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Hi Michelle, So you're 404'ing the old sitemap URL yet you've placed the new sitemap at the same location...? If you want to private message me your domain, I'd be happy to take a look for you. There should be no need to 404 anything, just replace the old sitemap and Google will do the rest. Alternatively, just recreate the new sitemap index at a new location such as domain.com/sitemaps/sitemap.xml. Thanks

That looks like a very useful plugin Keri

I'm biased towards a flattened architecture with fewer directories. I think it can help with click-through and makes more sense from an organizational point of view. To be fair, with the exception of #4, I've seen real-world examples of all of these that rank and perform very well. If this were a vote, I'd vote for #2. Consider how Yelp organizes their URLs using the following example listing for a dentist in Seattle. http://www.yelp.com/biz/randall-broom-dds-seattle The above example is actually a hybrid, because the /biz directory is actually a category, but so is "seattle" which is appended to the end of the URL. Whatever you choose, make sure it's consistent and follow a logical navigation and linking structure, so that both search engines and users understand where they are at all times.

Hi Indexxess - I think the point is that no one knows at this point. I've seen some talk around the blogosphere and on different forums that a domain-wide 301 will sometimes rescue a site from Penguin, but not always. It's so hard to know what to tell you. I have a client who got hit that I am testing out different tactics on different domains (they had multiple sites get hit). On one, we're trying to clean up the exact anchors. On another, we're redirecting domain-wide to a new domain. On another, we're building a lot of branded links. We're doing this because no one knows what will work. I'd say you should, regardless, focus on getting good links. Get branded links. If you were hit because of a lot of exact match anchors, then you need branded anyways to balance that out. From what I've seen and heard, negative SEO could work, and people are claiming it works. But it will take a lot of time and effort to do this to your competitors, and honestly I think you could better spend time on your own site and providing value than going negative and trying to knock your competitors out. Sorry I couldn't be more helpful, but at this point, there's just a lot of conjecture and testing going on out there.

I would use the rel=canonical tag for these kind of duplicate content issues. Rather than having me explain I think its best to link you to some great content on the topic: Get started: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps _Advanced: _ _http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-extreme-canonical-tricks_ Gives you some other options: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical Hope this helps!

Thanx all, once this content is deleted, what would I show on my sitemap.xml? This domain has become a landing page and now redirects to two other location businesses. eg. www.business.co.za  used to be the main site, but now they have split to www.business1.co.za and www.business2.co.za Do I now add a simplified site map showing only these two links? Or do I show the old sitemap with the two new links to the new domains?

No, I have not seen this happen to any pages as of yet.  I will however keep an eye out.  Congratulations on your semi recovery,  I am sure there are many out there who would like to be in your shoes right now!! Cheers

What is the purpose of this? Do you have all your content on 'one page' but the 'tabs' just say what is the current 'page'? My feeling is that if your home page is www.example.com and you're showing organic search visitors different content than those who put in www.example.com then you are misleading search engines and visitors and you need to not do that. You will be better setting up separate pages with each well targeted to different keywords/terms instead. Using JS to present different content is not a good idea.

What I think you're asking is whether having a decent-length ALT tag going to do you some harm? The ALT tag is designed to be a** descriptive alternative to the image** and therefore** should** describe the image. You might want to make this short, or it might take a sentence or two. Make this useful to people who browse with images off and use a keyword/phrase if appropriate. There should not be any disadvantage of a good descriptive ALT tag. Just be as concise as you can be without losing a quality description. If the description has value elsewhere on the page then do that too, but you will want to put an ALT tag in any way, which must still be descriptive but not a duplication of something you've already said on the page. Hope this helps.

Sub domains act as their own domain essentially, a separate section which won't share weight unless specifically linked to. Sub domains are indexed in search engines separately to the root domain and subsequently, building links to these will influence ranking. If you concentrate your efforts in ranking the root domain, this won't necessarily help your sub domain rank, if we were talking sub directories, then this would as flow of authority and weight can pass through the site. Treat the sub domain as it's own website and initiate it's own strategy for this space would be my recommendation.

I can't say for sure with out seeing the sites and making sure I understand your question 100% but it sounds like both of them are hurting their SEO by having so many domains that they want to rank....client b more so than client a. Client A is passing link juice from ClientASite.com to Subpage.com. It's not a huge deal if Client A owns subpage but it's going to make ClientASite.com less competitive from an SEO perspective. Client B - same thing but worse since his clients would purchase multiple services that are SubPages. My question is why are they setup like that? Have you thought about building them both new sites and 301'ing the SubPages to pages on the main URL?

Sure so I did read that and somewhere microsites popped up - which left me wondering that for new product launch microsites are also good enough. So I wanted to clarify that . On the other hand for all our open page content we are planning to use wordpress itself. - would this be the best way to go about it? In my GA - I was very enthusiastic to know for a particular content landing page through what keywords did users land there? Is that possible if yes - then probably I don't know where to find it - I am looking under Content> Landing Pages Thanks

I use Dreamhost, Amazon Cloud (AWS) and Rackspace. Nearly all the stuff you'll need can be done on Dreamhost. Dreamhost is a good web hosting company.