Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi , We were finally able to submit the Google+ and have it acknowledge a connection. It took multiple tries over several days in varying ways to get it synced and acknowledged but, it's finally in. Many thanks! Rochelle

These are personal opinions... you will find lots of people who disagree... Google still gives a good bonus to exact match domains in the search results.  I own several and believe this is true.   They will not automatically rank you for highly competitive money keywords.  You must still work there - but not quite as hard. Lots of people think that EMDs get an unfair advantage in the SERPs.  These are people who purchased their domain late, want to buy cheap, or just don't understand that prime domains are just like Main Street real estate in a prosperous town.  If you are willing to pay the obscene price you will get all of the benefits.  I go after them.  I want the EMD for my important sites. Lots of people talk about the EMD penalty... they are full of beans.   What they think is a penalty is the EMDs not getting quite the full bonus that they did in the past.   Now, if you publish crap on an EMD, that EMD will not perform well - just like publishing crap on any other domain. Lots of people think that a partial match domain gives a big bonus in the SERPS... I'd say don't waste your time unless you have a brandable slogan or name. Conversion rates can be higher on exact match domains.  That is my experience. It is easier to get cooperation from other people if you own an important EMD.   The EMD can give you immediate credibility even if undeserved. Most importantly... owning the EMD gives me mental energy.  If I owned baloney.com then I would be the big baloney and build the best site around for that topic.  This mindset is more powerful than any SEO.

Hi Rachel, Could mean one of several things: You lost high-trust links (or the sites linking to you lost trust) You gained low-trust links The algorithm is a comparative metric (based against all the other sites on the web) so it's possible you simply experienced a readjustment of a relative measurement, and nothing really happened with your links It's probably not much to worry about, unless you notice a drop in rankings, been hit by a penalty, or suspect a rash of negative links. In these cases further investigation may be warranted, but otherwise you'll probably be okay as long as you notice your traffic remaining steady. Cheers.

The most blunt answer humanly possible to this: Here's the thing, ethics and Google rules aside (sorry Matt C.), if Google eventually catches this site selling links, they will likely penalize you for having bought one. ...so... Google is very successful ($29 billion in 2010) and it is almost all based on the quality of their search results. If the penalties did not match the benefits, you are putting this revenue at risk (again, $29 billion). How do you think they will take that? How would you?

Looks like it's good. I have the same problem with Facebook, so I added the url in the FB embed code but Google does it automatically. You're fine :).

Thanks, Keri.  I just tried and it worked this time.  I'll check tomorrow to see how things look.

Thanks EGOL, Shane and Peter. The good news is that we own the domain, what isn't so great is that we don't own the hosting (Big lesson learned here). Some how I need to take control of the hosting. Thanks everyone for all your help, I'm truly grateful. Tom

Hi there, Really interesting question that I just noticed here. I've never done this before, but my best guess comes from the Google Guidelines on moving the site: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83105?hl=en If Google recommends keeping the redirect in place for at least a month or so, the implication is that you can remove a redirect from site A to site B after a few months without significant ranking drops to site B. That also implies that removing a redirect from site A to site B will not return site A to its former rankings, because the link equity will continue to count for site B. That said, maybe it's different if Google sees the same content that people originally linked to. I wouldn't think so, though - 301 generally means permanent, no take-backs. You'll have to make the decision on whether it's worth it to remove the redirect based on how much it helped site B. Without knowing the details (was site A properly redirected to the same or similar content on site B? which site is more valuable?) it's hard to give you advice, but hopefully this gives you enough to reason it out!

One SEO implication that redirecting all of your error 404s to the home page is that it could lead to Google and other search engines to flag your site for having 'soft 404 errors.' Best practice is to have a custom 404 page, that returns a 404 message, that then helps the end user find what they are looking for.  Either a list of top categories, a search box, or a phone # to call tech support. Here's what Google says about why you shouldn't do this: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/181708?hl=en Returning a code other than 404 or 410 for a non-existent page (or redirecting users to another page, such as the homepage, instead of returning a 404) can be problematic. Firstly, it tells search engines that there’s a real page at that URL. As a result, that URL may be crawled and its content indexed. Because of the time Googlebot spends on non-existent pages, your unique URLs may not be discovered as quickly or visited as frequently and your site’s crawl coverage may be impacted (also, you probably don’t want your site to rank well for the search query [File not found]). We recommend that you always return a 404 (Not found) or a 410 (Gone) response code in response to a request for a non-existing page. You can improve the user experience by configuring your site to display a custom 404 page when returning a 404 response code. For example, you could create a page containing a list of your most popular pages, or a link to your home page, or a feedback link. You can also use the Webmaster Tools Custom 404 widget to add a search box and more site search options to your site. But it’s important to remember that it’s not enough to just create a page that displays a 404 message. You also need to return the correct 404 or 410 HTTP response code.

