Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Keri i got u... I have to build my 60% to 75%  to related my Miche and rest of the link from Very good Page and domain Authority.Only Build a link from higher page and domain authority. Thanks much keri

ha ha .. Yes people at Google do make mistake.. Check here at - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html And the interesting thing is that here in this post I informed them to make the changes and they made it .. lolz

I had a site hit by penguin and since recovered it. Once the links that were causing the problem were removed it took about a week to come back. I will have to look at the dates... I think my site was fine on the 1st up date then got hit on the refresh. Not sure why it came back without another refresh.... Maybe that is not how it works. I will see if I still have the data in GA. I have since sold the site. **I found the GA. An image is attached. I did not receive any type of message in webmaster tools. 2gpQw.jpg

The global navigation is created by an out-of-the-box widget which is using style=display:none. If I use "fetch as Googlebot" on this page, the links are displayed in code. So I believe Googlebot is able to see the links but "display:none" doesn't make sense from SEO POV.

Most of this is speculation based on the features and changes Google has been pushing out.  Taking into account the mobile initiatives Google has been implementing like GoMo, the mobile Googlebot and the different SERP's for mobile users from desktop users, I would have to say that it is important to optimize your mobile version as well. If you have a responsive design then your meta information may remain the same unless you simply serve up a different menu all together. Your CTR's are probably going to be different as well as your linking architecture.   Just make everything user friendly by considering the user's context and you should do awesome no matter the changes Google puts in place.

Yes, wildcards work, thank god.

Strategy: Add value to visitors from those specific cities. It's the only way to do it right. Ideas: Provide a resource for "where to buy" within those cities. CityGrid/CitySearch, Yelp, Foursquare will provide the locations through their API's. More here.. City knowledge graph, demographics, what's trending, what's hot, authority social profiles. Help define your market, with transparency. Price comparisons between physical stores & online store. Pricebot? hmm..

I agree with EGOL and Ryan, it looks like you have a lot to go on already. Good luck to you!

I think to achieve good results for any "vertical" focus has to be actual users and not search volumes. SEO, SEM,  & Inbound Social Marketing has to be startegic & creative. (Say Adding Value?) Here few suggestions & features I liked from Urbanspoon , Expedia 1. Scope for UGC (User Generated Content) : Reviews, Ratings, How to Reach, Overall Experience. 2. Solid site architecture. ( For fun we name it wysiwyg architecture ) - Panoramic view of Hotel room, restaurant, Car for Rent Or Add value using more relevant modules on Page. 3. Many  great websites are missing implementation  of  Microdata using schema.org 4. Sectionwise Sitemap.xml, Image Sitemap, Video Sitemap 5. User-centric Navigation (Internal linking with partial anchor text) 6. Add Value using cool Facebook fan page or app 7. Promote every effort & channel strategically 8. Implement Canonical tags across Multilingual TLDs. Hope, I have made attempt to enlist major features which Tripadvisor is missing

hmm interesting, well I have started laying the foundation for all the blog content which is linked to facebook and i'll link to it on twitter as I complete it and see how that helps.

Fair point about the Sitemap. Thanks a lot, I'll take these on board and see what happens from there. Thanks,

I think you have a PDF and all you want to do is to promote the website within the targeted audience and get down downloads for the ebook. More downloads means more email subscriptions and this you will use further for promotional emails. To be honest, If I will be at your place i would have plan the promotion even before the content, but now when you have done this here is the recommended action plan you can follow! Decide Clear goals: This will help you identify that your overall promotional plan is getting any success or not. Try to make few clear, measurable goals from the promotional plan. With the ebook you should consider the following goals as important Specific number of email subscription. Specific number of links you will get on an ebook How much quality traffic i should receive Specific number of leads for my business. Number of tiwtter followers should increase Number of facebook followers should increase to a certain extent. Once the goals are decided now it’s a time for a promotional plan and to achieve each part of the goal you should promote accordingly. Like for example for Facebook and twitter you can invite the people and pass them a book upon a tweet or a facebook like... Blogger Outreach is also a good idea, you can also try Press Release... as this is a guide, contacting institutes and schools that offer related course can also be of great help... This is a creative game to think, scale under your budget and do it...

I had the same situation a year ago and didn't bother waiting. I just made the switch and 301'd the old site to the new one. We took a minor hit in rankings for about 2 weeks, and then ever since, we've been ranking quite well. I'd make the switch now.

I combined the htaccess files (putting the blog rewrite rule to the bottom of the file) now having just one htacess in the root directory and unfortunately it did not work. When I tried it, all the links on the blog would not work, they were all "page not found" so I reverted it back to what I originally had... Here is what the combined htaccess file looked like: RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.htm\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index.htm$ http://www.example.com/ [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L] <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On  RewriteBase /blog/  RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.php/. [NC]  RewriteRule ^index.php/(.*)$ http://www.example.com/blog/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]</ifmodule> Thanks again for any insight!

Thanks Dr. Pete! An you know what? You are absolutely right. Google has interpreted the canonical just that way and it's been in our GWT reports forever and no one could figure out where they were coming from. Thank you, thank you, thank you (in my Gomer Pyle voice, of course!) Wow, it's amazing how fixing one thing can sometimes take you down a whole nother road and fix something else at the same time. I just can't thank both you and George enough. Kudos to George on a great answer.

EDIT - Just thought of a third option - try to buy the domain. lol... that was the first one that I thought of.... I would be on the phone, sending email, driving to their house. ... but after you own it they might realize that the bozo running the site for them allowed it to expire and see that you grabbed it and want it back!    They will be cussing about you louder than they will be cussing about Bozo. But... I would still go after it.

For Example: You have two version of home page (1) http version (2) https then in that case you have implement Canonical on home page. Many big sites who does financial transaction use the same approach.

There's probably good news and bad news here. The good news is that if the 301 redirects were done properly the 404 errors (or at least most of them) should go away with time. No, they are not necessarily bad for SEO. They are probably worse for your visitors. Have you thought about creating a custom 404 that is more friendly that Google's default 404 page? The bad news, is that 301 redirects to not pass all of the page rank and page authority. They might pass most, but not all. Because you've changed domains twice already, your site may never recover the lost page rank and page authority. However, if it was a fairly new site (less than a year old for all 3 domains), it might not really matter. If you first domain had good domain age, i.e. it was 10 years old, you probably aren't ever going to recover some of that lost ground. You may also have another issue with your redirects. Did you do redirects from medtronicdiabetes.net to medtronicdiabetes.com? When you did the new redirects to minimed.com, where did you redirect from? If your redirected the redirects, then that's probably not the best scenario. If you redirect the original URLs (that had been redirected to medtronicdiabetes.com) you will probably be better off. I am interested to know others' take on this scenario. I have seen sites struggle with this before and it can get quite complicated particularly if the site is large.