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Not quite clear on what you're asking, but a few comments: Breadcrumbs are a good thing on almost all websites. I can't think of a situation where I wouldn't recommend them. Breadcrumbs are links on the page - not sure what you mean by "static" but Google will count them as links. Don't worry about funneling link value to your homepage. That's going to happen inevitably since it's linked to from every page of your site. You're better off interlinking those internal pages on your site.

I also include my sitemap in the robots.txt ref: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_txt sitemap: [absoluteURL]

Thanks.  And since we've now implemented the aforementioned changes, I can give some findings back. What we did: We changed our sitemap to point to the same canonical URLs as are referenced in the tags on our product pages (only one entry in sitemap per product). What we didn't do: We didn't change the product pages themselves.  They still have a canonical URL link reference, pointing to a URL with no category paths, which does not naturally occur in the navigation of the site (on the site, product pages all have category paths in the URL). Findings: After submitting the new sitemap, the stats in Google Webmasters Tools indicate that almost all (> 96%) of our product pages are indexed.  We believe that the pages were already indexed (for the most part) and now the sitemap is useful for metrics.  From the timing, it's unlikely that the sitemap itself caused our index stats to get significantly better in just 1 day.  Possible, but unlikely.  In either case, since our product page URLs still reference canonical links which don't exist in the site's navigation, the evidence suggests that the canonical link itself is enough, and an actual navigation path to the canonical version of the page is not needed.  That's just empirical evidence, we have no inside info on Google's methods, but this is what we believe now after monitoring.

Hi Chris, We had a similar issue with one of our websites in the past where we had a 3rd party store under a sub domain and it hit us badly with the whole website effected in the SERPS with duplicate content. Caution advised! Mash

Hi Ian, Yes, what you are experiencing is well-documented. What is happening is that your previous organic rank has been subsumed into your new blended local rank, which takes your on-page/off-page SEO factors into account in addition to other factors like your Google+ profile, citations, reviews etc. So, you haven't 'lost' your organic ranking exactly...it's gone into the mix in creating your local ranking. In the past, it was very common for powerful businesses to dominate the first page of the SERPs with multiple listings. For example, as single business might be able to achieve a local listing, one or more organic listings, plus directory listings of his business and even image and video listings all on page 1 of the results. Around the time of the Venice Update (see: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understand-and-rock-the-google-venice-update), this type of dominance changed. Google began showing a greater variety of businesses in the results, and the instance of multiple listings for a single business became quite rare. Now, some months ago, some articles were published by some excellent Local SEOs who had managed to achieve double listing for clients by using a tactic of optimizing a second page on their site in certain ways. Here are some examples of this: http://www.nightlitemedia.com/2012/05/organic-and-google-places-ranking-on-page-1/ http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/local-search-general-discussions/719-lqqk-incredible-shrinking-local-serps-traffic-drops.html However, there has been some talk that this tactic isn't working the way it was a couple of months ago. Also on this topic, past heatmap studies have shown that it's better to have the blended local listing than the organic one: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/eyetracking-google-serps However, recently, I have bumped into conversations in which people are stating that their businesses' CTR rate went down after they were transition from an organic listing to a blended local one, opening discussion as to whether it's really better to achieve high local inclusion if it means losing your previous organic listing.. I don't have a source to quote on that. It's just rumblings I've heard. So, as you can see, there is a lot of discussion going on about this, and you are not alone in what you're experiencing with your listing. Hope these thoughts and resources help!

These are called "Sitelinks" and they can be found in your Google Webmaster Tools (GWT), if you have GWT installed. From what I recall Google will choose these "Sitelinks" for you, however you can block them if you don't want them.

thank you!

Thanks again David!

I have similar question with Image publishing guidelines. Right now, I have very tricky requirement from client for same image on different pages via different paths and different ALT tags. I was searching solution on Google and come to know about this great discussion. So, I have decided to jump on it. I have one image on with following name. lamp.jpg Client want that, I will use lamp.jpg to following pages via different file name. Again, Image will be same. xyz.com/lamp.html contain xyz.com/images/lamp.jpg xyz.com/table-lamp.html contain xyz.com/images/table-lamp.jpg xyz.com/floor-lamp.html contain xyz.com/images/floor-lamp.jpg So, Is it really helpful in terms of SEO?

If you set up the http://example.com to http://www.example.com for the entire domain, then you don't have to worry about the other pages. You can do this by putting the following code in your .htaccess file: RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Thanks, I know about this, but the results show everything, including blog posts. What I want is a verified study that shows results

Again, yes and no to having to wait. I wrote an article that was 1st page (and still is) within just 4 hours. That was down to Google+ With so many factors, it is hard to try and judge what has made a difference. Also be aware that sometimes a site can get a false bump for a shirt period of time after a major change, only to settle back again once Google has analysed it all again - just be sure it wasn't something like this as in 12 years, I have never seen just a change of structure make a dramatic change. Hope you get everything sorted

Yeah Google only works with 1:1 so maybe if you setup a Google account shared by both users and markup using that profile is the only work around I could think of, but could be messy.

If you just want the videos watched - Host the YouTube versions, but bear in mind that you'll be sacrificing rankings to your own site as a consequence. Additionally consider that View Counts don't actually effective YouTube video's ranking position much. More important to improve visibility on YouTube.com is the user engagement (how many peopel watch the video through to the end and then thumb/comment/share it).

Thanks Mark, We have actually decided to get rid of the old domain and move forward with the new one. Your suggestions are really useful and it helps a lot during this transition.

Agree with John's response, but to add two points: 1. You can also set redirects manually via a .htaccess file if using Joomla.  The format is very simple: redirect 301 /oldpage.html /newpage.html It takes some time, but I'm generally of the opinion that it's worth it when these appear in GWMT. 2.  There's a feature in Webmaster Tools now to mark the errors as 'resolved'.  That can help clean things up for you.  If the errors aren't really resolved, Google states in the help documentation that they will eventually reappear for you to find again.