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Nope, a one hour downtime should not affect your rankings. Here is Matt Cutts on the subject. A) Crawler may not even detect the downtime B) If downtime is detected, crawler will check back later to see if it is a serious problem. Your site would be back up by then and shouldn't affect rankings.

Thanks - it's my real name! I'm more a fan of Saruman...

Got it -- thank you very much! Mike

Jane, I've seen the meta refresh reported on this page: http://www.fdmgroup.com/fdm-group-speaks-out-against-the-revelation-that-one-in-four-graduates-fail-to-find-work/ I've since removed the email address on this page. Is meta refresh still an issue? Thanks.

Is the content that will be added readable? Looking in SEO browser, it doesnt seem that it is. Check out the report here: http://seo-browser.com/index.php?address=http%3A%2F%2Fdeepdesign.co.za%2Fprint-printer-printing%2F&button0.x=68&button0.y=15&button0=Simple If the content cannot be read by a search engine, any content you add will no have any effect on your rankings. The boxes that slide out (if your plan is to retain that design), should link to sub pages of focused, relevant content. I think you should also take a very close look at the way the pages/URL's are set up.  print-printer-printing/ with a page title of "PRINT, PRINTER, PRINTING! | DEEPDESIGN" Very spammy, and even if Google allows it to rank I doubt a user would be compelled to click that result out of one that states something like "Graphic Design and Printing Services -YOURCOMPANY" I would look at all aspects of the site, even if their budget is low. Doing SEO work just for the sake of getting paid will not get the company the results they are looking for. I would check the template to see what is readable text, then focus your efforts on cleaning up the on page and off page SEO.

I understand I might be a little late, but I had experienced this issue first hand with a Magento site. Once I added a wildcard exclusion in the robots.txt file my impressions and click improved noticeably.

PageRank is a pretty outdated way of looking at a page's worth, especially because it's updated irregularly, and often fudged / inaccurate. Google realised a while ago that people used PageRank as a metric to buy and sell links, meaning that them making it very accurate was helping fund an industry they very much didn't like. That said, 2.5 years with no internal PR showing up on any URL seems slightly odd. Do the pages show decent Moz metrics, like Page Authority? Does the site sit on HTTPS URLs exclusively? At least a little while ago, that used to stop toolbar PR from showing up but it didn't mean that pages wouldn't rank. It's also possible that the site receives few or no links from elsewhere, meaning that there is not much authority to be passed through the site from the home page or any other target page. Does this seem likely to you, looking at the site's links? As others have said, there could also be internal linking problems that halt the flow of authority, but 2.5 years is a while to show no internal tbPR whatsoever.

If there is a need to write these from a customer's point of view, no matter how they are going to find the content, then the posts should be written. You don't need to cultivate everything on your site for search - there should be a reason behind why you create and publish content, however, and EGOL is right that a content plan is an important start if you feel that you're writing / publishing "in the dark" with no structure. Short updates might be very useful for your current readership, or for historical purposes, so that future readers can go back and research what constituted a "record price" in 2014. They may never arrive at that content through a search engine, but it's useful to them and they find it regardless.

EGOL and Samuel raise some very good points here. I feel like you're also somewhat at risk of looking like you're trying to deceive the audience if you're deliberately divorcing the community from the brand site and image, but using it to drive the community to commercial action. I am not sure how subtle they are planning on making that connection, but subtlety in that manner rarely works: it's a lot more "honest" and appreciated to cultivate a community and openly market a product, as Moz has done. Using the Moz example, this site did not start out as a tool / analytics provider, so the community actually came first. When I was a full time employee, we were largely an SEO consultancy. The blog was a labour of love as far as Rand and the staff were concerned. In 2007 when we first introduced Premium (now Pro) accounts, we clearly used the community (which was pretty substantial, even back then) to market the service. To all but a very few negative folks, this went down fine. If Rand had started a separate company and website hosting and selling SEO tools and subscriptions, and had dropped hints and posts every now and again here to promote it, it would not have been met with nearly as much favour. The SEO points about two sites being twice as hard to maintain, market and rank than one also apply, but I would question whether a smaller brand can build a totally separate community that is a) big enough, and b) independent enough not to annoy users if they figure out the commercial intent behind it. If there's one thing that's slightly worse than no community, it's an empty one.

Great, thanks so much for your tips and help!

Hi Alexander, For multi-location businesses (that is to say, businesses with more than one, staffed physical office) it's generally considered a best practice to link to the location landing page on the website, rather than the homepage, because your Google+ Local page is then pointing users and bots right to a page that matches the NAP on the business listing. This practice may also lower the risk of merging happening, because Google's bots are easily able to see that everything matches on the designated page, rather than leaving them to scour around the website trying to pick the right location out of a handful of them. You might enjoy reading: http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide Hope this helps!

HI Diego, You don't need to worry too much about whether the pages are tags or categories, but could you give me examples of the URLs you plan to use?

Hello Julian, If you follow my advice above you should be fine.

Hi, it helped us rank better for each product page. It allowed me to focus on a single product rather than variations of a product and made our site easier to navigate for the visitor.

No. Goodbacklinks are one of the most important factors, as they are a source of traffic to the site, and a souce for Google to validate your site's content. if you have a ton of good links, but the rest of the site is garbage, you probably wont get very good results. The algorithm looks at over 200 separate bits of information when determining where to rank a site. Are backlinks high on that list? Absolutely. Does that mean that you can have thin content, bad optimization and design? No. Stating that "Backlinks are the most important factor in SEO" sounds more like a marketing phrase used by that company to sell their services.

I would Agree with Moosa - Be careful because you may end up with it not ranking what so ever. People may be finding your slide shows through the site and not necessarily via rankings. I would recommend trying to get a link back to your site or even a link in the deck pointing to your site so even if a user finds it they can still get back to you and its not lost revenue (though you won't necessarily get a seo benefit unfortunately) Remember Slideshare is an authoritative site if you strip[ it out can you compete ?

When you submit the resubmission request, be honest and descriptive in your reply. State clearly what you have done to repair the manual penalty placed agaist your site, and that to the best of your knowledge, the issue is taken care of.

Ever consider that the domain name itself may be a problem? It's just as easy to get www.viagrasssss.com. And I think the largest issue is that the domain name was registered one month ago. You can't expect much in the first month.

Thanks! I had a RU content person on my team ask on a Yandex specific forum and that is the answer she got.