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Good question! In my opinion, A/B and multivariate tests are a good way to increase bounce rates. Often, adding a few images, adding bullet points, breaking up your text in smaller paragraphs can help decrease bounce rate. What you should keep in mind, though, is that different kind of traffic tends to have different bounce rates. So facebook, twitter, digg, stumbleupon ... normally have quite high bounce rates. The same goes for RSS feeds: if people suscribe to your blog, often they will come to your page just to read the one article, without browsing your site. It can therefore help to include links to other parts of your sites, related blog posts, and with a call to action in your blog post. For reducing bounce rates of Google (or other search engine) organic traffic, you should aim for page titles that relate to the content of the page. When someone clicks on a search result, they will at least have read the title. Now if your h1 is very different from that, chances are, people will leave your site right away, assuming it does not offer what they are looking for. The same goes for PPC. Make sure your ad copy matches the landing page. In order to achieve this, split your keywords in different ad groups, according to the topic. Then tailor the ads towards the keywords and the landing page. PPC also allows you to run a lot of experiments, so take advantage of this and apply what you learn from it to other areas.

If you still kept the same platform and haven't touched any on-page factors like META tags and such, then simply changing the design the correct way shouldn't affect the rankings negatively. If it's done the right way, then your rankings will stay that same (or) if might just DROP in rankings A LITTLE BIT. Again, only if done the correct way.

If you must hide content with AJAX to meet the design requirements, use whats called graceful degradation. In your case it would mean placing all the content that appears on any given URL into the original resource that loads within <noscript>tags.</p> <p>For example if you have a page for cancun and depending on what people click different parts of the cancun resort show up, put all that info into <noscript> tags on the cancun page.</p> <p>But I think John Barth is right. I didn't see any AJAX on the page, only php. If you're loading content using PHP you've got no worries, all the magic happens on the server and is served up to engine bots in full.</p></noscript>

I would tell you to ditch Flash, but there's no flash in the example you gave us. It's all good ol' fashioned Javascript/AJAX. Their site doesn't degrade very gracefully without javascript. In fact, the entire site is offensively slow and difficult to navigate. However, I'm happy to report that without CSS or Javascript, the site loads just fine. I don't see any issue with it being indexed apart from you'll need to canonicalize your pages, and the silly URL parameters: Example: subcontent.php?sc=our-family-tree That would look so much better if it were: /our-family-tree Otherwise, it's really hard to judge the SEO of a site without content, because I'm mainly looking for title tags, meta descriptions, navigational structure, anchor text, keyword usage, and so on. http://me.graficode.com/preprod/subcontent.php?sc=our-family-tree

You might want to add Taxi Knutsford in as a meta keyword as well. Also, you haven't got any links with the anchor text 'Taxi Knutsford' linking to your desired landing page, just a couple both internally and externally could help up the ranking. There isn't any text I can see that directly says 'taxi knutsford'. There's plenty of text featuring the words knutsford and taxi separately, but these need to be placed together at some point to create a keyword match. Like Vitalscom says, you need to make better use of H1, as you currently don't have one. It also may help to make better use of the alt text in your pictures... slipping 'taxi knutsford' as an alt could help. You may also want to upload a sitemap. As well as adding to Google local, you may want to add the website listing to business sites such as 118 and Yell if not already done so.

Thanks for the responses. I'll try to get a hold of the htaccess file and setup a 301 redirect. Thanks again!

Everything I have seen points to a sitewide dampening effect. A big change with Panda is that poor quality pages on your site can drag down the entire site, which is why some SEOs are advising that you get rid of the low quality or duplicate content. Hubpages tried to get around the sitewide effect by moving pages to a subdomain which Google usually considers separate from the main site.

For UK searches, google will recognise that a .co.uk site is probably more relevant than a .com if you were just comparing by that factor alone, but there are many, many factors that are more importance than this which make up a ranking. Also, it's worth bearing in mind that if you transfer a domain to a new registrant and the site from a content perspective wasn't existent before or the content is changed dramatically in the process (or around the same time) then the domain age will most likely have very little impact. In fact factors such as how long you renew the domain for will probably have more impact. For example if you buy the domain for 4 years it will look less spammy than a 1 year renewal.

