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Adding "noindex" to your page doesn't just keep link juice from flowing to it - it also means that it won't appear in the SERPs at all - what about your users who are actually trying to find your page? I wouldn't noindex anything unless you're sure that you don't want anyone to be able to find that page via organic search. When you're structuring your site, it's better to focus on having a structure that allows search engines to crawl and find every page (no orphan pages, no content that search engines can't crawl, no duplicate content) and that allows users (you know, the people who give you money!) to easily find content.  If you want to conserve link juice on your pages, try to make sure you don't have a ton of links on every page, but don't try to nofollow/noindex content based solely on the idea of link juice - it won't work.

There's no technical limitation to the length of heading tags (h1, h2 etc) as they're not displayed anywhere other than on the content page. (Unlike the meta-title attribute, for example, that gets truncated on the Search Results page if it's too long.) Make it just long enough and no longer What I mean by that is - write it as a heading that clearly communicates the nature of the page it's introducing, but don't waste words. The more words in the header, the less your targeted words will stand out - both to search engines and to users. So cut down on stop words (the, and, if, because etc) and try to get your primary words close to the beginning of the heading if possible. But as Stefan says - make sure it makes the visitor want to keep reading - otherwise your SEO efforts have been wasted.

As far as SEO is concerned, the reason for linking to other pages is to help pass the "Google juice" or ranking influence of each page along to other related pages on your website. Using keyword-appropriate anchor text in those links helps the search engines understand what those other pages are valuable for. So don't repeatedly link with "click here". But don't always link to a page with the same anchor text either. As the latest Penguin update has shown, anchor text that is always the same is unlikely to have occurred naturally and will look spammy. The reason you don't need to link to the homepage in the body of a post is simple math - your homepage likely already has the most incoming links anyway - it's the other pages that need all the help they can get. (Plus as others have mentioned and you confirmed, you already have a link to that home page in your page's navigation.) But here's the real kicker - the reason for putting links in the body of your posts should be to provide value to the reader, first and foremost. If you keep this in mind, you'll probably take care of the SEO needs automatically - and naturally! As theBrewRoom says, link to things that would help the reader of the current post better understand what you're talking about, and use anchor text that will let the reader know what to expect when he gets there. Last thing to think about - ideally you want a page to have as few links as will get the job done effectively. The more links on a page, the less ranking influence each one can pass along. So don't flood your pages with links thinking that will help even more other pages rank better. And there again - what's best for the user is also good SEO - a page jammed with links will just confuse a user and look cluttered, while not helping your SEO. Think "user first" and you'll almost never go wrong. Good luck & have fun figuring out what good pages to link to! Paul

If you're not experiencing any serious problems and just want to prevent future issues, I'd probably use rel=prev/next here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html It was designed specifically for paginated content and won't block your link-juice flow to deeper pages. Google has in the past said you can canonical to the "View All", but don't canonical back to page one. I've heard mixed results on the "View All" technique. One thing, though - you currently have all these pages NOINDEX,FOLLOW'ed, so it's kind of a moot point. What you could do is just lift the NOINDEX on page 1 of results and keep it for pages 2+. That may be your least risky move at this point.

Hi Laura, Intertek is a well respected company in several fields (I actually used to work on digital campaigns for one of your larger competitors) and should have a fairly natural advantage in terms of content that exists already and industry recognition. The onsite SEO for the entire site looks a bit below average (Please correct me if I'm wrong here..) and you could probably show some improvement in the numbers fairly quickly that way. I found some success in driving quality/relevant traffic with a competitor of yours through community development.  Intertek deals with a fairly technical audience and there are a lot of related active discussions happening regularly in different forums including linkedIn groups.  Gain some cooperation and buy in from some of your brand managers and have them participate in community discussion and conversation.  Use a social media platform to monitor the different groups and apportion responses and questions to the appropriate person.  Remember to "brand" them as well otherwise they'll eventually lose interest. I'm fairly certain that Intertek has a great deal of tools and guides that your technicians and surveyors are using.  If they haven't been declared internal-only try to find audiences that could make use of them, even if only for basic reference and publish them on sites that cater to that audience.  (Make sure they're copyrighted first). Get some cross-promotion going with the various associations, professional certification groups and advocacy groups of which I guarantee Intertek has been active with.  Find out what content their marketing people would like to have and utilize your internal resources there.  This can be challenging because your operations people aren't going to want extra demands on the non-marketing subject matter experts that are probably overworked already, but you should be able to get questions answered or short descriptions written that you can flesh out into longer content pieces. Focus on your division first and document everything.  I mean everything.  Show the benefits of your work over time and pitch it to the other business units.  Make sure to brand yourself and your team as being the ones responsible.  You should be able to show some good improvement in the numbers over time and describe to the powers-that-be how your efforts in your unit can be applied to their area of responsibility. There is, of course, traditional media buys and search marketing, but that depends on your budget. Best of luck -Jason

If the domain name is a solid one that has the ability to stick in your clients head then it might make sense to buy the domain and spend a few months rehabbing the quality of links. If you have the financial ability then I would buy it, use google webmasters to identify the bad links, reach out to the site owners and request they remove the links, send a report to google showing the work you've done. Then I would work on getting positive links for your site by getting mentions in online news sites, edu sites and others. You can accomplish this by hosting a small charity event. Also have your customers write reviews on Yelp and similar sites. Yahoo Directory link and BBB link. Time heals all wounds including bad links.

