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Thanks again Mike... Our URL structure I think meets Google's requirements - but there is yet no breadcrumbs appearing... does that appear depeding on domain reputation?

Yeah, we had suspected that just having too many keywords that are too similar could be causing confusion for search engines, but it's good to have a third party affirmation to support that assessment. We do intend to rework and "un" optimize some of our pages that are competing with one another and see what happens. Thanks for the assistance and for sharing that blog article too.

Hi John, Subdomains are technically different websites, I don't see why Google would give your main website the benefits of the SEO gained from the sub-site. With that said, having it on its own URL is preferable  purely from a click-through perspective. Users are much more likely to visit and spend time on a site that's clearly its own over one that seems like a 'bolt on' to someone elses. I hope that helps! Andrew

The key is to make sure your website growth, authority and success is natural. I have personally witnessed a client who has tried to "get to number one in Google" by rushing into activities of obtaining vast numbers of inbound links and ultimately they logged into GWT one day to see a nice message from Google notifying them of the suspicious activity. Keep things simple. Start with fixing any errors within the HTML by running your site through the WC3 validator. I can see you have 8 errors on the homepage.  Easily fixable.  Then run your site the Y-Slow browser add-on.  The page loading time is taken into consideration with search engines.  You are currently getting a Grade C - see if you can improve this somewhat. One thing at a time. Oh and remember, its no longer about "being number 1" so much now, its about measuring your goals and conversion rates and determining success that way.  Stick some kind of track_pageview onto the "start test" button, then you can compare how many people visit your homepage and also compare how many actually ran the speed test system.  The fact that the speed test is the main function of your site suggests you should see that the number of visitors to your homepage should not be too disimilar to the number of people who run the test.  If there is a big difference, find out why.  Good luck. I got 9mb per second by the way.

Ah, ok got it, thanks.  From an SEO perspective I definitely wouldn't worry about it since the link goes to a registration form and doesn't have any SEO value.  You might even decide that its better to keep the page out of the index altogether (but again, I wouldn't spend much time on it).    The better alternative for redirects is a 301 redirect on the old URL, and updating all your internal links with the new URL.  If this was an important page I'd consider doing it, but for this page it would be last on my never-ending list of priorities.

Correct, I don't see a duplication issue.

if those pages are all in the same directory are in a couple of them you can remove them using the removal from index tool in gwt, in order to make this those pages should return a 404 or being noindexed (which is what you already did).

Hi BJS, normally the most important page of a website is the homepage not just because it is the homepage but because is the most linked page interanlly where all the juice flows, so the pages which are nearest the homepage are supposed to be the most important too. The farest they are from your homepage, so the more hidden they are the least important they are. Moreover if a page is widely linked internally the more important it should be just because if many products belongs to a category, the most this category is linked through breadcrumbs and the more content it has. Don't be concerned about having products deep in structure is normal that for the most competitive kw categories are the pages which are focusing on those terms because these are the most useful pages for users to filter and find what they're looking for.

I think with Google's Keyword Tool you need to choose your match type. If you choose broad or phrase, then it will pick up any and all instances of "presonus 16" but if you choose exact, then it won't. So I think that Google does compile data on the words typed as well as on the suggestions. But I haven't heard of any data that suggests they are willing to be public about how reliant on the data they are. I know for Google Instant Suggest (or whatever it's called) if you click on the suggestion within a second or two the ads don't count that as an impression, so it may be similar to that kind of thing? Google may see the blue linked suggestion click within a specific time as the actual intended search query.

Paul is like the cleanup hitter. We all get on base and he drives em home.

First, Daniel, you should have access to FTP (File Transfer Protocol or where website is hosted). For this, you will need to contact the company who created the website to request access these data: 1 - Use FTP 2 - FTP account password 3 - Port (if needed) If the website can be managed through an interface (CMS, eg Wordpress, Joomla or Custom CMS), you'll need a username and a password. In the case of a simple website consisting of HTML and CSS, you should consider the following issues: Meta Titles, Meta Descriptions, Links Anchors and Titles, Images Alts and visible content. For more information, read the Begginer Guide. If a CMS like Wordpress, you can install various SEO plugins to ease your work. Example: AllInOne or Yoast SEO Pack. It's easy to use. Have a great day! Mike.

Yep. If you had links to that page from other authority pages, the pagerank/authority would transfer over, even with the indexing issue.

Hmm, good point. I would like to think that they would have something in place to recognize that. e.g. when a crawler from CA crawls and the keywords change to CA, G would recognize that the listings are generated based on geoip (which should be a considered a good thing for relevance). In addition, you said it was a small portion of the page's content so it probably wouldn't affect rankings much. In G's own words, focus on the user instead of the search engine. In this scenario, your users and you have a lot more to gain from having much more targeted listings show up on your site. Cheers, Oleg

This plugin automatically 301 redirects image attachment pages to the parent post, simply install and activate, done: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/attachment-pages-redirect/

If your website have problem with delay in cached, follow the following steps: Check the crawl error and robots.txt if any through GWT Re-fetched the website through GWT with "URL and linked pages submitted to index" option. Try to increase your website visibility through Social bookmarking and social networking promotion You will get sure benefit through above practice.

That's exactly right.  In fact, a couple of years ago many SEO's believed that sub folders would have more SEO value than subdomains, as it would ensure that all of the SEO "strength", as it were, would pass to the root domain. We've moved away from this now as people have tested subdomains and found that the strength passes equally to them as well.  Whether you go with subdomains or sub-folders, either way the SEO value will pass.

I agree with Andie, subdomains are basically new websites. They carry NO value because they are in a new folder, not a subfolder. If you want to make your URLs prettier, check to see if there is a plugin for the software you use to simplify the process. If you have only a couple hundred products, I would go old school and stay away from plugins.

Hi there Durand, I'm not quite sure of the logic here. Is there any reason you're wanting to move domain names? As a general rule of thumb, I wouldn't suggest splitting up parts of your site across different domain names. Related pages are stronger together, weaker apart. Andie

Thanks guys!  Yeah the links are for users.  I think I've got the answer I was looking for.

It is usually better to redirect one to one instead of redirecting from a redirect. Where possible it should be avoided because eventually, if you chain too many redirects to redirects, Google will stop caring. There will be no negative impact from changing an old redirect to point at a more relevant page. You may want to double-check that the level of traffic and inbound links pointing to the page is worth going through the trouble of the 301 instead of letting it 404. Sometimes it can be better to just let a page die if no one is clicking through on it.