Thanks guys. Regarding guest blogging, I've had some pretty fantastic results. My tips are to make sure the site is REALLY relevant and don't use keyword rich anchor text.

Thanks well spotted

Thanks Alan all done so far so good thanks for your help

Thanks guys.

I would allow Google to crawl those pages for a little while longer just to ensure that they see the rel canonical tags. Then once you feel that they have recrawled the IP address pages you can disallow them again if you want, thought that isn't entirely necessary if you have the rel canonical tag set up properly. Another option would be to 301 redirect the IP version of the page to the corresponding www. version. If they still don't drop from the index you can use the URL Removal Tool in GWT, but you will have to set up a GWT account for each of the IP domains.

As far as an drops in traffic on certain dates, there's not enough traffic and data there to tell. Being that most of the terms were on page 2, traffic has been low,spotty and inconsistent. This is one of the first things I looked at but was unable to spot any obvious dates.

If it isn't going to be so much work that it will wreck the budget or take someone off of something more urgent, I would use schema markup on anything on which it can be legitimately used - regardless of whether or not Google is currently showing that particular itemtype. Google currently only uses some of them, but will probably add more later. Other sites are starting to use the markup for things like Offers, too. Pinterest just announced that they are now going to have "rich pins", for example. So you can add the markup now and be a little ahead of the game, or wait until you need to catch up.

Hi h2o2, maybe the phrasing wasnt clear but I think you misunderstood: "For bigger sites especially I really wouldnt advise not using breadcrumbs."

IMO don't do it. I know that Matt cuts once said that linking to high authoritive sites can be beneficial, but he did not elaborate how. I really don't  think it helps you rank better. I would have at least one link out as reading the original google algorithm a page with no external links is a hanging page and not included in page rank calculations, there is a line of thought that this is also true on a website level. so at leas one external link on your site. The idea is to have news linking to you, and you not linking to it. Screenshots seems ok.

As donna said they look at the whole url, but I would prefere the fiile name to be descriptive, I would do something like /horror/frankenstein.png

Thanks so much Thomas for your thoughts.  I definitely don't want to have duplicate content.   I guess what I am still wondering is this.   One of the sites is a church and they have their own website in our town.  The pastor for the church has been posting his sermons and blogging on blogger.  So we are going to move them from blogger to wordpress (big fan here too) and I was just going to redirect everything and in effect shut the blogger site down but what I am wondering now is if it makes sense to leave some remnants of the blogger site behind (beyond just the redirected urls). Maybe we shoud eave a few posts that only appear on blogger so that perhaps we can get an occasional extra spot near the top of the serps for some keywords.  I would also not be surprised if having a verifiable history of authorship on blogger that goes back a ways further than any imported page would be factored in by google when looking at the author's authority on the topic (i.e. in this case religion and my home town).  Also, having authorship on two different domains would show diversity and help as well.

I found this article useful: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-in-2013-7-surprisingly-simple-factors-that-will-take-the-lead/57092/ Hope it helps, Best regards, Holger

Hi Nakul, Maybe the initial post was not explicit enough: we will obviously redirect (301) all the old URLs. And to make sure we won't mess it up with the redirections, we want to update the new product URLs littl by little, product area by product area. Which means that during this "transition" period, some product URLs will have the old structure, some others will have the new URL structure (both are given above) and the question is: does Google matter about the coherence of (product pages) URLs in the same website?

Ok, thanks Peter, really appreciate the advice! Ill give that a go and see if that brings down the errors on the website.

Thank you guys, I agree with you and I think I have to remove the prices from the structured data. Our prices are not really "lower" than competition because our music is very high quality, and quality must be paid. So, I think it is not good for us to have pricing display, and you gave me confirmation to this doubt. Now: do you think it is easy to remove the pricing from Google results just as removing the structured information from our product pages? Is there any other way (or additional way) to tell Google "We don't want you to show our prices?". I also read that Google may associate natural search results with Merchant Center datafeed (we are on there), and if that's the case how to solve it? Thank you again.

Not necessarily. I run a news website that covers current affairs. And as my site is in a small niche but has good domain authority, it ranks well for many random search terms. My bounce rate is about 83% but still ranks #1 for all my main keywords. Naturally, I'd prefer if it were lower, but it does show that it's not a critical factor. I'm pretty sure it counts a lot more when Google calculates your quality score in AdWords however.

So your assertion that because we bring in some content from FourSquare (note through their API not by "scrapping" it) that we aren't providing value is really off the mark. It is not about value.  It is what google sees as duplicate content that is available on many sites.    Google is demoting or filtering lots of pages that have content available on other websites. Yelp and Urbanspoon might get away with it because they are more powerful than other websites. I know that you don't like my answer.   I am telling you why I believe your traffic is down. Here is a big reason.   Your site is showing lots of duplicate content.

In addition to the speed issue, 301-redirects function just like a regular link - that is to say they lose a little bit of "link juice" in the transfer. So definitely fix the incorrect links to point directly to the correct URL. No sense wasting any "juice" unnecessarily. My $0.02 Paul