Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Your first words are "Custom Fabricator" which causes me some friction - This sounds like you might be b2b. Do you sell stuff direct to customers? Thank you, Doug.   This is exactly what bothered me too.  I did think they were b2b from those words.

Assuming that you plan on posting them on your site as pdf files then they are spiderable to some extent. Google does spider and index some pdf's. I wouldn't advise this as a plan because pdf's do not generally rank well in most areas. The only category I can think of offhand where they do are irs forms. They would be much more likely to be thoroughly crawled, indexed and ranked if they are posted as actual webpages in html.

Hi Jane, Thanks for your input, your opinion is highly appreciated. You mentioned how doing a site: search isn't accurate, but rather the results of a submitted sitemap I'm assuming via Webmasters. We're not able to see specifically which URLs Google chose to place in the index and which they didn't, am I right? They simply show you the number of URLs submitted and the number that are indexed. Regarding Mandy's higher authority, that does make a lot of sense. I absolutely concur with your questions, and to a degree I have established that stance. I need to remain consistent so that the client can better understand the reasoning behind my concerns. Thanks for your help!

Hi Stephan, Before you spend _too _long on this, I'd make sure it's the best use of your time - regular images do work on retina displays and so you may have higher priorities. In many ways (simplicity, maintainability, design) the best route is to use retina-ready images throughout your site and serve them up to non-retina users as well. This typically results in better images for all and doesn't have to impact filesize too much (see this article about compressing larger images). The downside is that for certain kinds of images, the larger image will still have a much larger filesize and this can be a major speed issue - especially for those on mobile connections. Unless you have evidence that one or other effect (fuzzy images on retina or slow loading) is causing you problems, I would personally take an "if it ain't broke" approach. The complexity of maintaining two sets of images is a step too far for most websites in my opinion and I would tend to stick with regular images up until the point where high resolution displays are significant among your users and plan to switch to high-resolution images for all at that point. I hope that helps.

That's great - thank you again for all the help

Hi Stephan, I agree with Scott that this is possible but question how much more trouble it would be to run two installations for the two blogs? The canonical tag will take care of the duplicate content. I don't see much wrong with duplicating using this approach if the duplicated full article is better for users on the non-canonical site, or using the snippet + link approach if that's fine for usability / reader interest.

Hi there, glad to have been of help! As far as how long to wait goes, it really is hard to say but if you see nothing at all in a month, I'd consider other options like canonicalisation (or coming back here, showing what you've done and seeing what people say - as I am only one opinion! ). Cheers, Jane

It seems like Yoast won't find keywords when they are links, too. Go figure. Anyway, use Yoast, but don't rely on it. If you know it's there and looks good for the reader, then that's all you need to worry about.

Jane, do you recommend that we do a brand new study like Aviva did? It seems like that would make for a much higher quality article. If so, what's the minimum sample size and are there companies you know of that we can hire to do the study? Thanks! Great ideas here.

Thanks William.

Great insights and suggestions - thanks for replying! I'm hung up on the different size markets as well. Our association has sorted the 100+ businesses into different size brackets, but those are based on revenue as opposed to size of city (although there is definitely a correlation.) Analytics like bounce rate though would be a benchmark regardless of the demo/size of the business' location.

figured it out...go to extensions and uncheck it. lol.

Me too, trust me i want to go. : (

This sounds a little risky. I would avoid doing redirects if possible. If this was my site, I would get into my analytics and find out which 100 pages are pulling in most of the sales from people who enter from search.   I would then spend whatever time it takes to recode about five pages by hand,  using the best SEO practices within my ability. I want to make them into something kickass. After I did the first five of those pages, I would get in touch with a consultant, show her those pages (before and after shots), tell her the goal and have her give opinion on what might be done better.  When I do something big like this I always get second opinion from someone who does more SEO than me and who is smarter about it than I am.   I might ask a question on Moz or get a friend to look at something.   I always get advice from people I trust when doing this.  I don't worry about cost.   One taken opportunity can be worth literally a million dollars in the long term.  One screw up can cost many thousands of dollars immediately and millions over time. So, after these consults I would launch a few dozen hand-crafted pages and see what happens.  A couple weeks later I would launch  more if the results were good. The higher the value of these pages the more that I would do by hand.  Once I thought that I had things under control then I would write or have written a program to do the rest of the job automatically. I am never in a hurry on a high value job like this.

This should not cause a problem. As soralsokal says, internal anchor text linking isn't a regular problem for over-optimisation; the only way you'd be in danger of attracting unwanted search engine attention is if you were churning out hundreds of low-quality blog posts, linking internally over and over again to commercial pages with spammy anchor text. Google is used to seeing navigational links on ecommerce sites, the vast majority of which are "optimised". The optimisation is fine; it's for users. You wouldn't link to your wine page with any other anchor than "wine" because it tells people what the page will be about Google knows this; navigational elements like this are fine as a result.

I don't see why that would have any negative effect whatsoever, but at the same time it shouldn't be very difficult to change the image source to the actual url instead of the server's ip address.

If you do not have any tags or categories, you should exclude them from Yoast's XML sitemap. To do this; Go to SEO -> XML Sitemaps Check off Tags and Categories to exclude them from the sitemap. If this doesn't fix it, let us know - I can try to help further. -Dan

The company page would be suited to the rel=publisher tag The better way to explain the author tag is like a book. On the back of the book you don't have info on the publisher but the author the same is true here, the tag is to say who wrote the content not who published it thus the two tags. So you want to use the author tag on the personal profile or who ever wrote it. in short: use your personal profile.