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Glad I could be of help. If you need any other guidance as you get into it, do just get in touch, I'd be happy to help. My contact details are on my SEOmoz profile

Thanks Jon!

Thanks for the insight... Simplastics.com currently runs on IIS, however, the new site will run on a Linux based server with PHP and SQL db. As for the 30240 trailer (LOL) unfortunately that is a misguided application of part numbers by a particular manufacturer (we don't like it either as it spiders like a zip code instead of a part number). The new site utilizes a Magento shopping cart so we're committed to Linux. Considering the migration to a new platform, what would be your recommendation?

#1 Fix the misspelling on your home page title!  "Pacakages" #2 Reading the descriptions on the Google results page, the Student City one sounds a lot more interesting to me: "Epic events, celebs, DJs, parties & staff. StudentCity delivers the ultimate _spring break _experience! Want the best week of your life?" vs. yours: "Hanover, Maryland tour operator highlights worldwide travel packages. Photo gallery, company profile and information request forms available."

thumb up for you

We use Pingdom to monitor a lot of client websites. It is great, because we receive SMS messages when something is wrong. The detailed reporting, iPhone app and abilty to monitor http-statuses is exceptional! http://www.pingdom.com/

Hi Joel, There have a been a couple great articles on the SEOmoz blog this year that should be able to give you some ideas. You should definitely check them out. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-links-with-video-content Hope this helps! Tim

I don't think there is any hard evidence on them, Rand talks about the footers and manipulation here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-changes-every-seo-should-make-before-the-over-optimization-penalty-hits-whiteboard-friday There is evidence on the fact that if they are linking to a page that has already been linked to higher in the code, they count for nothing. Only the first anchor text links count in google's eyes. So unless you're linking to pages that are not within the nav, it's fairly pointless from an SEO point of view. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts I think using the Footer for linking to pages already linked to is a waste of time. People use the navigation to find the page they're looking for. Footer anchors should be used for the stuff people expect to see there, i.e. T&Cs, policies, trust signals, awards, contact us, address, Company No. etc.

Best practices SEO recommendations would dictate eliminating the unique URLs and consolidating to eliminate duplicate content conflict considerations. Never trust Google to "figure it out" when you can instead STRENGTHEN the core product content depth through consolidation. To keep product pages clean, you can display product variations through CSS enabled tabs, or a host of other methods.  (Dropdown menus, for example). Then, redirect all those variation pages with 301 Redirects back to the new consolidated page version for each core product.

Google does measure social activity so your question is a good one. I personally prefer shares versus likes.  I'm going to quote Mari Smith, as she best explains the difference between the two.  "Note the Facebook Like Button now functions (almost) the same as the Facebook Share Button. The big difference is there isn’t an obvious place to write your own narrative before posting to Facebook, plus you cannot select the thumbnail. Clicking the Facebook Like Button automatically pushes the full story into your personal Profile stream. So, you may wish to add the Facebook Share Button with Counter to your registration page instead." So from a SEO perspective they're equivalent. From a useability and conversion perspective, I would think share would be better.

1. Absolutely correct. - But make sure to upload new xml sitemap as well 2. Considering latest penguin update, if you re-do your site and make it live with well optimized (white hat only) pages and site structure. load speed, accessibility, content quality, etc. if all these points have been taken care of, there are no chances of rank drop, in fact it should improve. P.S. don't concentrate to much on keywords, use them naturally/genuinely. Create attractive/meaningful meta tags. Hope I was able to answer you query properly. Best of luck

Alan's answer is spot on. Avoid javaScript or carefully follow best-practices so Google can crawl all content without reading javaScript. Alan is exactly right when he said: never count on Google crawling through your JavaScript to find content, but also never count on being able to hide anything from Google via JavaScript. Whether you use PHP or not is not directly relevant. PHP is executed server-side, so Google never sees your PHP code and doesn't care. What matters is whether your programmer writes PHP code that will generate search friendly HTML code, url structure, etc.

I wouldn't even know what a "starter bay" or "extension bay" was. I also think there are WAY too many options. If you are involved in the hospitality industry you would think you'd understand what these terms mean, having said that would those terms be specific to a UK audience? For example, I'm in Australia (I have a fast food business background from a previous life) and we would just call them shelving or store room shelving.  The starter bay, we'd call it a "return". I ask this question because I noticed that your client does take orders from outside mainland UK. You are right about having too many options. That is a lot of stock that the client is carrying.

Hi Raymond, Merging a large number of sites can be tricky. If Google sees a large number of new 301s all pointing to your homepage, this could throw up some flags. This is especially the case if the homepage in question doesn't already have a strong link profile. That said, there's no guarantees that it will hurt, either. I'd go slow and try to build up natural links to your homepage outside the 301 redirects. If and when you do de-commission a site, make sure it has a clean backlink profile before redirecting, Try to redirect individual pages to individual pages (not everything to the homepage) and itrogers said, make sure to file a change of address in Google Webmaster Tools. Best of luck!

Thanks much, Anthony. Any other opinions?

The 301 redirects was quite easy to set up, but I've actually found a better solution using Dreamweaver for my problem. I replaced all the old pages where I'd broken the template in the sub folder with new versions which are attached to the template with the correct copy and paste the content and title tags. So all the pages which are indexed and now the new looking version. The one thing I've learnt from this episode is that if you don't know how to operate a particular piece of software and you can't get the answers you require immediately, be patient until you know how to do things correctly. It saves time in the long run..............

Joomla has all those features included in its core but if you want greater flexibility over what content you want public and what you want private (requires visitors to sign-up/login to view), you may want to check out this extension. There are a few Wordpress plugins that cater for what you're after - but again, included in the core is memberships, sign-up/login functions so not really sure exactly what you're after but here are some resources that will likely come in useful for you. http://buddypress.org/ http://ntt.cc/2009/10/13/25-excellent-social-networking-plugins-for-wordpress.html

LOL! Yep, that can happen. Remember, ALWAYS upgrade your software to the latest stable version. I forgot to upgrade my ecommerce site and it got hacked a couple weeks ago. Go ahead and feel free to use WP. Just remember to upgrade it because hackers find vulnerabilities in old versions. You can also use Joomla or drupal.org/