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Hi Barry, The purpose of that 3-digit min unique identifier is to make sure the filename is unique.  We recommend our clients add it to the tail end of the URL as part of the filename, so headline-of-article-12345.html It's a requirement before you apply.  If you're already accepted as a publisher, make sure your News XML is working properly.  You should also start incorporating the new meta keywords tag for GN publishers.  We covered that update recently: http://www.brafton.com/news/google-rolls-out-news_keywords-metatag-to-identify-news-content Jim

Always put the main keyword at the beginning of your title tag. It depends on the name of your brand, if it is not competitive, then you don't need it in your title tag at all if that is the name of your domain. It should rank naturally and opens you up for more space in your title tag to add a secondary keyword phrase.

You should use "noindex, follow", not "noindex, nofollow". In my opinion, you don't need to use "nofollow" at all here. Also, some people say it is OK to index your category pages, but if you do there should be some unique content describing what the category is about.

Maybe this link will help. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/help-google-index-your-videos.html

canonical them to their page without the parameters and handle the parameter IDs in Google WMT under "URL parameter Handling"

I'm going to disagree a bit. While I do think Google understands navigation links and generally views them a bit differently from contextual (on-page) links, there's still a fundamental problem of dilution. If you have 200 navigation links, you split your authority ("link juice") 200 ways, and you're treating the main pages, sub-pages, and sub-sub-pages as if they're all essentially equal from an SEO standpoint. If you prioritize everything, you prioritize nothing. What this ultimately means is that you drive a bit more ranking power to your very long-tail pages but a lot less to your top-level pages. It's a balancing act and there's not one right answer, but generally this isn't going to be a good fit to your business goals. I dig into it more in a post from last year: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many Again, it's not a right-or-wrong thing, but a matter of prioritization. From what you're describing, I'm worried that this could expand to hundreds and hundreds of links, and on a new site that could spread your ranking power pretty thin.

Simon is correct, there's no benefit to a 301 with domains that have no established web site or domain authority which it appears these two do not. I would definitely 301 them to their respective language's landing page.

Thanks for your comments! Agree that ingredient page could be great, with valuable content, but at the moment we just display the name and their role in the product. If I understand correctly google will find hundreds of these pages with pretty much similar content and, at least at the moment, no or few webpages linking to them. This would give this pages a low PR does dragging down the overall PR of the site thus ranking all pages lower. My assumption is that the PR of a site with 40 valuable content pages, with a lot of inbound links, get dragged down if the site has many more less valuable pages with virtually no inbound links. I am considering adding some criteria to ingredient and retailer templates to only make them indexable if they contain more than just the basic fields.

You should only seek links from quality sites.  Quality sites typically wont link to your site for money, but they do want quality content, and you can pay a well-known expert in that field to write quality content for that site and the article can include a link to your site.  Everything should be relevant to your site (e.g. both the other site and the article).  So, if you find a site you would like to link to your site, rather than asking them for a link, ask them if they would post an article written by an expert in that field. Best, Christopher

There are a few different tools I've found helpful to find out what's trending on Twitter, namely: http://www.twee.co/ - what's trending now on Twitter http://www.topsy.com - more trend information Another new one I've found helpful for trends throughout the USA and world is http://trendsmap.com/

Hi Simon, Understood. These pages are category list pages so when a new category is product the template pull that data in. So the majority of page we are using to rank end with this catlist (70/80 categories). URLS are auto generated based on the category titles and product titles.

No off course, I wan't the new url to get indexed since I find that Google in my opinion doesn't favor URL:s with querystrings. But I'm having some problems getting the new urls without querystring indexed. Does Google count these as fresh, or old due to the redirect? I've tried using the query parameter tools and found this less than helpful.

Thanks for you replies! The UX/UI definitely needs improving and is something on the list. I will take all of your other ideas into account and try to apply them as best I can. It's strange to see how much I already know but how much easier it is when it's spelled out to you haha. My keywords are empty for a reason Gerd but thanks for your reply, I shall get to optimising my images as the graph clearly shows up to 3 seconds for one of them to load!! I'll also look to adding tags where appropriate. Cheers!

EMD affects low quality sites. Don't be afraid of exact match domains if you are going to put up a good, worthwhile site with real content. Ex: www.melbournephotography.com.au is on page 1 for Melbourne photography www.hotels.com is #1 for hotels www.creditcards.com is #1 for credit cards I wouldn't worry about it for a real site. And Moz has a whole post on it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-exact-match-domain-playbook-a-guide-and-best-practices-for-emds including: Matt Cutts has made this comment in the past (about 2 years ago): "We have looked at the rankings and weights that we give to keyword domains and some people have complained that we’re giving a little too much weight for keywords in domains. And so we have been thinking about adjusting that mix a little bit and sort of turning the knob down within the algorithm so that given two different domains, it wouldn't necessarily help you as much to have a domain with a bunch of keywords in it."

No worries - I appreciate your attention to this matter. It is a confounding problem that I am frustrated with the black box of terrible search results for legitimate pages. I am open to an ideas/suggestion you may have. Thanks, again!

That's a good point you make Cyrus in regards to linking to a site that has competitors on it also. I have considered this and my idea was to pass in a url param that would not show anything else only the restaurants own menu. For example, menus.com/bobs-pizza?ads=0 would not show a search bar or any other links (simply just their own menu). This page would have rel-canonical link to menus.com/bobs-pizza so as to maintain link juice... Other option i was thinking was to include an iframe on the restaurants page that would source data from menus.com. I guess i could have a link pointing back to menus.com at the bottom of the menu in the iframe. I think the link idea makes sense rather the redirect for the reasons you mentioned. Maybe i could have a popup on mobile devices that contains a link to the menu's site (again this would be in javascript - not sure if this is a good idea though). Any other ideas on how i may be able to show a link (only on mobile devices) that could point to menus.com (in a SEO friendly way)?

People ask similar questions regularly. I just saw you had no answer and wanted to be sure someone had given it a shot for you. I would suggest go to Schema.org and to GWT and read the info there. By using the tool you confirmed that it was correct.  What you don't want to do is corrupt what the intention is by adding in your url, etc. Keep the item property what it is and keep it simple. Remember its semantic web for a reason.  Hope it helps,