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i am happy about this community as it helps me a lot thank you guys for your input i really appreciate it. Im gonna ask 1 more question to the community to help me enlighten. thanks

Are you absolutely sure that those links are what caused your rankings to drop?  When did the drop happen?  There was a big Panda update around May 20 that caused a lot of sites to increase or decrease in rankings and that is all about on-page content as opposed to links. Google is generally very good at simply discounting the links that come with negative SEO.  One of my own sites was hacked recently and had thousands of links pointing to it with anchors like "ugg boots" and "michael kors".  Those links showed up in ahrefs and majestic but not in Webmaster Tools.  The links did not affect my rankings.  I am pretty sure that the reason why they didn't appear in GWT is because Google was able to recognize it as an attack and just discount them.  Still, just to be sure I collected the links from ahrefs and majestic and disavowed them. I have still yet to see a credible case of negative SEO working on a site unless that site already had a really unnatural link profile to start with.

I agree, never redirect when you can fix the link.

Thanks for all the help!

Interesting, Lesley - I hadn't made that connection - that Google may have different crawlers for rich snippets and 'normal' pages. Makes sense really, especially when you consider the data highlighter tool in WMT. Good point and I'm pleased I read this posting now!

1 install across multiple domains can be done via domain mapping - and I recommend you do that. The cctld domains will help you rank locally and having 1 wp installation requires much less maintenance. In addition, use a plugin like WPML to easily manage multiple languages and let it handle the SEO for you (by setting up proper sitemaps and hreflang tags)

This type of structure also fits in nicely with your analytics package. You can look at all the visits to /toyota/ to see how popular that is compared with all the visits to /ford/, for example.

Another decent site for usabilty testing is: http://www.feedbackarmy.com/ (not the best, but good results for a company with a tight budget).

I do believe that purchasing direct advertising on specific sites, as well as GDN and other networks are both in the cards. I was just curious about format, since I was under the impression that Flash was being phased out by most sites these days and HTML5 is coming on strong.  Most of the comments here support this theory.  Unfortunately, my company does not.  They still think there is no difference between flash, animated gif and html5 when it comes to banner creative. They will learn soon enough, with or without my input (which is never asked for when planning)

Thanks Irving. When you say stuffing the blog and knowledgebase tags. Do you mean stuffing on specific blog or knowledgebase article pages? Thanks!

Apache reads the .htaccess from top to bottom, so it's good to keep that in mind. If I had to guess, I'd say you have more 301s than just those in your .htaccess. A rule above that is likely conflicting with that specific redirect. If you have a rule redirecting everything from that subdirectory without the French URL parameter, and it's before the rule in question, then this rule will never catch anything.

So the short answer is there's nothing in Feedburner's robots.txt to prevent crawlers from accessing those URLs, even indexing them. You'll find them in Moz's index because those URLs are completely discoverable on the web. It appears to me Google is making a special case out of them. Although they don't do that for all Feedburner URLs. From a larger picture point of view, there's always going to be a discrepancy between what Google counts and what you find in OSE, or Majestic, or Ahrefs. So we don't really know how Google is treating those URLs. I would suspect they are using them for discovery. It's possible they pass link equity as well, but I wouldn't say that with a lot of confidence. It's possible we'll considering treating these URLs different in the future if we become more confident in how we believe Google treats them. Regardless, thanks for the heads up.

If your website is just syndicated content, it will hurt your seo.  But if you are doing your own activities and add in articles from other places around the web (which creates a beneficial user experience), it can help you get more readers and links. I would not expect that the aggregated content would rank well on your website as it is just a duplicate from another site that deserves rankings for related keyphrases.

I had this once, I checked a paragraph from our site and found an American firm using our content. Our intellectual Property Management company Demys got involved and it was quickly resolved. Other issues I have had is duplicate content on four site, check for duplicate urls which resolve to the same page using Screaming frog.

There is one designer on Themeforest that creates blog templates for EE. You can contact him here: http://themeforest.net/user/bjornbjorn?WT.ac=category_profile&WT.z_author=bjornbjorn

You can always inform Google about it : https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1

Same here, I get the German version as well as I probably should get the Dutch/ NL pages.

Hi, ideally only one version of the URL should throw an HTTP header status code 200 and rest all can be redirected to the preferred version via 301. Suppose, http://www.abc.com is your preferred version (the www version), all others like, http://abc.com, http://abc.com/index.html, http://www.abc.com/index.php etc., can be redirected to the www version via 301. It is highly recommended to maintain this consistency through out your website. You can use a tool like the following to check if you have multiple versions of your homepage return status 200. http://www.ragepank.com/redirect-check/ Hope it helps. Good Luck. Best regards, Devanur Rafi

The basic theory is that as you go down a website's hierarchy, the more you go from short-tail, general themes to long-tail, specific things. Here's the rough idea: Home Page -- very general short-tail Blog (or other main section page) -- general and short-tail Post Category (or a section subpage) -- specific and long-tail Blog Post -- very specific and long-tail Basically, items like blog posts should ideally be the best sources of authoritative information on very specific topics such as a post each on "international seo," "e-commerce seo," and "b2b seo." All of these posts could be within a category of "seo strategy" for which the category page would aim to rank. As far as click-through rate -- it depends on the keyword. You should aim to give whatever will address the user intent behind a given search query. The more that the query is very, very specific, the more that it should probably be targeted by a specific post. The more that it is a general, informational query, the more that users may want to be taken to a collection of posts. Now, I wouldn't know what to suggest for your website because I have not seen it. But I hope this helps!

now that you mention it, it appears that only the primary number is shown on both Google Maps (newest version) and on the Google + Local business profile page. guess we can only effectively use one now!