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OK, thought I would get a bite on that Question....I am going to run a test by setting up 4 sites in the same vertical with TLD's of differing extensions. Any suggestions on test parameters???

Hi Jake. Links on a page are what allow page rank to flow throughout your site. The full details are extremely long and complex involving advanced math, technical patents and more fun. If you want to look at some of the details here is a link: http://www.sirgroane.net/google-page-rank/ I should also clarify this issue has no direct relationship to Panda. There can be some indirect relation based on how you present the links, but the number of links on a page is a foundational SEO factor. At a high level, each link you offer to a page is an indicator of it's importance. If your website has 200 pages and you provide a link to all 200 pages from your home page, you are saying every page of your site has equal importance. This is generally a bad approach and will lead to poor SEO performance. If you were to offer a "cars" website, there are some makes and models which are very popular, and others which are unpopular. I have not done any research but I imagine cars like Ford Mustangs, Chevy Corvettes and similar flashy models are more popular topics for discussions then a Chrysler Lebaron or other models. From your home page I would suggest a link to each car manufacturer, then a link block of "Popular cars" which links to the mustang and corvette pages. This method allows your PR to flow to your most important pages. It is a solid SEO tactic. As a general rule, you should minimize your links on a page to what is necessary or helpful. You are damaging your site's SEO by trying to link to everything. It is what I would refer to as "link stuffing". Every additional link you add to a page weakens all the other links on the page.

In short, provide less internally linking to less important pages. This approach is the best method to conserve link juice and allow it to flow to other more important pages. You describe pages which are near duplicate and have keyword conflicts. Ideally those pages should be removed. If they must remain, they should be canonicalized to the primary page you want to appear in SERPs. Some sites offer the following links in the navigation: legal, privacy policy, terms, about us, etc. You can conserve link juice by not including those links on every page, although there may be legal or other reasons you want them on all pages. You could consider a single "Site Info" form of link which presents a page links to your privacy policy and other pages.

I've done as you suggested. I came across the issue after running a report that showed 40 links with 302 status-all turned out to be trackbacks. While the above advice takes care of the future, is there any harm in having these existing 302 trackbacks, or any advantage in making them 301s? Thank you, Dan

My clients look to me for recommendations. Recently I was in a position where I needed to determine which CMS would be best to recommend for clients, as well as use for my own site. I reviewed about a dozen CMS systems including Dot Net Nuke and ultimately narrowed it down to three: Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress. I dropped Drupal after closer inspection and my recommendation for clients is either WP or Joomla. If a "full-featured" site is needed, I recommend Joomla. Actually, it is my default recommendation because it allows so much flexibility. The biggest drawback for Joomla when compared to WP is it is more complex, both for admins and developers. It will take a bit more time to develop and a bit more knowledge to administrate. If a client needs a basic site I would suggest WP. These are simply my experiences and research and I am only sharing in case it is helpful. I would also share I have used Windows-based software most of my life. I spent 7 years as a MS SQL DBA working for Verizon Wireless. All my experience is working with windows platforms, yet for web development there is a strong preference towards *nix based platforms. If I was being pitched with a Dot Net Nuke CMS, I would ask for a clear and compelling reason to accept the proposal. My guess is the developer's main experience is with that platform, and they are biased. When developing a new platform, I would recommend a plan which is based upon the inherent coding of the CMS. When necessary rely on the most established extensions or add-ons possible. Unless you are working for a large company which has their own developers on staff, you want to avoid custom coding whenever possible. CMS software is frequently updated. You will be faced with a constant choice of not updating your software, or paying to have the custom coding updating before each update. Additionally if a key developer leaves, you are often faced with the new developer not working well with the prior code and pitching a plan to recode the site. The entire point of a CMS is faster development, lower development costs and standardization. My main focus in receiving a pitch for any platform is to examine the development plan with these questions in mind.

I know I'm a little behind the times on this one, I'm thinking of using headway for my next site and seems to have some really nice SEO features.  Built in meta-description fields (this doesn't come with WP), a SERP preview,  easy nofollow, noindex....  All kinds of stuff. Maybe I'll write full review once I've tried it.

Just to add a bit, if your pages are being frequently updated you can add a published date and frequency of updates in the XML You can also prioritize the pages (like giving your category pages a higher priority). However, only use these optional parameters in the XML if they will be used correctly and this will definitely help the bots in crawling your site. If your pages hardly ever get updated, then it makes little sense to let Google know in the sitemap that your pages never change.

Yes, definitely.

I would suggest the expanded menu as a static menu bar on all of your pages, but at least the top level pages.  The homepage is by far the most important for the reasons stated above- it looks like your deeper pages are getting indexed, so that's not an issue. Then it looks like it's time to start link-building!

