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Hi Gary, I'm wondering if you have an update for us of how things are going for you?

Hi Feneris, Were these answers enough to get you started, or are you still looking for some more advice? We'd love to have you check in and know how things are going for you. Thanks!

Hi Andy, This is what I did one site that seemed to work very well - 350% increase (over previous year) in traffic 7 months after adding image galleries and blog for a tile company. Lots of descriptive content with keywords on each image on page. Images in blog posts 2-3 per week.  Share posts and images out to interior design bloggers and print media with online presence. Generate lots of posts (several per week) by external bloggers and media that link back to the tile company site images and image collection galleries, home page, and blog posts. I repost their posts on the tile company's blog that "so and so design blogger" did this great post with excerpt and link to them. These are all follow links in WordPress. Link out generously. Tweet out from blog the post with URL 3-5/day 5 days a week amid general conversation on twitter. Credit the great blogger who shared your content. Share post with URL on Facebook. Pin like crazy. GIve out, give credit to others, and watch it come back. Have fun!

Thanks Robert, The domain is a uk on and is hosted in the UK..

We had a large drop this week.

Here's the post on Search Engine Roundtable that discusses Google's comments about this not being a ranking change. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-subdomains-webmaster-tools-13968.html

Let me just warn that you shouldn't always take the industry leaders as a good example. Yelp has a brand and link profile that allows them to get away with plenty of bad or just mediocre practices. I think the Panda philosophy is going to continue, and it's not all-or-none - thin content and a bloated index can harm the ranking power of your other, more critical pages. You may rank for more long-tail phrases, but that can come at the cost of higher rankings on your money terms. It's a balancing act.

That sounds like a nice idea and will work nicely for users - you'll just need to consider whether you would rather the YouTube videos or the pages on your site rank for the targeted keywords and optimise everything accordingly. There aren't any duplicate content risks there.

I agree with Syed - it really depends on what you're doing with them. If they're just placeholders that have never had a site on them, Google probably won't notice at all. If these were previously interconnected micro-sites and then you turned around and funneled them into one site to capture all the link-juice, then it could certainly look a little manipulative. What's the purpose of the 20+ domains?

Dear Brendan, this should not make for any problems. We also use it on different websites for theming. Our theme is camping so we use the main keyword/theme word on most pages description which in turn should not be any problem. To be sure you could always interchange the position of the standard text (if this is not done automatically using a CMS). So no problem at all.

Thanks guys for the advice! Great stuff, has for sure answered my question and finally got an answer! Thanks

Yes. On this most recent update. I've noticed slight drops before due to google updates but nothing like this.

I dont think there is such a thing as "perfect SEO" (or perfect anything), I did a little research on this because it got me a bit nervous... I found this article http://www.webconfs.com/over-optimization-article-8.php... Last time Google was hinting a change to its algo's Panda kicked some sites. I wouldn't underestimate Googles "Hints"... The article I mentioned explains the differences between overstuffing keywords and keeping it clean. Keeping a keyword to content ratio of 3-7% should keep you in the "safe" SEO area (for now).

Have you setup a change of address in Google Webmaster Tools? https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83106

The guidline you want to look out for is cloaking, showing one thing to the user and one to the serch engine. If you are hiding the text and not showing it to the user then you have a problem. if you have some way that the user can click and then see the hidden text you should be ok. how does google know the difference? i dont know if they can algorthmicaly, but if you rank well a compeditor will look into your site and report you if he can.

Thank you Edward. I don't have quite that problem, but I think you are right too. My CDN is set up to be Origin Pull. That means there is no need to FTP - the system just fetches content as requested. you should check that out if you have to ftp everything. But what you said that helped me is this - that I should have had one CNAME for images and anotehr CNAME for content and the content should be limited to a folder called content, so I can put the CSS files and the JS files in it and that way, the plain HTML pages at teh root level will never be affected. I also realized, while checking the system, that I wasn't using a canonical tag in the intermediate pages, as I was in the story pages. So I just added code to add canonical tags for all the intermediate pages and the front page. I do have a few other types of pages, so I will handle the code for them next. I think adding the canonical tag might fix the problem, but I will also work on reconfiguring the CDN and change over when the action is not too busy, in case it takes a while to propagate.

Yes that's a different situation. You're now talking about pagination, which quite rightly, canonicals to parent page is not to be used. For faceted/filtered navigation it seems like canonical usage is indeed the right way to go about it, given Peter's experience just mentioned above, and the article you linked to that says, "...(in part because Google only indexes the content on the canonical page, so any content from the rest of the pages in the series would be ignored)."