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Hi Avi, Not a lot of material on this element so I can't really support my answer with public information. About 1.5 years ago we tested this question on some of our pages. Results were not conclusive as the difference in ranking was only so small. We tested this on popular pages (50k search a month) as well as long tail queries. We went all out with writing a crazy amount of content for those pages. I noticed that the expanded content was a detractor to our user's activity as our CR went down with it. Part of me thinks that hiding a significant portion of your textual content can lead to Google not taking this content into account. The other part wonder how google could effectively differentiate something that is hidden purely for aesthetic purpose and what is SEO hidden content. I suppose the format and volume of hidden content would dictate Google's perception of your content. Looking at the recent developments in Google approach towards content, I would say text heavy pages are progressively diminishing in value. If you could swap the text with a more engaging video, you are more likely to be in a better position in the near future.

If you have tons of thin content pages, then it is a good idea to consolidate them into a parent page, and canonical to that parent page from all the subpages. Then focus on creating unique content for the the parent page. If you have a lot of users, reviews and ratings can be a great way to add unique, user-generated content to your pages. You can incentivise people to leave reviews for you by offering a discount coupon for people who leave a review after making a purchase.

It may depend on how the host of the draft version has it set up. For example, Adobe Business Catalyst settings automatically block all test sites from being crawled by search engines. Can you inquire if the search engines are allowed to crawl their archived or draft site? I have also been amazed at how many times someone puts a "back up" copy somewhere else on line.  Opening up the discussion may save you duplicate content troubles ahead.

Thanks for the reply. We went down the route of blocking the other domains from accessing the server in the end. Hopefully the duplicate versions of the website won't cause too much trouble. One thing am considering is adding the domains to webmaster tools and removing them from google, that should help with duplicate content issues.  If they are pointing to our server and accessing our files then we may as well exploit that for a webmaster tools verification action

Hi Vjay, Tripwire Magazine offers a recent article showcasing 40 different webpage templates which may help provide a frame of reference for strong landing pages. A clean, static design with a clear call-to-action and contact information in your top right corner will always help your user navigation. As well, ensure your landing page has a simple, descriptive URL visitors can easily use and remember. Featuring current, relevant text on the page explaining your services to potential customers will also help your user experience.

If you're all good I'd mark the question as answered, and mark any answers you found helpful as good answers - this helps all of us here in the community! Thanks, Mark

Hi, If you change content, design and URLs in the same time you won't be able to assess the reason behind an improvement in rankings or a negative effect in rankings. Let's say you change all 3 in the same time and you get a slight increasing rankings - you will be happy but the setup behind this is that the content change had a huge positive impact and the design and url changes had a negative effect - you only see the final end result  - this is just an example. The bottom line is that you can get the best out of it if you do it step by step as you can adjust, roll back, edit in order to get the best out of it. The last change I would do is the URL change and always have a fix and clear procedure in place for this as it is important (if you have some visibility now and the risk of losing something is big). Cheers.

Thank you for the advice. I'm not a fan of controlling anchor text either. I don't want to end up in trouble with any of the search engines. I will give it a try on a limited basis and see how it affects the search results.

Hai Marie Haynes, thanks for the valuable suggestion, am a regular follower of mytrafficdropped.com. Yes, these kind of keyword based anchor text links are there in our back link profile. All these links were build by a free lancer seo, We identified these & collected the report from him. We started diluting these keyword based anchor text links with Brand name, read more, visit website.. etc anchor text based links. Now it's about below 1% of total back links, (143 of 3200 unique domain links from WMT). We are trying to remove as many as possible, but the removal response was negligible and some are expecting $ to remove links.  Still these few links (below 1% of total links)will be consider as unnatural links..?.  if I used the disavow tool, how many days will it take to remove these  bad links?. Your advice is highly appreciated . It’s nice to hear you and Thanking you in advance.

Thanks @iPullRank.  There are so many moving parts here and we have decided it is just beyond our understanding to get this fixed.  We've decided to work with the folks at Portent Interactive to start a long term fix.  Thank you, everyone, for your feedback and assistance. If there is one thing I've learned it's that we need to be working with trustworthy folks like those within the Moz community.

I have understood the length of the URL to be calculated post http:// unless it's https://. Just the way it is displayed in the results.

Thanks so much for responding. I posted a response but it didn't get posted here which is weird so I wonder if Q & A is somewhat broken at the moment. Are you able to share the URL of your GoECart store? Also, can you share what platform you were on prior to switching platforms? If you can't share it here that's fine just send me a private message. I swear on my reputation here at SEOMoz that I will not divulge any business-sensitive information. Thanks for answering! Dana

It's a long term process, keep working and the results will come. Just remember how painful this was and use that to strengthen the resolve of using good SEO practices so you don't have to go through this again!

Cool - yeah that was a good question.  Again I think how you proceed depends on exactly what your strategy is.   And if you really don't have a ton of content to justify the infinite scroll then I can see that advantages of getting it all one page - but if it is cumbersome for the user then that is where infinite scroll is so helpful.

It's tough, because these variations/customizations are legitimately what you do. My gut feeling, though, is that 80K (I'm seeing 90K with a site: search) indexed pages is just too much for your current link profile. It doesn't mean you'll get in trouble, but it could mean that your ranking power is spread far too thin. While it's not a decision I'd take lightly, I do think there's an advantage here to either: (1) Consolidating variations under one URL (2) Having multiple URLs, but possibly using rel=canonical (I think that's your best bet) to focus Google on one parent URL for each product

No problem, glad it resolved the problem. There are a number of possibilities, probably through one of the following; XML sitemap Faceted navigation Magento pinged Google when the page was created

Hi Andre, Thnx for the reply. i'll read it

Yup - what Karl said is absolute critical.  The link I sent gives examples of how to do this.

Thanks William. I will go ahead and purchase U-Design theme now.