Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks, Stubby.  Infomation appreciated. All the best, Aviva

Ostensibly it's a good way to find out which are the strongest pages on your site for a particular keyword.  It won't be indicative of the strength of the page when compared to anything else on the web, but if any page from your site is going to rank for that keyword, it will probably be the first one that Google shows on that query. It's not going to tell you exactly what factors are causing it (whether it be the on-page optimization, or the links), so any analysis you would want to do would be the same as you would have to do when looking at a regular SERP.  Google thinks that first page is the most relevant page on your site for that keyword.  Why?  You can get some ideas by comparing them, but it's never going to be 100% obvious. It's a great idea - I actually never thought of doing that to check for keyword cannibalization within a site, make sure the page I want ranking to actually the first - thanks!.

I agree with James, Try to evaluate also your competitors not just a keyword difficulty If I don't have a powerfull website, I would like to work in the long tail and less competitive keywords and easier as well...

I'm seeing another place where Google doesn't reference the Gdata in code.google.com. Check out http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/reference-headers.html#etag. In API changelog documentation for their calendar http://code.google.com/apis/calendar/changelog.html they say "If a client wishes to retain version 2.0 error behavior, then it can either send a request with the Gdata-Version: 2.0 HTTP header or append ?v=2.0 to request URIs. In this case, no error will be provided if an outdated updated-min parameter is provided or if a gCal:eid conflict occurs when inserting a recurrence exception. However, the server response docuement will still conform to version 2.1 and contain a Gdata-Version: 2.1 header." It seems like you're fine, as most of the references I'm seeing Google made don't include that GData info.

Thanks Ryan, I've heard of drupal but never dealt with it  - do you have any idea what software runs SEOmoz's Q&A or, for example, this site: http://www.incorporationanswers.org/ ? Thanks again

Autogenerated or inserted by hand makes no difference. I get LOTS of traffic because I cover some events and some people search for them with a date. To be certain that Google can read your dates or any other text information, view your page in google's cache.

And Google has just discontinued their directory, so the world will never know. Do let us know when you see it pop up in search.com, it'll be interesting to know how long that takes. Here's the article about Google Directory going down. http://searchengineland.com/final-nail-in-the-google-directory-coffin-86505

You should try to 301 as many of the dead pagoes as possible to any relevant page you can find. This will pass on the link juice to the new page, especially if it's related content. Otherwise the link juice will be lost and eventually the search engines will drop those pages out of their index. I know doing a couple hundred pages is HUGE task, so I would focus on the most valuable pages first. Ryan is right, 404's is a fact of life. I think it's best to create a custom 404 that your visitors won't mind landing on. For this it's best to be creative, try to make them laugh or smile. Most importantly, give them something to click on. this will allow you to recapture an otherwise lost customer. The very last thing you want them to do is click on their browsers back button.Any visitor can essentially navigate to any of our other pages even though they didn't actually get the page they were originally looking for. Good luck!

I would stick with the old URL structure.  If you redirect there could be some loss of anchor text on inbound links and perhaps in linkjuice.  If you are making nice money and these pages have external links don't walk the tightrope just to get  tidy file names.

Thank you for that response.  I wanted to follow up a little on it. The article you link to sounds good.  My concern, however, is that if I were to have a "view all" page then we could be talking about 1,000+ nodes on a single page.  This page would take much longer to load, which itself would become an SEO hit.  Though I do get why that's a suggestion, I have to wonder if that's the best solution for sites with large directories. The other article/post seems to mention both the "view all" method and the "noindex, follow" method which gives a little more validity to that option in my opinion.  I'm still trying to discern what the "best" method is, and it's starting to become clear that maybe there isn't exactly one industry standard for this.

Every industry is different you can use keywordspy.com to see how much your competitors spend on ppc but with out testing the correct keywords you will not really know - because alot has to do with the way you setup your ppc account and the how well the site is setup to convert people (price,trust, usability,etc)

Ok Thanks guys for the information, cheers John

The best type of user generated content is where you make users much place a specific amount into the form. It could be to win a price or something to emphasize the users to input the amount of content. Because if you have thin content which is spammy and the same all over the web it will not do much for ranks. I don't really think spelling errors are a big issue, that falls more down into usability, if you are a big brand and you have spelling errors all over your website it will not look professional.But from a UGC point of view I would not worry too much.

In short, your site URL structure needs to be designed in such a way that Google and other engines can crawl it. Clearly 10k 404 pages is an issue which needs to be addressed. It sounds like your sites redirect or navigation was not set up properly. Without being able to look at the site there is not a lot more information I can share. Would you be able to share your URL?

I absolutely agree with Keri on the points she raised. Some responses to your questions: With respect to your navigation changes, it could have a positive or negative effect on your site depending on the changes. If you eliminated links to less popular areas of your site, that is a good thing. If you eliminated links to good content and now it takes users more clicks to open a page then more juice will be lost and the content could become too deep for indexing. The links from your duplicate content sites shouldn't hurt your site, but if they share your same web host they don't help it either. It sounds like you are aware of your duplicate content issues and are working to correct the problem. With respect to establishing a brand, I would suggest you really focus on making your main site stand out. A part of that is having a great looking site that is not just another template copy. My favorite source of information on establishing a brand is: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/future-of-link-building  Since the webinar is titled "link building" many people miss it. I LOVE this video. Watch it, then watch it again. Take notes. It contains fantastic information for establishing a brand.