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its dropped from page one to page the bottom of page three over a six month period?

Their coder will be taking a look at it when he's freed up the time to see if there's a way to do that. Hopefully its something easy like that and doesn't require numerous workarounds to get going.

Yes I think this is better then having thin content, your links if you are lucky enough to get them would amass on the same page. You would probably only rank for the static content, at least over time, but that is probably what you want. I would have access to this page via POST not GET to avoid querystring in the url

Hi SoleGraphiocs, I know: I added the keywords last week and all the other keywords I added that day are showing, but just not this one. It is most strange! Maybe it will have magically appeared tomorrow morning Thank you for responding - it is most kind of you. XX A

Thank you very much!

Hi Jef, The best thing to do, is have a read here. The hreflang option would serve you nicely here. You won't need a separate G+ account for each either. Having the same author is absolutely fine but just make sure you reference each of the sites as a contributor to that site. Google understands, and handles, multiple language situations pretty well - just make sure you put in the necessary code for them. -Andy

As Andy said, you don't need to buy subdomains you need only set them up. but simply pointing a domain or subdomain to your site will not help. Setting a separate website on the domain, can help, but only if that subdomain has links pointing to it, but then you would be better of getting the links to your primary domain. so I would not bother.

As others had answered before, if the pages with parameters are just a consequence of a filter, but don't actually add nothing relevant (aka: substantially duplicated of the not parametered URLs) or nothing all, than the best idea is having those URLs with noindex meta robots. This will ensure that those pages, if they were crawled, will disappear from the index. But this is just a general rule, because can exists many variations to that same rule (and we don't know how really has been developed your site). For instance, if those pages cannot be physically crawl because the filters are behind a Javascript selector (something that can be verified disabling Java in the browser), then you should not suffer issues and, eventually, using the meta robots "noindex" should be just a prevention not really an intervention to something already happened.

Hi, If you would deem all internal pages to be of equal importance, then yes, there is no harm in this. The homepage is always set at 1.0 though. That said, everyone always has a view of their internal pages and which they class as pass-though to get to something more important, so do keep this in mind when deciding. -Andy

Hi Kimberly, Sorry for the delayed response! You're mixing two fields here: "last modified" fields in the .htaccess file are not references for search engines; "last modified" in meta data in the HTML or in the XML sitemap may be. Beyond that, webmasters have tried to manipulate "last modified" dates so much, Google's fairly wary of them. So, I wouldn't worry about using a last modified field in your .htaccess file. Hope this helps! Kristina

Hi Mark, I agree with Gyorgy. It will likely do more harm than good to change the underscores to hyphens because then links to those pages will have to go through a redirect. However, if you are set on making this change here's how you can do it using the .htaccess file. Hope this helps! `RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !\.(gif|png|jpg|jpeg|bmp)$ [NC]` <code>rewriteRule ^([^]*)([^]*)([^]*)(.*)$ http://www.payscout.com/$1-$2-$3-$4 [R=301,L] rewriteRule ^([^]*)([^]*)(.*)$ http://www.payscout.com/$1-$2-$3 [R=301,L] rewriteRule ^([^]*)(.*)$ http://www.payscout.com/$1-$2 [R=301,L]</code>

Yes, it can probably read the content of that particular page, but the not necessarily every page on your website. Crawlable is not the same as indexable. For example, Google crawls pages that contain the noindex tag, but don't index them. Also, even if a page is crawlable, it doesn't mean that Google understands it correctly. Are the meta tags correct? Does it contain correct mark-up/structured data? I recommend spending some time reading the Webmaster Tools help pages, so you'll have a better understanding: https://support.google.com/webmasters/?hl=en

Thanks so much Gianluca for this thoughtful and valuable advice. Yes, page load speed is definitely something that's been a concern. This is why we went back to 24 products displayed per page instead of 50 a few months ago. However, since then we've made some significant improvements in page load times and we think we can probably go up to 100 products per page and still be fairly fast. We will have to test. On the up side, we only have 7 categories with more than 100 products, and only 24 with more than 50. The biggest problem we have effecting speed isn't so much the images. It's the fact that the website does real-time pricing calls on every product to ou business back end every time the page loads. This may be a sticking point. I have also thought about the canonical tag problem. Of course, it's a problem now too, but if the "View All" page just ends up getting that generic URL and no proper canonical tag...then we really are back to square one. The possibility of no-indexing all of the categories that are related to paginated series is something that crossed my mind yesterday, so it's interesting that you mentioned that. While it would solve certain issues, wouldn't this be a problem in terms of having valuable content in Google? Granted, some of our category pages are purely there for navigation purposes, in which case, I suppose there's no harm in no-indexing them. However, with the roll-out of Hummingbird I began looking at our category pages as valuable opportunities for "topics" pages that could act as a hub for visitors searching for products or information around specific uses or brands. Wouldn't there be a significant risk in losing valuable market share for key terms by removing so many category pages from Google's index? If I am understanding your last suggestion you are saying to have the page default to "View All" and noindex everything else...You are right, not a great scenario, but you are also right in that this may be the only solution given management's steadfast stance on not wanting to pay to fix it. Lot's to think about, but your comment has been extremely helpful. Thanks again!

I agree with Miriam, without further details, it is really hard to say what is going on. However, depending on where you are actually searching from does factor into the results as well as the website associated with the listing. Additionally, the number of citations a location has and how well those citations match up, meaning name, address, and phone are all exactly the same, can influence local listing rankings as well. Whether or not the competitor has claimed their listing isn't really a huge factor in determining rankings. The fact that your competitors website outranks yours is an indication as to why those local listings may appear to be more relevant to the search, and therefore rank higher, than yours.

Hi guys, Yes the sites are targeting the right geographic locations. Thanks, Paul

I'm not sure that you'd encounter a situation where Google is intuitive enough to decide on UX and equate it to a ranking factor - although they do definitely try to render pages and understand websites from a user's point of view. Not to get all UX on you on an SEO Q&A board, but if this truly is a bad user experience, consider investing the time to fix it, but as long as Google can crawl a sensible hierarchy through internal linking (ignoring the breadcrumb issue), I don't believe this will be actively moving you down the rankings. Cheers, Jane

Bump.