Yes it is best practice. you can read more about it here : https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en It might not of been your designer more your CMS system that's create the pages.

Gary, you made my day! Thanks a lot. Now I know what i need to do.

Most sites say 90 days but the small print is that they will get you on page one for your brand name not your #1 key term or they will get a Google local page for you and get you ranking that way. It can take a while to rank well, depending on the keyphrases it can take years, and for the very long tail stuff just a few days/weeks. Links are still very important and you need to create good quality content on your site and then let sites that would be interested in knowing about that aware of it in the hope they will link to you. Be careful with your link building, Google is dishing out penalties left right and center. Get a link in some big directories like dmoz and yahoo. Get a facbook profile and twitter, Google loves social as well. Try to update them once a week. Even with just a small post. Write good content and interlink where possible to create a good internal flow. (don't over do it) It all takes time but all of a sudden it just happens and you start ranking well.

Ltsmz, You don't necessarily need to put the keyword "ProductName Review" several times on each page. However, if what you're showing on that page is indeed a review of that product, then I don't see why "ProductName Review" wouldn't be included in the copy, or header tag of the page. Once or twice should be plenty in most cases if you are repeating the words "ProductName" and "Review" each separately elsewhere on the page. I would optimize for both, as outlined in my answer above. Yes it makes a difference. Having the word "review" appear in a sitewide sidebar or footer is going to have much less of an impact than having it within the body of the content on the page. Interview industry experts and ask what their favorite products are for a specific need. Email the winner of a comparison, possibly giving them a badge (e.g. "Editor's Pick") to display on their site. Create high-quality, useful comparison charts that compare the price and features of each product within that niche. Generally just have a really useful, well-designed, regularly updated website.

the only issue I see would be on the category page if the brand is repeated a lot of times, this will not look good from the Panda Algo. Feel free to send me an link here or in private and I can take a look.

Try Open site explorer and "link opportunities" for any pages that are 404 and have external links.  Webmaster tools will also show you pages that are 404 that have external links (though it doesn't show you the links) and Ahrefs has a similar tool

There is a lot that goes into dealing with this issue. You will need some good tools that can be found here http://www.reconsiderationrequests.net/tools/ You need to focus on dofollow links and this may come as a surprise but also links that appear missing. Download the latest links from WMT, Ahrefs & majestic. Combine them and use excel or "ScrapeBox DupeRemove" available from the link above to remove and duplicates. Use "Blackhatlinks.com Free Dofollow / Nofollow Link Checker" to see if the link is dofollow / nofollow or notfound for the webmaster tools links. Once done you can start to look at what is good and bad. Under a manual penalty you are under review by a real person and they are meticulous, they will make you remove links you never even created and all sorts of crazy stuff. Almost all links are bad in Googles eyes, this includes urls, brand mentions and non optimized anchor text like click here. You need to attack it hard and remove as much as possible, because a penguin refresh only comes around every 6 months, the next will probably be in Feb or April. Remove anything that has optimized anchor text no matter what or try to get the text changed if its an incredible link. The most creditable links are ones where multiple sites are mentioned that include your competitors in some form of comparison on a forum, article blog etc... Almost all others are trash. Also some directories are ok, like dmoz, yahoo dir etc... OK I Mentioned before about missing links, you will find links in WMT where the link does not appear anymore, BUT in the case of a directory it may have moved down to page 3 or 4 when it was on page 1 or 2 when first crawled. The link is still on the site and if you see the site itself is trash, add it to the disavow. Dont bother adding links to the disavow file, add domains. example: domain:xyz.com domain:abc.com This will ensure you capture all links on those domains regardless if the move around. If you do not want to do this all yourself there are many tools out there, like Link Detox and rmoov. Feel free to ask me any questions or send me some examples if you are not sure. Its a horrible process I have had to do it myself and helped many others,all with success!

I disagree with mrcensorious and Dubs: I highly doubt that taking the time to change all of your URLs will be much of an SEO benefit, plus, changing URLs always brings a dip in traffic. Your current URLs are not so incredibly long that they're difficult to understand or share, and you already have keywords in them (I'm assuming they're in the "page" and/or "pagename" subfolder). As Google has been getting smarter, we've seen it place less and less emphasis on keywords in URLs and their structures, so my guess is, this would minimally help SEO right now (if at all), and probably wouldn't help in the future. Add on to that, whenever you make URL changes, you will always see two things: A temporary dip in organic traffic, as search engines see the new URL as an entirely new page and haven't attributed all of the links from the old URL to the new URL yet. A permanent dip in organic traffic, because 301 redirects don't seem to pass as much authority as a direct link. We never advise that our clients change their URLs unless they're going through a site redesign anyway and have to change them. So, I recommend you leave things the way they are!