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be sure to use a long tail keyword if you are a small site just getting started. Can u explain bit about above plz

I hear ya, Colin. Drives me nuts every time I see spammers up there.

Thanks Marie, Irving, EGOL, Andy - excellent advice as ever!

Hi Marcus. That sounds like a good Strategy. I am going to look at different structure on our dev site and see what works best overall from both technical and more importantly the customers point of view. I'll definitely have a look at he apps you mentioned. They seem really interesting. Once again, many thanks for your advise. Really helpful indeed Regards Craig

Obviously it really depends on what you really want from that forum... but in a normal state it is always good to go for sub directories instead of subdomain... Matt Cutts of Google also did a post on his blog regarding this you can read it here http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/ and i guess this will help you more... Hope this helps!

The homepage is only PR1 - I wouldn't worry about anything, just mass 301 the old domain to the new TLD and you're fine. Changing domains on well established sites is more risky but my guess is that this site is not ranking well yet anyway since some internal pages don't even have established content.

Looking at your link profile sorted by anchor text, I can see a few things.  First of all, your url is your most popular link and that is good.  In looking at your next links they are primarily anchor text. There's nothing wrong with that...in fact that's a good thing. But I'm concerned when I look at the quality of those links.  They are obviously made by an SEO and not natural. With what we currently believe about Penguin, the fact that the majority of your links are using your url as an anchor is likely enough to keep you from being affected by Penguin.  BUT, I would venture a guess that if a competitor decided to file a spam report on you, you could be faced with an unnatural links penalty.  I can't say for sure though as I only looked at a few of your links. At this point, if your ranking is not suffering, I'd probably do nothing about these links.  But I certainly wouldn't have your SEO company build any more! EDIT...I just saw that you said your rankings are slipping.  You'd need to dig deeper into your analytics to see if Penguin actually is an issue here or whether there is something else going on.  Here is a resource that may help you figure that out:  MyTrafficDropped.com/Penguin

I'm not quite sure I understand what the other 10 translated products are below it, but my gut reaction is that, yes, I would probably canonicalize these particular pages. They're not going to be high-value pages in Google's eyes. From a user perspective, it's good to have a placeholder (until you can put up a translation), but you may want to keep it down to a single page in the index until the translated versions roll out.

I agree with Irving - you probably want to let Google reindex all of those 301 links, so you might not have a problem at all in a couple of weeks. It's also possible that "low glycemic foods" is easier to rank for than "low glycemic diet." If you search for "low glycemic foods" in Google, most of the top 10 search results don't actually have that phrase in their page titles or URLs. Since you did, you would have ranked well in comparison. If you search for "low glycemic diet," you can see that the first 6 results (in my personalized view) have the exact phrase "low glycemic diet" in their page title. That's going to make it harder for you to compete with them. I checked on the search traffic for "low glycemic foods" vs. "low glycemic diet" and found that "low glycemic foods" gets more searches per month than "low glycemic diet." I know that you feel that "low glycemic diet" is more appropriate for your site, but if it's easier to rank for "low glycemic foods" and there are more people searching for "low glycemic foods," I would stick with your original URL.

Thanks very much George. I had spotted that but wondered if anyone had any other permutation that had worked for them. I think I'll follow the settings suggested on that page. Cheers, Colin

Hi All, I finally got to the bottom of the problem and it is that they have not applied canonicalization across the site, only to certain pages which is not my understanding when they implemented the update a few weeks back. So they are preparing a hot fix as part of a service pack to our site which will rectify this issue and apply canonicalization to all pages that contain query strings. This should clear that problem up once and for all. Thank you both for your input, a great help.

Hi Mat Being trying the GA and this is giving me a headache but looking at a tutorial on the web I am looking for Panda and/or Penguin and entered the dates given and will try to attach it here. Bz 1 April - 15 May 2012

Well I haven't had an issue with duplicate page titles and if you include your brand name in the format I mention and the rest is unique then there won't be an issue with Google and duplicate titles, in my opinion. Also if you are still unsure start looking at major well ranked sites and how they have most pages branded without this problem. Take SEOMoz's titles for instance, they use this format effectively without issue...

Hi Aviva, I would use a company like http://www.writeraccess.com/ they are very inexpensive and you can get somebody to write your entire website with perfect grammar and spelling emphasizing the words you chose to emphasize and they will make sure in is 100% new fresh content. I would go about it this way than writing it myself I personally do not consider myself a good writer and employee company as well as writers access to do my blogging and website text creation. I hope this is been of help. Sincerely, Tom

Hi Rebekah, Really appreciate your feedback. You are correct in that we are looking to rank for those 3 keywords. I do agree that Towels is too generic, so I'll look at alternative keywords to replace this one. I think the main issue with towels being mentioned so often is that the majority of these instances are links and to change them will re-write the URL's which then means a lot of additional work. We would have to look at this in more depth before carrying it out. I'll have a little play around to see what can be easily achieved and if possible rework the menus to reduce the instances.

To give a good reply to your question, I need to know your level of understanding. Are you familiar with what Google is targeting with the Penguin update? If your "SEO experts" understand the Penguin update and you don't and proceeding blindly then your clients will be better off if they steal your business. They might not be fear mongering.