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Yes you should only have 1 H1 tag per page, I didn't realise the "International Mailing List" was the H1. As Market Stomper said, it was more about UX and separating the paragraphs.

Hi Chris, Thanks for the reply. We have seen a few drops in rankings since the unconfirmed update last week so I've noted all our current rankings so I can compare them once the changes have been made. We have been SEO'ing the website for a while now but the web company made some changes to their CMS and messed things up!

Hi Rahul, The answer is with nofollow attributes. You will still maintain your human organization, while telling the Google bot what content is important and where to go. Hope that helps.

They could identify if there is a higher than average number of anchor text links with specific keyword phrases. If your distribution of anchor text is very different than the average site in that niche it would be detectable.

site.com and site.com/index.html are both loading index.html  So open Index.html, add the canonical tag back to your preferred version and you're done. If you're saying that you want the link to be something different, that depends on how the site is setup, whether you can change the "home" button or whatnot. In Wordpress's new menus this is simple. In other themes, not so much. In other CMS, I don't know because "it depends."

Hi Luke, You raise some interesting points. I imagine the main problem here is that the web is meant to be open and shared. In almost all circumstances you should only be linking out where somebody else's website provides good value to your users. Nofollow then becomes useful when you're linking out in things like comments, where you as the site's editor can't actually endorse the quality of the linked site. By swapping that paradigm around it's assumed that every site is "bad until proven worthy" - but because the web is already built up of billions of links that don't have nofollow it's kind of too late for that mentality to work. Google does take and act on spam reports which you can do so at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en if you believe sites are designed to spam. Andrew

I would go with another solution tho. I will start analyzing the pages where you have the highest CTR, then on those the highest bounce rate. Are those visitors leaving because the content is useless or because they finished reading the piece and there's nowhere to go? Consider all variables and try improving the content pages to include links to related posts kinda "You may find this articles interesting", or "Related Articles", etc. Try improving the site navigation, if you are getting CTR from search, then do whatever you can to keep those visitors there, by improving user experience and navigation. Hope that helps!

Thanks for your useful response. Yes, I'm thinking it's a numbers game. If a company goes very aggressively after ad links or directory links (and even less obvious types of  link - too much blogger outreach, for example) I guess they're asking for trouble. To be honest, I don't even tell people what back-linking anchor text I want either, from journalists or bloggers for example. I just let everything flow naturally. I feel far more comfortable that way.

Hi Rahul, I'll be curious to hear what others think about this. My reaction is that there is zero benefit to looking exclusively at a link on your site from an SEO/link-juice perspective. Taking that approach is going to get you into trouble. The reason I say that is any link that falls in the category of "I have this link for SEO purposes!" and any tricks used to make links unique (like using hash tags or query strings) for link juice purposes, will probably be ignored or penalized by Google. If it isn't ignored or penalized today, chances are it will be in the future as Google moves more in the direction of quality-related metrics. Any link that is not put in specifically for great UX really isn't worth having from any perspective, including link-juice/SEO perspectives. In regards to your other question, you would put your primary links in the top navigation and the body text because that is what users expect. If all of my users want to see my "Cool New Widgets" page, then I better have that link in the navigation. I probably should have that in the body of the page as well and maybe even in the footer. Will all those locations pass link juice? Probably not. But what is my main concern? Getting link juice or getting customers to the right page? I'll err on the side of getting customers to my page and having less than perfect link juice optimization because, in general, that is going to have bigger SEO wins. So, that is my two cents anyway. I'll be curious to see other replies about this question. Matthew

Are you any good at what you? How wil the prospective customer benefit form hiring you? Do you have satisfied customers ? Who is your target audience? You need to hit as many of these crucial points as possible. It's hard! Writing meta descriptions is a bit like writing haiku. Mentioning both the free assessment and free trial may be a mistake. It's a mixed message that is overly complicated. Maybe something like: Thousands of satisfied customers love our over- the- top IT support. Find out why during your free trial. May we delight you? or: With over 30 years experience, we delight customers with our over-the-top 24/7 IT support. Ask for a free trial today.

I just took a look and it looks like the page was last crawled less than 2 weeks ago. I also looked in GWT and I actually see 7 dir.yahoo links! Woot. Thanks Nakul.

Hi, Your robots.txt file is very .. steroid healthy. It has his own universe Are you 100% sure all of the entries are legit and clean ? First thing I would do is to check Web M;aster Tools for the mobile subdomain. If you don't have it yet, that will be a good place to start - to verify the m subdomain. Once in WeB Master Tools - you can debug this in no time. Cheers.

Not quite certain what you mean here, Joseph. Are you saying that the whole website is made up of a WordPress install, and that install is at /home? Or are saying that you have a website, and part of that site is a WordPress install at /home. I.e. are there any pages of your website that are not generated by WordPress? If your whole website consists of just the WordPress install, you absolutely need to move it to the root of the domain. There are just too many future problems, compromises and hassles if you leave it where it is. The canonical tag (even if you could use it in this instance) is no magic bullet to make up for a sub-optimal architecture decision. Paul

All feedback was very helpful. Thanks guys!

From other blog posts and my also from own experience, you are losing approx 15% linkjuice for each 301 hop. Too many hops and Google will give up ...Matt Cutts recommended not having more than 2 or at the most 3 redirect hops for googebot to crawl.

Thanks guys! God I feel so stupid - I should have checked that. I got so obsessed about the magento/wordpress thing that checking the canonical completely slipped my mind! Oh well at least if anyone else ever has the same problem, the resolution is here for all to see! Take care, Anthony

Hi BJ, From an SEO point of view i don't like to work in AJAX but it sure has some user experience points, doesnt it. Have you read this article http://www.seomoz.org/blog/create-crawlable-link-friendly-ajax-websites-using-pushstate. Common practise is to check the text cache of the site, that way you are able to see what the search engine see's and possibly see where your dulicate content issues are

100% agree. However, I think they already parked the URL. Did you? As if you did, it will start loosing its ranking (if it didn't already).

Hey Jay, I checked two of the pages: http://www.downpour.com/catalogsearch/advanced/byNarrator/narrator/Seth+Green/?bioid=5554 and http://www.downpour.com/catalogsearch/advanced/byAuthor/author/Solomon+Northup/?bioid=11758 against each other in a duplicate content checker (http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php) and they returned a similarity percentage of 67%, which we definitely shouldn't be showing as duplicate. (We consider pages at 90% or more to be dupes.) I went to check on your crawl to see if it might be a bug and it looks like the number of duplicate content errors has gone down a lot with the crawl that took place today and none of these pages are included as duplicates, so it may have been a temporary bug. If you see these pages counted as duplicates again. Please let us know so that we can look into it further. Hopefully, this helps! Chiaryn

Like Gian says, you are looking at it a little backwards. It's not problematic at all to get backlinks from comments, just make sure you're not being spammy or overdoing it. If you really want to look at follow/nofollow ratios, look at your competitor's backlink profiles in OSE or similar.