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I agree with Nakul - your best bet here is the name of the product right after the domain name - clean, short and straight to the point. I find the canonical urls especially useful when you need the parameters in the url in order to provide some functionality such as highlight the link in the navigation etc., but it doesn't really have much impact on the way the product is displayed - in this case I always use the shortest possible version of the url as the canonical. Later, when you create your sitemap, make sure that you also use the shortest versions to be included in it - so that you stay consistent with your decision and make it clear to the search engines what version should be indexed.

Anytime! Let me know how it goes for you.

Check out points 1, 3, and 4 from this post http://www.seomoz.org/blog/beat-google-panda Point 1 is that where is the content, your content doesn't even start above the fold - this is my first thought. Point 3 is that Overlapping or Redundant articles are not all going to be rewarded - I didn't read yours to know how overlapping they are, other than you said above they are "related" you might be fine here, I have to say I am not inclined to read more about these things on your articles...more than I wanted to know! Point 4 is a high ad ratio (I am not sure if this would apply or not) I would take these things into consideration when I look at those two pages Good Luck!

Anytime. Please feel free to mark the question as answered hahaha! On a side note, not sure why anyone would thumbs down your comment thanking us for our input :S due to this I have added my thumbs up to your comment thanking us.

Since SEOmoz doesn't provide all of their metrics they use to calculate, it's hard to say just how much the correlation is.  But I would have to say that the correlation would be there since good crawl penetration and juice distribution leads to better indexing and a better user experience. SEOmoz Domain Authority Domain Authority represents SEOmoz's best prediction about how a website will perform in search engine rankings. Use Domain Authority when comparing one site to another or tracking the “strength” of your website over time. We calculate this metric by combining all of our other link metrics (linking root domains, number of total links, mozRank, mozTrust, etc.) into a one single score. To determine Domain Authority, we employ machine learning against Google's algorithm to best model how search engine results are generated. Over 150 signals are included in this calculation. We constantly refine this model over time. This means your website's Domain Authority score will often fluxuate. For this reason, it's best to use Domain Authority as a competitive metric against other sites as opposed to a historic measure of your internal SEO efforts. http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority

Thanks for coming back to this thread with more info. I am always eager to hear about local business decision making because there are numerous approaches. I sincerely hope this works out well for you. It's a big effort to branch out. I like this reason you've listed: " Additionally, we use the city name in anchor text in backlinking. " Sounds good to me. And that's good that you've got the local area code phone numbers. So important! Good luck, Web Design Barrie! Miriam

I would block m.domain.com from all crawlers except Googlebot-Mobile. At the same time, I would block domain.com from Googlebot-Mobile. I hope that helps.

Even "normal" pagination is tricky, and I'm honestly not a fan of Google's recent advice. They've developed a very complicated, self-serving option that's tricky for webmasters and also doesn't work on Bing. That said, I think Alisha has laid out the options very well. I completely agree that the "View All" as you've described it isn't really applicable here. Your main page is only a View All for visitors, not Google (as Alisha noted). You could create a "View All", but then technically that should also be available to human users. I actually do like NOINDEX, FOLLOW as an option for pages 2+, as those pages rarely have any search value, it's much simpler than rel=prev/next, it works on Bing, and it tends to be more effective (in my experience, at least). That said, Google's rel=prev/next implementation is also theoretically valid here. In essence, ignore the AJAX, as that's for users only. Treat this as a regular pagination problem, since that's what Google is seeing. Also, Adam Audette has some good (although complex) advice on the subject of pagination: http://searchengineland.com/five-step-strategy-for-solving-seo-pagination-problems-95494

I always create one and link from the footer text navigation. It is beneficial for usability and search engine spidering. Also. I never add special qualifiers to links like follow etc etc unless it is in the negative (don't follow etc) and even then you can omit pages via robots.txt

