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Sweet thank you soo much.

Hard to say without details, but I'd definitely get those 301s in place fast, if they fell through the cracks. Possibly the new site introduced a couple of home-page duplicates as well? (like "/" vs. "/index.html"). Might want to check the internal links and add rel-canonical to the home-page.

If your homepage isn't attempting to rank for "in Chicago", "in New York" etc. then I don't see an issue with cannibalization as such. That said, I'd be wary of the tactic in general, unless you have offices in those areas. My experience has been that you'll be underwhelmed with the results if "Service in New York" etc. is triggering local search results when you don't actually have an address to go on those pages. If you do have multiple locations, then creating a page for each address is definitely the way to go.

I agree Andrew it has been a good discussion - that is the great thing about this community you can actually bounce ideas off like minded folks that have knowledge and understanding of what you are doing. I think it also shows that there are always several ways to go about things - it is like this discussion it has really got me thinking and I think that can only be a good thing! Thanks

If you are comparing link building through blog commenting with link request, link bating, infographics and similar stuff then yes it is indeed a low quality idea but I might disagree when you say it’s a waste of time… On a ground reality, If you write great comments on industry relevant blogs that actually contain value then you do get links that pass quality link juice. To prove my point here is a small example: http://kikolani-com/  (convert '-' with '.') A blog own by Kristi Hines is a do follow blog where you can add a keyword if you can produce some valuable comments… (Kristi is a great content producer who holds a great value in the industry as a front link blogger for blog and social media marketing)

At SEOmoz we use Amazon CloudFront that allows us to setup a CName for our CDN. For example you will see that all our CDN images come from a few different subdomains, such as cdn.seomoz.org or profile1.seomoz.org. I bet your drop is coming from the ugly url that your CDN is providing. If your CDN allows you to create a clean CName I would do that and create  your CDN at cdn.vistastores.com. Casey

Hi there, From the sounds of it, you have not seen a penalty yet. I've had a lot of calls and emails since my last post. My feeling is that you can either be proactive, and submit a reconsideration request before things go bad, or be reactive and see if anything happens. The latter strategy is better if there are a lot of links that you cannot clean up. In either case, don't do a reconsideration request until you've made a reasonable attempt to clean up the links. Thanks, Carson

Thanks, Kevin! That's very helpful and actionable. I hadn't thought of encouraging social links to the main site url. I've got FB share buttons on the internal articles, but not on the home page. Now I've just got to figure out how to add social share buttons to my home page without cluttering the experience.

Hi! From what I many have understood, the duplication content problem is probably affecting your site because the main shop is in English (www.store.com) and the /au/, /uk/ and /nz/ too are in English and with exact content you use for the main shop. When you are targeting different countries where is spoken the same language, as it is in this case, it is really suggested to follow these practices: try to "localize" the most you can the different countries shops, using local currencies, addresses, timezones; try to use the local variation of the language, as - for instance - the English spoken in UK is quite different from the one spoken in the USA. I know that this not really an option right now, because of the costs and time needed, but I urge to plan it in long term; use the tag rel="alternate" hreflang. This tag has been especially created for these situations, in order to tell to Google that a page - i.e.: www.store.com/uk/ - should be shown to the users from Uk. More and very easy to follow instructions about how to implement it can be found here New markup for multilingual content rel=alternate" hreflang="x" Remember that you can use this rel also at a level page, so you can maintain the subcarpet organization of your store. This especially useful in order to have just one site to think when it comes to link building. And the different link building campaigns you may start for any targeted country will benefit the site as a whole.

Keri, Thanks for replying, I had checked the analytics account, and complete drop is due to google SERP results, also position of my site for most pages had dropped by few positions, but all this happened as a sudden and steep change. Also till now I had not added 'canonical' tag to the paginated pages, and hence I am suspecting it may be that google has penalized me due for duplicacy. But even after fixing these errors still my traffic is dropping.

This is a technique I would only consider if your clients site is already highly authoritative (high PR, DA). Essentially, your splitting up one domain into a handful different subdomained websites. When you have a very strong site and you split it into subdomains, you increase your chance of getting multiple spots in the SERPs. When you split a weak site into subdomains, you water down your authority and it will take extra link building to get each subdomain to rank really well. Perhaps a better strategy would be to do a bit more keyword research and figure out what keywords to really go after with the current URL structure. Instead of going after something like 'bathroom remodeling' maybe you would be better served going after 'bristol custom bathroom remodeling' or something more specific. Sometimes you have to carve out a niche and get some links before tackling a more difficult keyword.

Umm you just have to look at their homepage to see that it's as spammy as anything. Ask yourself this, does it sound too good to be true? I would stay well clear of automated tools like this - unless you want another BMR on your hands - http://www.buildmyrank.com/news/its-been-a-great-run

Hi Jamie, Search engines are not the only place you may find links to your pages. Actually, if you have done a good job of promoting your pages across a variety of channels, there should be links out there in a range of different places. You will find a more detailed answer I wrote on this question about removing 301 redirects. Hope that helps, Sha

Hi Donnie, Not exactly sure what the question is, but you have an interesting theory. I think it would make a great blog post to present your theory and support it with data and evidence.

Hi Vinku, There are three basic ways to handle this. 301 redirect all expired or old pages to the category or subcategory they belong to. This is a great method if the pages get some tweet, shares and external links pointed at them. This method was endorsed a speaker at SES from CareerBuilder, who has a similar issue where job postings always expire. Let all the pages 404 and remove them from your site. Let most pages 404 and 301 selected pages that you know where popular to the category or subcategory page. It depends a lot on the popularity of your site and on the technical capabilities you have. Good luck.

Like i mentioned in my post.  If you "Reblog" the link is followed. If you "Like", the link is nofollowed.  Tumblr is not randomly no-following certain users, that is not what is happening at all.

You want to use a nofollow & a noindex tag on it. Here's a guide for going it in ASP .NET.

For the question that you asked, yes, to rank for a term you need a good relevant page of content with very strong social signals (links, likes, etc.) to promote it.

While it surely up to you, but with guest posting, I'd rather focus on the quality of the blogs than the number of unique ones. That said, recurring guest articles at SEOmoz or Mashable will work much better than dozens of unique guest posts on low-quality blogs. That doesn't mean you should focus only on huge established blogs. Here's what I do: Identify several large blogs in my niche and guest post their at least once a month At the same time, be in the constant search of new promising blogs and guest post there as well (to discover new communities and build more links) Looks like my answer here is: do both