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One of biggest mistakes I used to make - and I had no idea I was making it at the time - was in trying to be too cute with my H1s, H2s and meta tags/meta descriptions. How? I focused more on using fancy punctuation (e.g., dashes, pipes and colons, especially) than I did on the message I hoped to get across to readers. This was in 2010. Eventually, I discerned the trouble I was creating for myself, and not simply in the eyes of Google. Instead of thinking about what punctuation Google "recognizes," think of how you can deliver your information in the simplest, easiest-to-digest manner possible. When we attempt to get too cute with our punctuation, we must rely too heavily on someone/something else (e.g., search engines) to deliver our message in the way we hope to convey it; most important, though, it takes the emphasis off of the user, which is always, ALWAYS more interested in the best, most apropos result, not the result that highlights our prowess as A-List grammarians and punctuation scholars. My advice: Write simply to convey your message thoroughly. More often than not that means few words and even fewer punctuation characters. RS

Thanks Miriam!

My pleasure Randy.

Richard is correct. Redirects are handled in the htaccess file in the order in which they are presented. Put your most specific redirects first, your least specific redirects last.

This question should be directed to your licensor. No one else can answer this question. The answer can vary from one licensor to another. The licensor writes their terms for their own will and pleasure.

Hey There, No I wouldn't worry about that. Most optimized local business sites have complete NAP in schema in the footer and then that is repeated on the Contact Page. I really doubt there's any problem with this.

I'd take a slightly different approach to solving your issue though blocking the pages will work.  My only concern with doing that is that if you do any weight to that page will evaporate from your site as opposed to being passed back internally.  You won't be finding the pages in Wordpress as they're auto-generated and I'm guessing there's only one author which is why the author archive would be the same as the general archive. Assuming you're using Yoast you can remedy the issue by simply going to the Titles & Metas area, selecting the "Archives" tab and check the box next to "Add noindex, follow to the author archives".  This will allow the PageRank to pass but the page won't be indexed as duplicate content.  There are other types of pages int eh same area you can do the same thing for. As an aside, you should change your username.  From the example you've given I'm assuming you've left the user as "admin".  Since that's the default for Wordpress it makes it easier for attacks to brute-force their way in as they already have the username.  This can be done via phpMyAdmin to just change it but if you're not comfortable in there you can simply create a different user with Admin privileges and delete the old "admin" making sure to attribute all posts and pages to the new user. I shouldn't have to say this but just in case something goes wrong BE SURE TO BACK UP YOUR DATABASE !

I agree totally with Chris and according to Matt Cutts: "So if it’s a link from one page on your site to another page on your site, you want that featuring to flow, you want Googlebot to be able to find that page," Cutts continued. "So almost every link within your site, that is a link going from one page on your site to another page on your site, I would make sure the PageRank does flow which would mean leaving off the nofollow." So, just use no-follow for links to websites you don't trust.

I don't see a big deal on length from an H2 point of view. I often have that many H2s and many H3s. The bigger deal is whether the copy is adding any value to the page. Don't fret about the <h?>markup outside of the core H1 of the page.</h?> I'd be more concerned if formatting is ugly or confusing, or inconsistent. You can also edit the CSS and HTML to turn Subtitle goes here into Subtitle goes here and retain visual formatting identical to how it looks currently. This is the proper way to separate formatting from the semantic markup of the page (headings, in this situation).

This is what I would do, too: search for a large chunk of text from the page and see if the page comes up. Site: is not always 100% accurate.

I agree that getting the fundamentals right is your first port of call and John's link above is a great start which covers many of the aspects you really need to get right. I would also suggest making sure you have all the relevant social channels linked up and being interacted with, this should  help you generate additional engaged traffic to your site. Secondly, if you have a local presence for the business get started with this. Moz Local would be a good place to start as this should provide you with additional SEO benefits. Finally, you mentioned you are getting a lot of referral bot/spam traffic, I would suggest you try and clean up your analytics and block unwanted crawlers as without you will find it hard to determine genuine traffic to your site. There is a great article from Carlos Escalera on removing ghost referral spam that I would highly recommend you read. Hope that all helps.

Think I've sussed it. There is only about three or four main parameters so went to GA, Behaviour more > site content > all pages Then did a search for part of the parameter name, sure enough you are right only a handful of visits. Many Thanks Is duplicate content of this sort actually a major issue?  Especially considering Google should already know from Webmaster tools that these are parameter pages.

Hi J.P., Not that I can personally recommend, no, but I do hear other people speaking well of Bright Local as well if you want to pay per citation. However, I don't know if they do niche specific directories, as Whitespark does. P.S. This is Miriam writing, by the way, but I'm in Mozzer Alliance at the moment.

Removing 404 urls from Google indexes is a never ending job and often requires multiple submissions until they go away. But when should you submitt them for removal? If Moz finds them but Google is not reporting them yet in wemaster tools or Analytics... should you be proactive and submit them to google for removal? OR Wait until the show up as an error by Google?

It's failing because of the order. With Redirect 301 / http://www.healthpointe.net first, all other pages that were after / will not work. Also, going to David's answer, redirecting a /index.html is a special case, and there are a few ways around it such as using DirectoryIndex index.html at the top of the file or with a rewrite condition such as: RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.htmlRewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Adding lots of fresh content; Great content is extremely valuable.  Poor-quality content will harm your site in the Google rankings.   Average content isn't worth much. Linking Content Internally in ways that make the relationship between the content more clear; This should always be done. Creating schemas and metatags for the content. Sarah Palin would ask if you are putting lipstick on a pig.  If you have a pig then this is a waste of time.  If you have great content then it is worthwhile. My choice is add lots of fresh content but it has to be really good or you are wasting your time.