Hi Bristolweb! Thanks for coming to Q&A with your very good question. Here's the deal - there is nothing you can do to control or alter this for your clients. 'Related Places' is a built-in feature of Place Pages - Google thinks it is helpful to the user to show him similar businesses nearby. I sympathize with the feeling that this isn't exactly fair to a business owner to advertise his competitors on his own Place Page, but so long as Google feels it is worth it to do so, the Related Places section is here to stay. You ask for help improving a Place Page...would you like to link to a specific Place Page or are you asking for general advice? Please, let me know. Miriam

Hi On the old design we had the same footer links - parcel delivery was a sub folder and remains as such. The only difference with the parcel hub is that when we rolled out the redesign we added affiliate links to the parcel pages only. Rankings plummeted, we removed them yet they've continued to fall! As all other rankings remained stable I can only assume it's some kind of affiliate penalty which seems a little crazy as we hardly went overboard (we had 3 on the page) and besides they were removed when we noticed the drop, so for the last 6+ weeks we've had no links on them yet the rankings are still woefully low...now approximately 550 compared to top 30 prior to the changes!! Very baffling!

Thanks for your reply. Honestly, I did not want to digging more on this question after getting your first reply. But, I just assumed that, I may get some additional information from your experience. Finally, I'm going to Mark as answered.

Just an idea, if you are part of the same company why don't you redirect the pages from the larger site and point them at your newly designed smaller site? That way you won't get stung for duplicate content. If that's not possible I would rewrite all the content from scratch, the problem with rehashing is that sometimes it's often harder, also you can write optimised SEO copy for your new site to help increase rankings and traffic

Hi Matthew I thought I would share some advice about some of the existing blog posts on your site. http://sawwebmarketing.com/web-equity-owning-local-web-presence This blog post doesn't have any textual content for Google and other search engines to make use of, so I would suggest adding a paragraph or two describing what the image is about, making sure to bold any relevant keywords you wish to use in the article. http://sawwebmarketing.com/whats-the-real-deal-with-ranking-high-on-google-and-the-other-search-engines This article is better in terms of there being more text to work with, but there are no headings at all within the article. Google will expect to see the page or post title in a tag, so within the article I would suggest you use and tags where appropriate and bold keywords such as "SEO" or "Web Marketing" http://sawwebmarketing.com/good-advice-reserve-your-name-and-childrens-names-as-domain-names-today This article is good and I can see you've tried to add headings using strong/bold tags for things like, "Why is this is a good idea?" but for this I would suggest using a heading like Is buying a domain using your children's names a good idea? This allows you to have "domain" and "buying" as 2 potential keywords that Google will attribute to the blog post when indexing the post. It might be a good idea to also create a blogger or wordpress.com domain and post content on there as well. If nothing else this would allow you to have a backlink to your main site from a more authoritative site. I know that wordpress.com blogs allow you to auto post a tweet and facebook post when you add an article. For self-hosted WordPress blogs this functionality isn't available natively but there are plugins that will post a tweet or facebook post when you add new content. I hope I've been of some help or given you a few ideas for you to try. Ben

You're welcome, Bob. Sorry if that wasn't clear. I think I need more information. When you say you are targeting Salt Lake City and San Francisco, do you mean that you have offices in those two cities and are doing a true local campaign for the cities (optimizing the site for them + getting Google Place Pages, other local business index listings, etc.)? Or, is your service virtual and you are just targeting cities with your content only? If the former, then if the Local SEO is not handled correctly, Google can get confused as to why you've got two distinct addresses. In such a case, they may lose 'faith' in the validity of their data about you and that could, potentially, cause a drop, Please, come back with more info if you can. Miriam

According to teh Google you'll want to create a second sitemap specifically for your mobile pages. See: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34648

I'm assuming you'd like to have 5 star ratings for the product? Can you go back to those people who gave you a testimonial and get them to give you a rating out of 5? If so then great, but if not perhaps you can judge each review fairly and come up with a star rating. Once you've done this you can use Schema.org (try the Schema Creator if you're not sure how) or hReview to try and get some rich snippets showing. Use the Rich Snippets Testing Tool or Bing Webmaster Tools to validate.