Hi Bryant, Thanks for your response! I was anticipating on targeting the web hosting group of keywords just for the web hosting section of the website and the same for the other pools of keywords. I like your idea of general keywords for the homepage. Cheers, Nigel

Hey Will, You know what I would do is put all of your most popular lines toward the top, maybe create a specific category (example: Our Hottest Lines) where all of these will sit. This is not only a solid sales strategy (in my view) because you're keeping all your best selling lines toward the focal point of the screen (after all, this is what a lot of your potential customers are looking for, right?) but also pushing your customers towards popular styles/brands and in turn, hoping to convert. Not only that, but on-page ranking factors would have it that those Hottest Lines links are given greater attention and thus in theory, should rank better vs. a saturated list of alphabetically aligned categories. Categorising with the Alphabet is still another solid strategy, there would be no reason why you couldn't do this in addition to the above (just don't go too mad with your "Hottest Lines", especially if you carry a lot of brands). Closing out, I had a quick look at your site. I would get rid of the scrollbars at the top where your category description is. Instead, I would write some fresh content on each category page interlinking other important pages you want to rank for specific keywords. All the best, Anthony

I hate when I reply and it doesn't post! Thanks Ryan, Appreciate your sharing your experience in submission before posts are made. I would not have thought about doing one for subdomains--great insight and suggestion. The site in question has been up a while and is pretty comprehensive so I thought it would be a good practice. Another site I am working on did not have one either and it will be interesting to see how the XML sitemap added today will impact it. Thanks again to all of you for chiming in. Very helpful, I just had  not heard of someone declining to create one as a general practice before.

Hi, Google and Bing can see how much time your users spend on the page, and since they can also see that there is a large amount of information accessible through that page, I don't think you need to be as worried about the "single page" factor as normal. That said, just because your main user interface lives within a single page, there is no reason that you cannot have other pages linked to it. In fact there are a number of other pages which should be included in your site. For example: Contact, About, Terms, Privacy Policy and (if relevant) Disclosure and/or Disclaimer. They do not have to be right up front or included in your main UI, but they should at least be available for users as text links at the bottom of the page, in a sidebar or somewhere. If you don’t include them you are reducing the appearance of transparency for the site. This works against trust and will make people less confident about doing business through your site. Given that you are in real estate, these things should be a major consideration. Also, if you do not have an About page, you are reducing your opportunity to grow your customer base and add more clients. Hope that helps, Sha

The old links that are already in google need to be given a "forwarding address" (301 redirect) to the equivalent page on your new site. The user goes to the relevant page, and all is good. If there is something common between the old site and the new site in the URL (where each had /productabc/ in the URL) then you can set up a rewrite rule with a regular expression that will take care of a bunch of the URLs at once. Otherwise, you do need to rewrite them individually.

If you're still looking for advice, you might want to ping @graywolf on Twitter. I believe I see him talking about having a lot of WP sites and he might have some experience or words of wisdom to pass along.

author meta - no footer link - yes

You don't need a sitemap on any site, but its a good thing to do on any site if you want the best SEO. The document type doesn't matter because the engine crawlers don't change based on the version of the standard you're using.

Hi There, I decided a long time ago that the best way to handle the issue of the client deciding they want things changed is to allow them to decide for themselves that it may not be such a good idea. I have found a very effective way of achieving this. As soon as we receive a request or instruction from the client that we believe to be detrimental to the SEO for the site, we immediately forward to them a Disclaimer and Acknowledgement Form. The form is accompanied by a request for them to sign and return it so that the requested changes can be completed. Similar to Ninjamarketer's disclaimer, the most important part is that the form carries the words "hereby acknowledge and accept" and requires a signature. We make no attempt to dissuade the client - just forward the form and require it to be executed and returned before the work can proceed. It generally takes 5- 10 minutes for the client to call me once the form has been sent and in every case to date, they have decided before I answered the call, that they may not want to make the changes after all It is at this point that I am able to talk it through with them and do a little gentle SEO "Training" which they are very receptive to. It works for me As to partial SEO - we offer on-page services on a per-page basis (minimum 3 pages), but for any project of more than 5 pages, our quotation includes site wide audit, structural review and recommendations for further work. We also provide on-page work via direct access OR as a detailed report which can be handed to the existing developer for action. For clients with limited budgets, this can be helpful as they can attack the work in manageable chunks. We conduct the site assessment and advise them which pages are highest priority for action. It is nice when you have a client coming back to you for more work because they have seen marked improvement from the original project and want some more of that action Hope that helps, Sha

Hi Will, The time required for installation and testing could vary according to whether there are compatibility issues to resolve on the server. As an example - if we were to install an updated version of Wordpress for a client, that could be a 5 minute job, but the new version requires an updated version of PHP on the server and the age and configuration of the server may require patching (or even moving to a newer server) in order to install the correct version of PHP. Then, with all of the software updated and the new version of WP installed, we would need to check and test the installation to ensure that the template is still good and nothing has broken. So, a 5 minute job could easily turn into a 1 or 2 hour job and the need for the additional work will only become known when the installation is attempted (sucks to be us sometimes!) For this reason, most web development companies will probably quote you a minimum of an hour to do the work. Having said that, the hourly rate you have quoted would be considered extremely high by our company. I hope that helps, Sha

There are a few possible issues at play. The first thing you might do is look at your URL structure as you are navigating through your categories, products/SKUs. 1. If you are filtering and sorting without the URL structure changing, getting properly indexed will be your challenge.  Noindex vs.canonical is moot in this case. 2. If you are are filtering and sorting and the URL is changing with every parameter change, then you have to worry about duplicate content.  Robots.txt vs. canonical steps into the game and here's an example that I fell illustrates it best.  As you'll see, there are more ways than one and it will come down to which one is most easily done for your specific site while achieving the link structure that you desire. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical If you are using AJAX, a good xml sitemap is your lifeblood. Good luck!