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Hi Kristina - sorry for the long delay! I definitely wouldn't go with sub.subdomain.rootdomain.edu - I'd go with a subfolder and hopefully, something as close to the root/main domain as possible.

Google actually specifically told SEOMoz to not include their pagerank in the Mozbar.  Luckily there is a way to add pagerank! Download a 3rd party toolbar that has pagerank.  I use the quirk searchbar: http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/ You can then take as many or as few fields as you want, I use pagerank and alexa, and move them into your mozbar! Go to options: General: Location and you can set where you want the quirk bar to show up.

Google maay be able to work out what version you want to go with, but is it the same one that bing and other SE's will go with, and then you have the problem with www and non www links, one will be redirect to the other somehow and will leak a bit of link juice. its better that when some one copies your url its always the same. I prefer the non www. because www is unessasry, i believe its an old unix thing, not needed today. If you have a long domain name www makes it just that much more confusing

If that's the timeframe, it's most likely not the recent Farmer Update. I'd guess it's most likely to be a penalty of some kind (manipulative linking practices, cloaking, thin/duplicate/scraped content are the most likely culprits). You might check out these posts for more detail: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-handle-a-google-penalty-and-an-example-from-the-field-of-real-estate http://www.seomoz.org/blog/pagelevel-algorithmic-penalties-on-the-rise-from-google

When you say you are running a cpa model is that "Focus on conversions (Conversion Optimizer)"  in google adwords on the search network? If So Then they are correct google is still using its regular algorithm which includes quality score they just make the management changes for you based on data

Yeah - htaccess is the way to go for rewrite rules. Check out http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection for more depth/detail, too.

Thanks Wissam. I was thinking this was the way to go, and I appreciate your input. I do use the Yoast SEO plugin for Wordpress on another site, but the blog in question is through BlogEngine. I will do what you have suggested. Cheers!

agreed! we ran into the same problem with content (articles, etc). if you think of it in the same way as blog posts, they each have a unique URL, but with tags (i.e. categories) you are able to get them posted to the appropriate category landing pages. have a somewhat related issue that i posted here

Thank you everybody. I will give whitespark a shot.

Don't think that's an entirely accurate (or at least, not comprehensive) explanation of PageRank. Simply generating more pages on a site regardless of their ability to generate external links, is likely a way to dilute the site's ability to be crawled/indexed/ranked over time. See http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-pagerank-works-why-the-original-pr-formula-may-be-flawed and http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow for more.

Thank you for your update! I agree with your tests and your solution is probably the best also from a user experience point of view: giving a nice description and useful links on category pages should improve the number of pageviews / time spent on site.

First  question. Tummy tuck is a unique procedure in itself i am guessing, so using NY in the title would benefit you a lot. For example just speaking generally, if you use a deep target keyword such as , albany-ny-tummy-tuck , You might be limited on the traffic you get but will be good traffic. Vs using ny-tummy-tuck. My personal experience, specially dealing with unique niche items, I think a person from manhattan would want to go to albany to get a tummy tuck. So that being said a broader net for that keyword would be awesome. Side Notes: A. you need to use your company info " full address " on every page. Either site wide footer to be indexed or text on every page. B. To benefit best for that local based seo signal you need to make sure all your citations are in order. Use yext.com. AWESOME time saving and a must if you want to compete locally. Or you can manually make the changes but does take a lot of time. Second question, i would recommend looking at what is the most traffic driven long tail or medium size keyword that would benefit you and put that as close to the main directory as possible. ie: Home/ Procedure / Tummy Tuck . It would awesome if you can post your current Site structure and maybe we can help you structure it better, Hope it helps Hampig M Bizdetox.

That's the one! Thank you Rand!

Hi Oxygenretreat, Singulars and plurals should be treated the same, so your main page should be targeting both "exotic vacations" and "exotic vacation" because Google sees them as the same in most instances.  As for internal linking, it doesn't hold near the weight with Google as it has in the past.  My suggestion would be to make sure that your anchor text is related to the page and thats about it.  If you have a page about exotic vacations make sure that the internal anchor text links to it with some form of exotic vacations and not some term like "home".  Since internal anchor text is easily manipulated Google has reduced it's role in their ranking models over the past years. Casey