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Hi Arthur, Sorry for the long delay in a response. This is odd. I'm seeing just two (seemingly) random pages indexed in Bing. I highly suggest verifying your site in Bing's webmaster tools, as they have a a great webmaster tools dashboard as well, and can tell you if they're finding any problems.

Thanks Casey. I'm interested see if there is any varying opinion. I've had a few voted in favor of your methodology, but a couple of critics for the alternative. I think one page with all of the content will work well for us. Plus, the user experience should improve since we won't be having to load a new page each time the user wants to see additional information.

Hi, I believe, and have seen many others here with the same opinion...  find this is a very unreliable way to see links, it is usually very outdated, and a very small percentage of your link portfolio if any. Personally, I would take operator link: results with a grain of salt. w00t! Shane

Hi. Thanks for both of your replies, I really appreciate the help. You were 100% right Aran, I just checked through the .htaccess file and there is already a rewrite rule which converts the nice SEO friendly one in to the not so nice and friendly one. This seemed like madness to me but when I looked deeper it appears that the developer has included this rewrite rule so that the query string attached to the URL can be used for pulling stuff from a databse on various pages. Not the best for SEO but the whole site seems to rely on this. I have added some coding in to the site that uses the same query string to create a rel canonical tag. Thanks again for the help, I wouldn't have got there without the guidance. Ade.

TANKS!

Hi AWCthreads, Your question was: "Does the absence of keywords in the url significantly impact the page rank of an article?" Now if we talk about Google PageRank, then you should not worry about it. But if we look at search engines rankings, then you should. Using your keywords in the URl, gathering every +signal for the search engines may help you in gathering higher on-page SEO score, which will eventually lead to a higher ranking also for the targeted keywords. I hope it helped, Istvan

I can comment on pagination as Google has released very good guide for this in light of their support for prev and next rels: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

Actually, there were recent adjustments to the SEOmoz page rank system to make it more reflective of where a page would actually be ranking in search results. Since the move was only ten percent, it was probably simply an adjustment based on that change. The change was explained in the following post on the 23rd of Nov. by Matt Peters Since you are seeing improvement, it shows that the change is based no changes in measurement by moz and not in search rankings or results. Rest easy, its all good.

In purchasing domains we have changed... registrar from an Asian company to a USA company, registrant, all contact persons, all physical address, all email address, moved hosting (from one USA host to another USA host), changed DNS, changed IPs.... all of that was done the same day. No problems.

Adding to Daniel's comment, I'd say the big difference "...through our faceted search." It's important to have both the XML entries and a crawl path. An XML sitemap may be enough to get the pages indexed, but they won't inherit any internal link-juice. That comes through your internal links. Somewhere, there needs to be a link that Google can crawl to the other cities. The direct back-links will help, and should get you indexed and possibly ranking, but you're still losing the authority from the domain as a whole that you'd inherit via internal links. The upshot is that you'll lose ranking power.

www.mindflash.com

Boy you have to be careful with that approach. I've seen it done successfully but the amount of work it takes to do it right is outrageous. I do keep a list of link building contacts around to do the same sort of thing. If you can build a solid relationship with blog owners, many will eventually just give you the wordpress login and let you publish on your own. If you deliver really solid content as guest posts, a see bloggers open up to more guest posts often. At this point, I'm pretty confident I could get a hundred or so links up no problem using these contacts. I guess this is how I make the same sort of approach white-hat. In the end, if you're constructing a link network for your own clients, it's far too easy to make a mistake. Maybe too many of the same sites are on the same host, or even use the same Adwords login. Google can pretty easily tell if the same person has involvement in a large number of sites linking to one site. If they catch on, you're pretty likely to get a penalty. Mike

If you're worried about changing the format of your URLs when moving to the Wordpress platform, just make sure you have the appropriate 301 redirects in place to the new URLs. This should help pass the link juice from your old site. As Robert says, if Godaddy are just hosting the site, they won't get any link juice.

If they're really just low quality (spun articles, blog comments, etc.), then I agree with Casey. You can cause more trouble taking a machete to your links - move forward with stronger, better links, and the past will probably be forgiven. My only caveat is that if these links appear to be paid or farmed, I might be a bit more aggressive with removing some of them.

Maybe I'll try a bit less stuffing, but would rather have the value of the key words in the search. Does anyone know if Google still gives search vale for the terms it leaves out? I will try a small test to see what happens. Thanks

I posted that message at Cre8 as soon as I saw that the image SERPs were being cleaned.  Nothing triggered me to look at image SERPs... I was simply looking at images and noticed that the SERPs had been cleaned. On that date only the high traffic SERPs had pirated images removed.  Now many of the secondary SERPs have improved image results. I can not tell you that this has brought me extra traffic.  I didn't see a traffic lift.

Thanks very much for your reply Jerod! Google Webmaster Tools is set up and working. Some info: No detected malware 1 crawl error (I think this must have been temporary. Only reported once, and this url is not in the robots.txt now): http://greatfire.org/url/190838 URL restricted by robots.txt Dec 10, 2011 Pages crawled per day, average: 1102 Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds), average: 2116 The robots.txt is mostly the standard one provided by Drupal. We've added "Disallow: /node/" because all interesting urls should have a more interesting alias than that. We'll look more into whether this can be the cause. Anything else that you notice?