If you're worried about this then ask the site to do a larger content update on their page rather than just changing a link. Get them to add an editorial note that says when the update happened and why. A lot of "keyword sponsorship" services only change phrases into links and don't actually update the content. Plus if ti comes down to a manual review you've almost got proof that it's not just some crappy links you've paid for.

We recently added a rel="nofollow" tag to our footer links that contained anchor text and, though difficult to know if this was causative, we have seen Google ranking improve overall v.s. 1 month ago and v.s. 1 week ago. In our case, many of those links were referenced at a single source so we were able to make a mass change. A client of ours is doing the same thing, but rather than anchor text, they have an image with a consistent image alt text. I am guessing the same logic would prevail here? Would the alt text be considered in the same way as anchor text? Also, Cyrus, what are your thoughts on using the nofollow tag as a fix? Although your suggestions 1 and 2 seem ideal, is there any thought about why a followed brand name link would be preferred to a nofollow link?

They are just a new/alternate way of displaying sitelinks. Here's a relevant article from Search Engine Land earlier this year. Here's an article from Google Webmaster Tools on what you can do with sitelinks as a webmaster. In short, you can't tell Google which sitelinks to display, but you can 'demote' certain pages. So if you find Google is pulling up your 'About Us' page as a sitelink, but that's a page that you don't place a lot of priority on, you can log into your Webmaster Tools account and demote that page to give other pages a better chance of showing up.

I see NASA.gov being beaten for quotes from their own content - sometimes even a quote of their title tag.  So many people scrape their content or republish it verbatim. A city newspaper near me had a lot of pages of crappy content.  They simply posted a page for every business around with biz name, phone address and couple other pieces of info.  These were really skinny pages.  Their rankings have been in the dumps and I think these skinny pages are the reason.

Thanks for the help guys. I have been 301'ing to a seperate domain rather than somewhere else on the same site. I'll speed up the removal of the old content, thanks Ben!

That article is great.  I would emphasize the video sitemap and adding rich snippets. If the videos are a great resource then you probably won't have much trouble getting links.  Just do a search for your local area "blog:city name" is a good place to start.

RewriteRule ^folder/(.*)$ http://www.newurl.com [R=permanent,L] The above works for me.

Donnie, I have to agree with Jason.  Check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landing_page It think it is a great definition.  As you can see, any page can be a landing page, and EVERY page should be considered a landing page.  You are always trying to get the person who is on your page to do something, whether it is buy a product, download an ebook, sign up for your email newsletter, or click through to the next page. Each landing page does not need its own domain.  Otherwise, how would a big brand like Target or Amazon rank for so many terms? Anyhow, I hope this helps, and best of luck.

Ok Tommy Thanks a lot

Don't create a page per key term please. Only create pages per intention. In your case, does the page you want to rank [plus sized clothing "xxxx"] match the intent of the searcher for that term? And is the same page as relevant for [plus sized clothing]. Are you the best answer for both terms? Is that page the best answer for both terms? I don't want to sound negative but I highly doubt that. If you sell plus sized clothing on the national level, your homepage is probably the best page. If you are going for new styles in 2012, that should be a different page with just those styles. If you are a store or collection of stores in Boston, then [Boston plus sized clothing] is more your term. Now after all of that, do know that typically using a broader term in addition to some modifiers is perfectly fine if it makes sense for the page. Don't take that too far, don't key word stuff your title tags or content. Know your keywords, use them, but don't abuse them. Talk to people, don't market to them.

Hi Duncan, Your current display in the SERPs is a blended listing. The title is going to your homepage. Other elements are going to Google Maps and your Google+ Local page. So, that qualifies it as blended. As Adam has mentioned in his response, we may not be completely understanding the intent of your question. Can you offer further clarification? Thanks!

Hi David, That's really an interesting scenario you've described of actually preferring your purely organic result over your local one. What has likely happened is that your previous organic rankings have simply blended in with your new local ones, because most local rankings are blended these days. Thomas' suggestion is a creative one and may be worth trying if you truly feel you were benefiting more from a plain organic display vs. a blended local one, but now that you've got your local info out there, how Google chooses to display it may be difficult to change.