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Looks like your site was the target of an advertisement. If you didn't place the add... stranger things have happened. It's not all that uncommon to get a link placed somewhere weird on the web and receive 100s or even 1000s of off-topic visits a day. Almost always in these cases, your bounce rate and time-on-site are negatively effected. But don't worry. A high bounce rate in this case won't hurt you at all. What Google (and the other search engines) are looking for is the "long click". Dr. Pete calls it "dwell time" in this article he recently wrote. What this means is that when Google itself directs users to your website, they don't want those users returning to Google right away to click on another result or perform another search. This is the type of high bounce rate that can hurt you. On the other hand, Google doesn't care (and doesn't even look at your analytics) if a 3rd party is sending you off-topic clicks. Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

First,  I appreciate all the responses and I will certainly take something from each of them.  Vahe touched on something that I thought I should do and now it's confirmed.   My national currency page sits on top of several sub pages but I don't have links to the sub pages from within that page.  I figured it was enough to have them on the menu.  But in the back of my mind I wondered if there was some SEO type reason to use a bunch of internal links to make the site more navigable and to pass link juice around. Thanks everyone who answered!

Dear Cyrus, I completely agree that there is no good and added value with the stock id and measurements for Google but I felt like I had no choice. I didn't want to start putting canonical between the pages because every other day an item is sold and then I would need to change the canonical to a similar existing item. Are you saying that when a page makes a canonical to himself Google does not index it? Or treats it as a non original page (a copied page) even if I don't specify from where it is copied? Please see the following question I asked that is about this matter and got a different response:  http://www.seomoz.org/q/is-there-a-reason-to-put-a-canonical-to-yourself-interesting-case Thanks

It's tricky - these are http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html To steal their example, page 2 of search results is going to need 2 tags, like this: If there's no page refresh and you're using AJAX, it's possible your paginated search isn't being indexed at all. It depends on what you're showing to bots. Unfortunately, that's nearly impossible to tell without seeing the site.

I completely agree.  I have had very similar projects.  Good luck!

I 100% agree with Marisa. I don't fully understand what you're trying to accomplish, but it looks like a recipe for disaster, to be blunt. You're going to moving link-juice around in really weird ways and basically splitting your efforts. Why can't you house everything on "www.abcshoes.com"? Is there a technical reason you need the "...onlinestore.com" domain (such as a 3rd-party storefront)? I feel like we're missing a piece of the puzzle here.

I share Alan's hesitation - it could look like cloaking, especially if a bot is making the call. If the pages aren't indexed yet, you could just "nofollow" the links - it sends the same signal transparently. Home Depot is probably pulling it off with the AJAX/JS implementation, which is a bit harder for Google to parse. They also have a massive authority and link profile, so they can always squeak the small stuff by. You might not be so lucky. In general, it's best to stick to the standard practices and not get too tricky.

The problem with "myths" like keyword count/density is that they were probably true once. In the last 90s (pre-Google), if you knew the exact density of keywords to use on any given day, you'd rank pretty well on the early search engines. It was a cat-and-mouse game. Things have changed a lot since then, though.

Yes, exactly - if you see a blog post with 100 comments and they're all using exact-match anchor text to 10 different interests ("Free Casino", "Cheap Viagra", etc.) it's a pretty clear sign that blog's been spammed to death. Admittedly, it's not always so obvious, but you can usually spot quality problems pretty quickly.

I wouldnt panic too much. Just prepare for some hard and time consuming work. Stick with the domain. Keep updating new content and lower the keyword density, make the content as good as possible. Then, you should follow a good quality link building strategy which should also include social link building. I would happily provide you with a free report and plan should you wish to take me up on the offer. Then you could use the plan to do things properly and reduce the risk of SERP drops or even sandboxing (removal from results). Add me on Skype if you wish to discuss anything, I should be available most of the time. My Skype name is on my profile (click my name).

Ok, I got it Jeffrey Tks for the help

I don't know what title tag to use.  Would take more KW research than I am able to do at this time. The post pages are not being found because your content management system is inserting a bad link.  It can probably be fixed by working the code in your template page. This site has some good rankings even though there is a lot wrong with it.  If you are getting some good traffic and making a few sales it would definitely be worth the money to hire someone to fix the technical problems. There is also a lot of potential to improve your conversion rate. Good luck with it.

If you're still having this issue, send a note to the help desk via email at help@seomoz.org. They'll help you figure out what is happening. So sorry for the delayed response!

I wouldn't worry about it. Google and Bing have way more information for making ranking decisions than a site like this.

I would say my success story is hitting page 1 google.co.uk for a big keyword in my industry in less than 4 weeks for a 60% difficulty keyword with a website less than 2 months old

Lot's of good advice here, so I'll just weigh in with my two cents... Instead of redirecting all your files to /index.php, why not rewrite those in .htaccess to redirect back to the original (without the /index.php) This has the dual effect of preserving your link equity to those original urls, and there's a slight correlation between shorter URLs and higher rankings (in part possibly because shorter URLs have a higher click-thru rate) Regardless, I suspect a perfect storm of factors contributed to your rankings, as you stated yourself: 1. Site was down when on old US host for a minimum of 3 hours one day and perhaps longer 2. Changed from US host to host based in Spain 3. Analytics stopped recording data for 3 days and site was down briefly after the change of host 4. All original URLs now have /index.php at the end I purposely left out a Google Algorithm change, because of Occam's Razor - the simplest explanation is usually correct, and an algorythm change would be too much coincidence. As Robert said, make sure you're targeting the right country in Google Webmaster. Other than that, I would try very hard to return all URLs, hosting and settings back to their original state before all these changes.

Hi Kenoshi Creative, Unfortunately, due the the fact that I'm in the US, Google isn't allowing me to change my location to Calgary, so I'm unable to produce the sitelinks display you are seeing for the terms you've mentioned, but I do understand what you're talking about. To my recollection, these displays started getting attention around the middle of 2011. Here is a blog post on this subject, but I'm afraid it may not be of much help to you because it sounds like you're already implementing most of these things: http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2011/08/17/google-places-sitelinks/ Perhaps of more use to you will be Linda Buquet's piece on this + the discussion that follows it: http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/google-places-one-box-local-sitelinks.html And this post by Matthew Hunt: http://www.smallbusinessonlinecoach.com/blog/seo/google-displaying-new-sitelinks/ Are these of any help to you? I sincerely hope so! Miriam