Ryan, thx for the considered response

Hi Keri, thanks for the follow up. As for the specific question no I have not really found a concrete answer. Currently we have left the duplicate navigation alone and focused on more pressing updates. Sorry that I don't have more info to share.

I think most of the time people don't worry about it these days, since the search engines are so much better with guessing the correct spelling and showing those results instead of the results for the misspelled word. User forums and reviews are one way you can get misspelled words in without it looking too odd, if that at all fits your situation. Is your company still asking about this at all, or have you gone way beyond that now?

Just an example....  tell people how to use your products for maximum enjoyment... For example if you sell mountain bikes articles about.... how to select mountain bike tires.... how to change a mountain bike tire in under 60 seconds... recommended tools for off-road biking... how to true a bike wheel (rear)... how to true a bike wheel (front).... how to clean the mountain bike chain.... geeezz...  I could go on forever... So... give everything that you need to make your customers experts at  buying... owning... riding... maintaining... racing their mountain bikes... and make your staff look like expert mountain bikers and all-round good guys. PS... I am not talking about light weight trivial pedestrian articles... these would be substantive, complete and detailed articles with lots of big juicy photos.  And you need a video of me changing the mountain bike tire in 42 seconds.

I have replied to you inbox message.

They change dynamically as new products are added or removed. Content is framed in from a subdomain on the client's site that syncs with All You Retail's (the third party supplier) inventory stuff. Content lives in the subdomain, images are hotlinked from a variety of different places (suppliers, AYRs system, supplier info stream). As for how exactly the inventory works, I'm not 100% sure yet. The site I'm referring to is here: http://durochersonline.com You can see what I mean. I know there are a slew of other SEO problems to be fixed, but this is the one I've never dealt with before. I don't start on the project for a few weeks, just want to make sure I know what I'm in for here.

Thanks for the fast response guys! The "By Brand" path is basically for SEO purposes only. 90% of our visitors use one of two forms to find their tire size. The first form is a vehicle search which breaks down to the specific tire size and the minimum speed rating requirements. This form accounts for 80% of our form completions. The second form is by the specific tire size. When a visitor completes one of these forms, they are only given results that link to the specific item pages that match their vehicle. We actually do not want people using the "by brand / category" method to find their products as this will almost always lead them down an empty path. Tires must match an exact size for that vehicle. One the other hand, we do want to show up in search results for these products. Our current results bring us quite a bit of traffic. This method is just to get them into the website. We will have a "Do these tires match my vehicle" form on the this page. If they do not, we will take them to a page explaining why not and provide them with alternate, matching results. By Brand is great for browsing but at the end of the day the tire must be a fit for the vehicle. Ultimately the end focus of the website will be for them to search by vehicle. An example of an item level URL (based on Roberts reply) would be: brand     category       model               item (tire size) www.company.com/Michelin/Performance/Primacy-MXV4/2055516 This same page would be duplicated 40+ times for each tire size available, with links to these item pages originating from the model page: www.company.com/Michelin/Performance/Primacy-MXV4/ Would the 40+ individual item pages leading from the model page produce duplicate content issues? These pages will contain the exact same content including our features and benefits and user reviews. The path of "by brand" from the home page would look as follows: Home -> Michelin -> Primacy MXV4 - > 205/55R16 or Home -> Michelin -> Performance -> Primacy MXV4 - > 205/55R16 Whichever one would be deemed better. I just want to make sure I get it right the first time. Thanks for the responses!

We ended up rewriting the subdomian in IIS. Thanks for your help Heather.

but it's still user friendly.

Place that code in between the head tags for all of the specific categories to implement a Canonical link ^.^ Hope it helps!

Time to put that legal knowledge to work!  Glad I could help - let me know if you have any more questions.