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If the member pages are being indexed, YES. At the risk of stating the obvious, you need to focus on your on a page optimization. In order to do that you need to get back to the basics. What are the keywords that you need to focus on and that are important for your website.  Whatever those words are, you will need to make sure that your "member  pages" are rich in those keywords. When google makes a determination of the relevance and quality of your website, related to the search terms, the better job you do on on page optimization, the higher your relevancy and quality score will be from google. As an example: one of your keywords might be trade shows and meetings.  So on each of the member pages it would-be important to mention the keywords  trade shows and meetings that your members support at the convention visitors bureau.  Or if you are providing them standard outlines of members pages, you could provide several different standard version layouts that mention your primary keywords in different ways. This portion of on page optimization, depending on the number of members, could make a large impact on your seo results. Hope this helps.

Not sure...but I plan on renaming pages too.  I have heard on this forum that if there are no external links to the pages then I should just leave up the old "site map" for a while along with the new one and then after they are indexed take down the old site map.  If you have links then a redirect is necessary and you do lose some link juice. I am interested in hearing from others too in regards to a more direct answer to your response.

Thanks to everybody who's weighed in on this discussion.   Do y'all think subfolders are the way to go for new web content for a big company with a well-established website even if the main site won't do much linking to the subfolder and the covered topics are separate?   Is much link mojo passed purely as a property of the domain's strength (if domain.com is reputable, domain.com/folder/ must be, too)?  Or is the majority of authority established because of the internal links?

That sounds perfect - if the user-generated URLs are getting enough traffic, make them permanent pages and 301-redirect or canonical. If not, weed them out of the index.

Thanks.

Thanks Everett - I was coming to that conclusion, but really just needed some back-up. I appreciate your response! Emily

There's nothing wrong with doing this, as long as the "title" attribute is accurate (DON'T spam it with non-relevant keywords), but I haven't seem compelling evidence that it acts as a ranking signal.

Hi Jeremy, You're in luck, because a guy named Mark Collier just did a study on the matter. He found that exact match .net domains had a much lower correlation to higher rankings. .net exact match = 0.08 Correlation .com exact match = 0.18 Correlation The full study can be found here: http://www.theopenalgorithm.com/correlation-data/domain-name-seo/ In the latest SEOmoz study, the correlation for exact match .com domains was .22 and previously .38, which indicate that the power of overall power of exact match domains in general is diminishing. http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics It's worth reading both of these studies in whole. It's also worth noting that there are likely several reasons for .net exact match to rank lower. #1 being that .net domains tend to be spammier, less established domains. Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Yes it is a WP site. Im reading many opinions on this. I want to move a ranking page 2 levels deeper in the URL structure, does the depth of the page matter at all? is this www.domain/category/page better than this www.domain/category/sub-catagory/page for ranking? I am restructuring an entire site there will be a few pages taken out and a few 301s. Many of the pages have the .html extension (plug-in). I read that its better not to have the .html if we take it out do we need a 301 redirect? can taking the .html out hurt SERP results?

Ya, I read through that article yesterday & see that they recommend the same setting as the Yoast plugin should be doing? Although I didn't ever get a response from me to see if there is something missing? For now, I plan on adding this to the robots.txt file & see what results I get? Do you know the time frame that it takes to get the updates in GWT? Will this update within a few weeks or would it take longer than that? Thanks for all the help! BJ

i think thatis a tweet from alan davis. Bing has live tweets on their US news section i have noticed, search for somthing that is currently in the news, and you will see scrolling tweets live on the side bar.

One of the reasons why keywords in a domain name work so well are because when links and references are made to the website, the keywords are typically the anchor text that are in the links.  So, you get an extra advantage beyond even the semantic benefit of having the keywords in the domain name.  You'll have less worries in the anchor text link building violations because you can build more links similar to the keywords in your domain. However, it appears in certain verticals, there are more benefits for the exact keywords in a domain.  Check out attorney phrases for example.  Do some research by checking out specific verticals and you might get your answer in terms of how important or how valuable they can be.

Yes, I have seen it only 2-3 times ever since it launched. I guess the way we all search or the kind of searches we have, don't have short answers

Very Greatful for SEOMoz. Thanks.