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It's really hard to pin down three things, and all of my tips would cross over one another to some degree, but I'll wade in with mine anyway... For me, it's roughly the same as yours, but perhaps my priorities would be slightly different: 1. Content. It's king. Write excellent quality, valuable content and people will want to share it socially, link to you from their website, and most importantly, users will read it and engage with it. This is the vast majority of your link building effort right here (which is why I won't include a bullet on link building). 2. Architecture, structure and on-page optimisation. If you have a good flat architecture that is technically structured, marked up well and geared towards SEO best practises, you will reap the benefits. 3. Analysis. To the point of being anal retentive. Probably one of the most little mentioned parts of an SEO's job is to analyse everything. See what your competitors are doing well, see what niches you can fit into, research your own market, analyse technical mistakes/improvements, analyse how users engage with your site, how they navigate, what they do when they're here, how they found you, how else they can find you, and so on. Good research means that you can gauge what you need to be doing better, what new things you should do, and when. That's mine very much in a nutshell. I hope others will come along and share their's too. Matt

Hi Zora, In my experience, it is easier to rank well for a subfolder than it is for a subdomain. With a subdomain, you are mostly leaving it to rank for itself, and it will need almost as much SEO as your root domain. With a subfolder, it seems that more link juice is passed down the line from the root, so it is much easier to rank. Again - this is just from my experience. I would say that you should not question why you have suddenly jumped onto page 1, though I suspect it is because you have moved the contents to a subfoler. I would set up a 301 from the subdomain and fingers crossed Google will rank your subfolder in place of the subdomain at it's next crawl. Cheers Matt

If you change the entire Address you'll also use 301. So that's why i think it is possible.

Thanks for the ideas guys. Good advice Jamo, and that's a great point Marie... I've seen this happen before, just puzzled me that the home page dropped out of site in my SERPs. It's always nice to discuss because of the uncertainties with SEO, thanks for your help.

Awesome. will do. How many clicks from the home page should the categories be for indexing, link juice, and usability? The reason I ask is because there's a lot of items that go in multiple categories so we do subcategories and sub-sub categories

Thanks man!

Hard to say what is meant by that video. Often, Google is purposely vague. If the content is truly no longer relevant, I would 301 it to more relevant URLs on a page by page basis.  This will remove low performing pages from Google's index, and potentially improve your rankings. On the other hand, if the content still has value but doesn't need to be front and center, a clearly organized archive based on date or some other organizational method should work fine.

My guess is no -- otherwise, we'd all have the latest viral cat video with 25,000,000 million views also embedded on our own website.

Hey Paul, Thanks for reaching out. One quick thing to remember when you're looking at the social metrics on OSE, those are for the URL specifically. They have no correlation to your actual facebook page. For example: www.seomoz.org had 156 Facebook Likes on OSE, where as our actual facebook page has 79,222. Significant difference there. I hope that makes sense. It can definitely be confusing if you aren't expecting it. Cheers, Joel. edit: fix a word.

Commonly on large ecommerce websites duplication between categories and sub categories is an issue. The views of search results can also be a factor IE: grid, list, etc- Association the sub categories with the main top level categories by using the canonical tag. It is also a possibility to block the /search/ results by using the robots.txt- search results aren't the most beneficial to the user and this is a ranking factor. The canonical tags are exceptionally effective for ecommerce structures.

This is my site url: http://goo.gl/AzYa5 I have encrypted because of privacy issues.

Totally agree with Casey. Otherwise everyone that offers something for free would be penalized and we have an empty Internet. Imagine searching for a free e-book on SEO and Google says: "Sorry, but free is a spammy word so I won't show you any results.". That would be hilarious wouldn't it? Do what Casey mentioned and you should be fine. Some free advice.. kind regards Jarno

What is the site built on? If wordpress, check out wpengine (no affiliation).  Just saw this post and wanted to respond as I had tons of downtime when I migrated a site to a shared environment on another host. Site kept having downtime no matter what I tried with support.  So you can imagine the frustration and how this can impact the business not just from a search perspective. I think the question here is how stable do you need something. Does shared work? Yea sure. But if you are putting something that is the core of your business on a $4.95mth host, than you get $4.95 worth of insurance.

In addition to what has been said, I think you also need to understand how it all works for you to make the best decision. It is all about DNS propogation, it is the time taken to update all the servers around the web with the new IP to point to when one looks for your domain name. Now yourdomain.com points to 195.81.76.22 and you want to move it to 156.22.101.85 (examples only) While the update is propagating, some visitors will get the old IP (website on yahoo) and others will get the updated one (on the other host) so there is no downtime. The issue is with dynamic sites (forums, blogs...) you might get data (comments, posts...) that will be made to the version on Yahoo and will be lost once everyone goes to the new host. I your website is static, just go ahead and move your files and update your DNS records and don't worry about anything else. If your website is dynamic, then you should copy the data at a given time and either : block the old website from getting comments/posts/entries... copy the data manually from the database once all DNS have been updated (hard to do) accept to lose some infos Hope that helps

I like to prepare in advance for future Algo Changes. With that said it is probably best not to get into the habit of putting the same 3 links on the blog post. Blog links aren't that valuable Most are set to no follow anyways If on same C-Block, will eventually be a red flag,  if not now then in the future. It is best to stick to the White Hat techniques. I just think about it this way. If my business is my website and I finally start generating a nice income from it and I violate some rule that shuts me down, how will that impact my lifestyle?

I took a look at bronxpad.com in opensiteexloreer.org. If this is the website you are referring to, when you implement these 301 redirects make sure you also redirect bronxpad.com/index.html and www.bronxpad.com/index.html to www.bronxpad.com, for the same reason as the non-www to the www.

Hi! Thanks! I completely understand. We would never want to prevent URLs on the client's domain from being crawled. That could clearly put our client's online presence at risk. However, we're more concerned with Google noticing the shopping cart's domain is pointing to every page of the client's website which could appear unnatural & potentially, put the client's site at risk. What we're hoping to achieve is preventing from Google crawling the third party URL on every page to avoid any penalization.

When searching a brand name that brand's Google+ page has been known to show. If you are looking to replicate this you will need to optimise your Google+ page for the knowledge graph and have a unique brand name. More info on this can be found by searching the Q&As for similar questions.