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In WordPress, if you have categories of dogs, budgies and cats, the category pages that WordPress generates for you will be www.yoursite.com/category/cats www.yoursite.com/category/dogs www.yoursite.com/category/budgies So the word category appears in each URL diluting the keywords.  Yoast allows you to remove the "category" part of this altogether, if you want to. I don't think there are any disadvantages to it other than when you look at a page URL you'll have a hard time telling if it is a category page or not. The advantage is that you page doesn't look generated to the naked eye - the word category in the URL is giveaway.  If you go to the trouble of inserting some relevant unique info at the top of each category page this will look even better, both to humans and search engines.  You also make the URL a little more relevant. You can instead specify a word to replace category and tag in the URL which is another route. So rather than category you can specify some niche word where appropriate.

Have to agree with Takeshi. In my experience, even still in 2013, having a blog on a subdomain gives you all of the disadvantages of it being a separate site while achieving none of the advantages. If the blog's topics are directly related to the primary topics of the website itself, put it in a subdirectory - save yourself all kinds of hassle while letting your main site authority help your blog, and vice versa. Paul [Updated to note:  those two articles you mention are referring to very specific elements of subdomains and subdirectories. Namely that geo-targeting is equally effective whether you're using a subdomain or subdirectory, that specifically within Webmaster Tools, links between subdomains and primary domains will be considered internal for reporting purposes, and that subdomains are no longer considered "seperate" sites when it comes to trying to get your site/subdomain to show multiple times in a SERP.. These should in no way be considered general claims that subdomains and subdirectories perform similarly in all other aspects]

Great to hear DDseo, glad I helped.  You may mark good answers and / or mark the topic answered. Cheers

Tried all of them. Did not isolate the effectiveness of each directory however did lead to a positive result overall.

Basically it's unnatural to have 70% the same anchor text, Google will most likely penalize you. Just reduce the % and create more high quality backlinks with a variation, mix it up, make it look natural, 'click here' 'more info' and so on. Hope this helps, there is more information out there, it's to do with Penguin I believe.

I don't think there's any way that an 80 to 90% traffic drop can be attributed to the link juice loss of 301 redirects, Kevin. Did you test and confirm that all of the 301 redirects were actually working correctly when first installed? The challenge now is that many if not most of those original URLs may have now dropped out of the index, if they weren't redirected correctly (since they'll have been 404ing so long that the search engines will have dropped them from their indexes) . So there may not be anything to actually go back to. Unfortunately it's really hard to offer any sort of specific information in situations like this without being able to actually look at both the old and new domains.

Yup, we just have one site but it needs all sorts of redirects. We have a site such as www.neat-stuff.com and most people just type in without the dash. We completely redid the site with all new urls so we had a lot of redirects to do.

That is exactly what we ended up doing thanks for your help. After site launch a few months ago we lost a lot of organic traffic. Think this will bring some of it back?

Hi Nathan, Dorothea is correct about P.O. boxes being forbidden in Google's local products. However, phone verification is not a solution, as Google will not offer this for every business - only some of them. If this is the case for your business, and you are not being offered a phone verification option, then postcard is the only way you can verify your business. What is the exact situation with this business? Why can't mail be delivered to the brick and mortar location? I know there are some parts of the U.S. where the post office does not deliver mail to homes and businesses, but only to P.O. boxes. Is that the case with your location? If so, my best suggestion would be that you go through this troubleshooter and see if it leads you to Google's new verification issues phone number: http://support.google.com/places/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1399021&page=ts.cs

It's serious enough. I mean, why only fix 3 out of the 4 leaks in your boat? If you're gonna fix 'em, fix 'em all And it's potentially very serious if the unfixed version is one of the two on the primary domain. It's a simple extra addition to the IIS redirects. Do note though! All the 301 redirects should point DIRECTLY to the final primary url. e.g. you don' t want a redirect that goes neatstuff.com -> www.neatstuff.com -> www.neat-stuff.com. The header checker tool will warn you about this by showing two 301-redirects before finally listing the 200 response. Paul

Related-ish question: I have a site-wide banner on a website with a theme related to mine with the alt tag containing an exact-match keyword. It's on 2,500 pages. Post-Penguin, am I inviting trouble? Should I play it safe and have it on, say, just a handful of pages -- or even just the homepage?

Andy is 100% right: don't sweat the snippets and noindex your category pages (they can be a dupe content issue so it's better to be proactive rather than end up as Panda food).

First off, I agree with the advice that Charles has given you.  Keep them all on the same domain!  It means that your DA will help the authority of your pages aimed at other countries.  Now, let me address your other questions: Yes, duplicate content is still an issue.  You can solve it using the rel=hreflang tag.  This will tell Google for what country the content is meant.  For instructions on how to apply it, check this post: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2232347/A-Simple-Guide-to-Using-relalternate-hreflangx Pricing your products locally can be helpful, in establishing your commitment to that market.  I just read this article that could be helpful when thinking about that strategy: http://searchengineland.com/how-international-pricing-strategy-website-forms-impact-global-search-marketing-147265 If at all possible, localizing the way things are written will also show your commitment.  We work exclusively on Spanish language projects, and I can tell you that we have to localize quite a bit depending on the market we are going after. Let me know if you need any more help, I'll be glad to point you in the right direction if I can.

Hi Matt, Thanks for your reply. I think the fact that we gained a lot of backlinks and then lost them was due to our very highly quoted and linked story in December (the Skype story, used as an example in our first post). Many websites put links to us on their front pages. Inevitably, these only stay until pushed down and off the page by newer stories. We have not create fake links anywhere. According to Google Analytics, visitors have entered our site through links on 904 websites since Dec 1. The top ones are Reddit, YCombinator, Twitter, habrahabr.ru, Facebook, TheNextWeb and Wikipedia. All very legitimate links, as far as I can understand. What do you think we should do? Why does https prevent using a link profile tool?

From my original post: "One idea that just occured to me would be to rename the image and set up a 301 in the .htaccess. Would that work?" ...so I'll take half the compliment - great minds and all that!

Yeah, if you could solve this via .htaccess that would be great, especially if you have link equity flowing into any of those URLs. I'd go one step further than Irving and highly recommend canonical tags on those URLs. Since, as you said, it's all one page with infinite URL possibilities, the canonical should be easy to implement. Best of luck!