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it has hundreds, but my concern is google will always have a flag saying this site has done some bad stuff in the past.

Crank out some good content and link back with varied anchor text using some of those higher search volume terms. Also try and generate good content on other websites (guest blogging, providing a resource section on some site) and leverage varied anchor text back to your pages you are trying to rank.

Hi Brett.  I haven't used IDX for my sites because it is not available for our real estate board.  If your board has IDX available then you should be able to integrate it into your website.  Or you can hire someone to do it for you. Send me a personal message (via my profile) and I'll tell you who I host with.  I can share some ideas with you too. Marie

Hello, I use http://gsitecrawler.com/. 1. I'm not sure what you mean by category wise xml, but your site map should include all pages and set up in a clean and organised hierarchy. http://www.clevegibbon.com/contentmanagement/2009/06/10/from-site-map-to-content-hierarchy/  If you have 50,000 pages, i hope you've set up your hierarchy because 50,000 pages is a hell lot of pages. 2. You can set up the xml file to update automatically as well; http://gsitecrawler.com/en/faq/info/automate/. hope this helps

In my limited experience, landing pages for each service and/or "service in city" work nicely as a part of a content marketing strategy along with blogging, etc.

Google attempts to execute javascript, in some cases. But it does a really awful job of it. With the code you've got, it'll ignore the script content. The smart change to make here would be to switch to a CSS plus javascript solution. The best solution is something like jquery, where you have an HTML list of images, then use CSS to hide the images and javascript to reveal it. That way, if a crawler hits the page, it sees the entire list of images and ALT attributes. That's called graceful degradation - it's best practices for SEO. While it'll take a lot of work, it's worth doing. It'll give you a long-term, SEO-friendly page that also works better for different devices.

By 'include files', do you mean that you have one central design (e.g. an index.php) and then a query pulls in the correct page? If your pages are pulled in from that subdirectory and if you're now getting errors, then I suggest you Check to see if those pages are included in Google's index, using a "site:" query Use a robots.txt disallow command to prevent it from being included in future. For it to have appeared in Google's index in the first place, either these files are in your sitemap.xml or you've accidentally created a direct link from somewhere to those files. Either way, check your folder security and block anything that shouldn't have access to those files.

The more I've worked with search engines, the more you get used to the occasional 'blip' in your rankings. The Bing/Yahoo algorithm seems to yield particular inconsistent rankings as well. I would suggest that if you were out the top 50 before and now, ignore the sudden great rankings and work on your on-page and off-page optimisation. Bear in mind Yahoo & Bing share data and Bing (as with Google) uses social signals, so up your social media game and interaction (in a non-spammy way). No easy route to the top I'm afraid, just hard work, but work done in the right direction

No Appropriate answer still :S

I think Guy Warner nailed it. I wrote the copy for my home page back in 2004. I've tweaked it over the years, but it remained largely the same. During that time, lots of others have been copying the text for their own websites. Now, if you search for an exact match, a few of the other sites come up even higher in the SERP than my own site! I've done my best to get folks to remove the copies (and serving DMCA complaints when necessary) but I think my time is better spent simply rewriting the home page. It's frustrating on one hand, but it's also good to finally have an idea of what the problem might be. Thanks, Guy!

Your second paragraph is on point. Hear hear

Yes use bread crumbs and also use contextual links.  Regardless of what Google says or people think for the SEO aspect.  These additions help your users. In addition you can tag your contextual links with something like product-page.html?ref=context. Then in Google Analytics you'll be able to see if these links are being used.  And if so, how you can make the user experience even better. -Guy

interesting thanks

Thank you Peter! That "underscore" issue just pass through my attention. I will change it now, and hopefully it reduces some of the warnings. However this "page-all" and prev/next feature I've introduced just in the last 2 weeks. So the main part could be something else. Now the rel="prev/next" feature I suspended too on the website, so I am really curious on the results. Much appreciated your feedback! Thanks again!

Hi JP, Addon domains are OK as long as you play by the rules (do not interlink them, user unique content). Think about them as sites being on the same dedicated server. Do not do things you would not do to sites on the same server and you will be OK.

Hi Bob, Many people are also using Blogger Link Up http://www.bloggerlinkup.com/ and Help a Reporter Out (HARO) http://www.helpareporter.com/ Hope that helps!

Ok cool, yeah I think it's mainly comment pages.  Which no following them is standard on Wordpress. The blocking of the robots notice threw me a little off though.  Obviously you'd want your comments to show up in the search engines as well. Thanks both of ya'll for the help!

Thanks Jim