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Hi Joe, Thanks for the response. Having had a variety of different opinions, and still not being 100% on the right answer, I spent a LOT of time crawling through SEOmoz Q&A: Takeaways from my digging around are: Changes to title tags and URL's should be implemented separately. As you state above, reason for this is so that you can pinpoint problems if they arise (see point 3 of the answer) http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/49136/revising-urls Title tag changes should also be implemented in stages. Homepage, top 50 pages, everything else (again, see point 3 of the answer): http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/39946/title-tags-global-changes. (As an interesting aside, Dr Pete clearly states that when making sitewide changes, dont make more than one set of changes per page, it could cause an over-optimisation penalty) URL structure changes should be implemented all in one go: http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/45183/update-url-structure (this link is an amazing guide from everett sizemore on exactly how to implement URL changes, recommended reading!) I appreciate there's no right and wrong answer, but I think that with the above in mind, the approach I'm going to take to these changes is a scientific one. Make a change, assess results, move forward. 1. Implement title tag changes in stages (monitoring site performance at every stage). Homepage/Category Pages/Everything else. 2.Add new on page content. 3. Add new information architecture (couple of new categories- nothing significant) 4. Implement URL changes through 301 redirects all in one go. Keep old site XML sitemap in place. Once site has been crawled (and new pages found) move to new sitemap and update internal links 4. Implement meta robots 'noindex, follow' to various sections of the site. Not all in one go, but section by section, monitoring results and then moving on if no issues arise Would be interested to know what you think of that as a plan? Also, need to send out love to Dr Pete and Everett Sizemore for their Q&A answers! James

I agree with Ryan's response. It's always good to do competitive analysis but stay away from the spammy websites and do some article marketing and social book marking if you have to, provide high value content to the market in that niche instead of reporting it. Be the market leader for that niche. Good luck.

Looks like Google is picking the keyword meta tag as the anchor text and description tag for the detail. Though it might be picking the most relevant keyword, on the basis of page content, from the list instead of the first one everytime. Just something I found checking the pages above. The anchor texts are strangely the very first in the list of keywords.

Yes. Every tool I know of that provides PR pulls from the tool bar PR.

I would always recommend when implementing canonical tags that you use an absolute links, which just means your entire url starting with http:// When they are talking about relative canonical links they mean relative to the "base" link, which could also be called the root of your website.  So if your url was: http://www.rootdomain.com then your relative rel canonical tag would be

There is no connection to meta descriptions and rankings, so refreshing the content in the meta description will not help your rankings at all. The meta descriptions are typically used as the text below the page title in the SERP, so good meta descriptions can help click through rate. So write your meta descriptions for users, and only change the content if you believe you can create better copy that will drive more click throughs.

Place it wherever you think people will use it. People might +1 your homepage if they like the website or brand, so it's worth putting there. Otherwise put it wherever else you have sharing links.

Raven Tools is definitely worth trying. SEO Book have some good free (and paid) tools.

Hi although you may be a little reluctant to make changes to a site which is performing well I would take some direction from the error report. It will help. You may find that you start ranking better for main keywords and also start picking up some other keywords also. Too many links; this is not always straightforward if you are an ecommerce site, though if your links are in footer and for seo purposes it may be worth deciding which are important. 302 redirect. Google prefer 301 permanent redirects Title tag too long. This may be a good exercise in that perhaps your title tags are not as well optimised as they might be, not only for SEO purposes but also for human consumption because this is what is bolded inorganic results. A good title tag will increase click through, therefore it could be the case that lower ranking competitors with better title tags are actually getting more visits from organic. Meta description. The same advice here. You should have a unique meta description for all your important pages. This is what will appear in the organic results snippet and again better meta descriptions achieve more traffic. Sean

That is my question exactly. I was curious if any experts in this community have a reasonable solution.

It seems like canonicalizing the URLs is still a good idea.  For one, there are other search engines that respect the tag, so you want them to do the right things.  However, it does sound like for Google that this could replace the need for canonicalization tags due to URL parameters.  If you have duplicate content that's not caused by URL parameters, you'd still need the canonical tag. Just to be safe, I'm still doing both. When I logged into my webmaster tools, all of the parameters Google had found were there already.  I went through and edited them and added the new information.

Sorry for the vague graph. Good answer.... We are actually working on improving the blog side and  make our social media presence stronger.

Funny, we had that self-pointing canonical tag since July 8th - just removed it less than a day ago as we thought it might be harmful. So, that means that it didn't help as it was there all the time.

Does the server return a 503 not available when it goes down at least? Or is it somehow set to show a 404? You want to make sure it's showing a 503 to the bots so they know the server is down and not that the pages have been removed.

Do not request for Google to remove the URL. It would mean the page would be de-indexed for 90 days. The cleanup will depend on the root cause. If there is an issue on the site right now then you cannot resolve the problem until it is fixed. Report the issue to your host and ask they run a security scan. Meanwhile run your own scans and upgrade the site to 1.7. Change all passwords then check the site again.