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Nick, Thanks a lot for your advice. I will leave them in place and live with the clutter. Thanks again! Linck

Please Read this  http://moz.com/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps it will help you.

I like your idea a lot!  I think as web and computer people we sometimes get too hung up on the historic teachings of our predecessors.  It's a good idea to change up the conventional wisdom sometimes.  Are you building the site with a CMS platform so if you decided the link structure didn't work for you, you could easily change it and it will auto 301 the old links? In general though I think your idea is awesome and I'm curious to hear if it helps SEO at all.  I know google does care about directionality.  For instance I rank higher for NBG Networks than for Networks NBG so your theory sounds like a winner to me. -Nick

Hi Alan, Can you give us an update on how things are going? Do you have any more questions? Have you seen any changes recently?

This could change in traffic be soooo many things without knowing your site's entire background. There could be a Panda/Penguin penalty in play (I have no way of knowing) so read up on those and make sure you're not a victim of duplicate/thin content and/or shady link building practices (even if they occurred in the past, use OSE to take a look). I'm not seeing the redirect from non www to www as an issue in terms of ranking but double check that you implemented that correctly.  I haven't heard of losing rankings over this tweak before but I suppose it's possible that it takes Google a some time to figure that out (though I dont see why it would hurt rankings in the interim). Other sites outranking you for your own article is actually quite common if you're not on a strong domain otherwise.  3rd page sounds rather harsh though.  Are you engaging in any questionable link building practices? Without knowing more it's really tough to say what your site's problem might be.  I think I can rule out the 301 redirect from www to non-www if implimented correctly.  Sean is correct in checking your robots.txt file as well. Hope I answered your question if not solving your greater problem for you!

Report the results to Google, not that they will actually care, but if you open a thread in the Webmaster Help Forums, someone from Google may see the thread and tell you what's going on. Anyway, that's completely normal and I see that in every possible niche. Bad sites being ranked above good ones, they are just "awaiting" a drop, it will come, the question is when... Try to get in touch with someone at google, tweet Cutts, open a thread in WHF, write about it, get the word out. If you really deserve a better spot then all that may get Google's attention.

The solution you describe it's correct, so you can go with it.

Glad you got it sorted out, @allb83! Let us know if you have additional Qs.

What happened was I was using a URL rename textbox in the back end of our ecommerce platform. For the past year I have been renaming the URLs to fit keywords, sometimes renaming them a second time when the page drastically changed. I figured the cart was doing a 301 redirect every time I renamed the URL, but instead of doing that, it did a 301 redirect the first time, then each additional time I renamed the URL, it just left a blank white page on the old URL. Do I need to fix these blank white pages, or are they being filtered out by Google and won't harm the site's rankings? I don't know if a custom 404 page - I could do that - is a good idea since they were once category pages. A custom 404 would be a good idea but I'm wondering if I have to do more.

I haven't contacted the forum yet but that's my next step. Pages indexed: 91k Blocked by robots.txt: 8.4million I don't even know how you could create 8.4 million indexable pages from our content.

Eric, thanks for the question -- I wish I had seen this a lot earlier! But for your client's next event or anyone else who's reading, here's what I would do for an event: public relations. This is the best way to build the client's brand, obtain exposure, and "earn" quality, authoritative links indirectly. My post at Moz here goes into the basics of PR strategy in a digital context, but I'll add some thoughts here specifically for your context. 1. Goal identification -- I presume, in the end, that the goal is consumer sales of this product? 2. Audience Research -- What types of people would be interested in such a product? What interests them? What is their demographic profile? 3. Positioning and Messaging -- How can you position and brand your company and product in a way that would appeal to that audience? How can you take that general positioning and then create messaging (text, images, and so on) to communicate that positioning? 4. Media List Creation -- Here's where the conference comes in. I'd do the research to answer this question: What news outlets, publications, and blogs both are read by the target audience and will attend the conference? Who are the specific reporters and writers that will be at the conference. 5. Press Release Development & Pitching -- Before the conference, craft news releases, media kits, and more based on your positioning and messaging. Pitch to the journalists beforehand and invite them to the booth for an interview. In some contexts, you may want to grant an exclusive to the biggest outlet on your media list in exchange for a guarantee that they will write about you prominently. I know that it may seem weird to talk about PR on a site that focuses mainly on online marketing, but I'm personally starting to feel that the "SEO" world is rapidly moving away from keywords and links and more towards just doing traditional "marketing." And part of that involves PR. I hope this may help!

Hi, Mike is correct. Your organic search traffic and ranking is for organic keywords only. A way to double check your ranking: download the Moz bar, and when you type a query into Google, you will see a bold number under each result indicatng it's rank in position. You will not see this number next to an ad. Hope that helps!

Hi Wayne, Is Indiana Accident Attorney the name of your website or are you purposely manipulating the title tag for certain landing pages?  I think that branding your content is fine as long as it is not manipulative.  For instance if you're changing the title depending on the page content I think that's a bit mis-leading and while it may not hurt you in googles eyes it's confusing to all humans who visit.  If you're consistent throughout or only modify it to say Indiana Accident Attorney Blog or some sub-section of your site that should be fine.  Moz.com uses the title tag the same way for branding purposes as do most CMS platforms out of the box. Good luck, -Nick

Welcome Leanne! Try to remove manually and disavow which you could't remove! This certainly takes time. Even after removal and disavow, it will take some time to get things going! Try local UK Links. Starting with Top UK directories like Yell, Yelp & others, you can move to few guest posts possibly! No Money Anchor Text Just a reminder! Social Media is going to help in big time! Use Hash tags to get real time shares & like of pages! Ok with content but try to make it more frequent! Regards

Google is indexing just over 80 URLs, although about 40% of them are developer test URLs (they lead to live pages of the site though). Nothing in robots.txt. No errors. The Google bot is still crawling, but it's crawling half the pages. What would make it decrease in page crawls? I'm working if there is a broken link or something on the home page that's pointing away from the site... although it's unlikely, I'll check....

There are many pre-formatted dashboards within the Google Analytics community. Using a combination of these to create VP level reports is a good way to align expectations with goals. The meat and potatoes of your job sounds like a well rounded successful campaign that resulted in increase in traffic and sales- regardless of the source. I would utilize a few dashboards, to nail down the specifics: 1. Traffic from Organic Searches & Sales From Organic Sources 2. Traffic from Social Sources & Sales From Social Sources 3. Transactions from Campaigns- ( paid, newsletters, emails, articles) - tracking installed obviously. 4. Over all rankings of Keywords that resulted in sales- after all who wants to be number 1 for shiny yellow thing, when you don't sell shiny yellow things. An executive overview or scorecard for these successes could be used as a glance through- at the top of the monthly report. What worked, what changed, what needs changing and the successes that are monitored. I hope this helps-

Hi Patrick, While an HTML site map is one way to add internal links to these pages, it may not be enough to get them to rank for anything (even if they do get back into Google's index thanks to the new links). In addition to the HTML site map, if you choose to build one, I would take a look at these pages and see how they can be better integrated into the main site. What are some user paths that might make sense for people to take to arrive at these pages? Bringing these orphan pages back into the fold will have a higher SEO impact and also increase the likelihood that people find these pages by browsing your site. I know this is a solution that will take more time and effort, so in the short term you might try the HTML site map and see how far that gets you. Good luck!

Thanks Mike, will adopt this approach. Appreciate your help.

Hi there I've not tested this, but this could be what you're after: http://www.nopcommerce.com/p/945/supermodal-advanced-modal-popup-plugin.aspx, http://www.pronopcommerce.com/super-modal-plugin Hope this helps.