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Oh without a doubt delete them. If you nofollow them you're safe from a linking perspective, but it's still throwing away that page juice, just not passing it to the site. If it's a sponsored theme you're using there is a possibility that it's an encrypted footer that will break the template if you try to edit or remove the link and you might need to do a little detective work on how to work around that, if that is the case.

The solution in the implementation of the rel="alternate" hreflang, as explained by Google here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

Links from Ezine Articles wont help you. Check out this video from Matt Cutts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chuhSmwsL7s

Hi Mike, Thanks for your response. Definitely some good food for thought here - especially about ensuring the pdfs are optimised. It may be that we can put all the content on the site as HTML, but just not have it as part of the navigation (which we are doing with certain pages, like FAQs. Unfortunately, when they say light on content they mean just that. As we are a design agency, the designers tend to think people are only picture led and the words distract from that. I tend to think that, while people will decide if we are the agency or them based on previous work, they also like to see stats on results, client feedback and so on. So I'll try to persuade them to go the HTML route, but at least you've pointed out some things to bear in mind if going the PDF avenue. Thanks! Nick

If you analyse all the blogs on competitor websites, establish their strong points and their weak points and then develop your own blog that provides the best content in the industry, you will gain natural links and you will have a chance of competing. Obviously this would only work if your onsite optimisation had been completed.

I would agree that the Google Trusted store would be a good place for them to start, very convenient. They could also use ratings from other review sites, like Yelp, etc.  and possibly even social signal via Google Plus, Twitter, etc.

I think Alan and EGOL have summed it up nicely for you. I have looked at a lot of Panda hit sites and one of the most common issues were e-commerce sites that consisted of primarily of stock product descriptions.  Why would Google want to rank a site highly that just contains information that hundreds of other sites have? If you've got a large chunk of your site containing duplicate descriptions like this then you can attract a Panda flag which can cause your whole site to not rank well, not just the product pages. You could use the duplicate product descriptions if you had a large amount of original and helpful text around it.  However, no one knows what the ratio is.  If you have the ability to rewrite the product descriptions this is by far the best thing to do.

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i jsut recently started your program, and have the same basic problem.  about 10 of my pages are PRIVATE. Also, i have links to about 10 PDF and 5 VIDEO  tutorial, which are also private,  Log in Only. now, i read your answer, and have no idea what you said.  GWT??   Robots.txt>??? i guess i am not far enough in the course of this to get it yet?

When you say blogs do you mean blog posts? I would think that they are all one in the same as far as search engines are concerned if you run everything off the same domain. Blog posts are a very easy way for an e-commerce site to build new content, write articles and attract new visitors.   Look at your stats to see how many visitors are hitting your blog posts. Where applicable, from your blog posts - refer visitors to relevant content/products on the e-commerce side of your site.

"Data Refresh" could refer to a few things. Google updates it's data centers constantly. Or you may be referring to an algorithmic data refresh as it applies to Penguin or Panda. Oct-Nov of 2012 saw many Google updates, and it's very possible your site was effected by one of these. Do you have access to Google Analytics for the account? If you know the exact dates that you saw a traffic loss, you can match these up with the known dates of the algorythm changes. In addition to SEOmoz's Google Algo Change History, there are a couple of tools you can use if you have access to Google analytics. Both are free: Panguin Tool Sistrix Google Update Tool (the sistrix link isn't working for me right now, but I'm hoping it comes back online) Once you know why your rankings/traffic dropped, you'll be better equipped to address the issues. -cyrus

I would be VERYYYY careful with this. Focus on putting your keywords in your content in a way that makes sense to the reader. Stuffing footers with your keywords is a definite NO NO!

Yes. You should/could use the canonical tag to specify your preferred version of pages with identical content. This can be the homepage or any other pages within your site. Mike

Hi Darlene, I found your question rather interesting as I have also been looking into the entire Local SEO thing recently. I opted to go for localised pages on the main site though: http://www.jhbathrooms.com/showroom/stockton-on-tees Couldn’t you rather use your microsites for back-linking purposes in an attempt to boost your main site’s DA (and pages PR)?  You could probably get away with more aggressive linking techniques towards these microsites without putting your main site at risk?  Or am I wrong in assuming this? I would love to see other people’s opinion on this… I am rather an SEO newbie, only being back into SEO for about 6 months after a very long absence. Used to do SEO back in 2000-2001; remember Alta Vista and Webposition Gold anyone? Cheers Greg

Thank you Miriam. It's good to know I'm not alone!

I think it's better to try identifying the bad links and disavow them with google instead of changing pages. Creating new pages might solve the page problem at first, but what if the entire domain gets kicked out down the road? Also, you might have good links pointing to your current pages, creating new replacement pages will make you loose the pagerank you might get from valid sources. I would identify and fix once and for all the issues before it spreads.

Hi John, I can tell you have actually already done quite a lot in order to make sure your site ranks well. I won't repeat what others have stated before me, but just wanted to mention a couple of things that might help a little... and as we know, every little helps Use a structured format for your address Schema.org, or other microformat. Structure your URLs in such a way that the location is mentioned within the URL (make it easy for Google to crawl and for your customers to navigate). You might have to rethink the site architecture a little. Create content that is optimised both for keyword and location (separate pages for every combination) > Local Landing Pages! The above will also allow you to have optimised Title and Description tags. Try to obtain Reviews that actually mention the keyword of the service your are trying to rank higher for. Hope any of the above helps? Cheers Greg