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As I said theoretically having the keyword you are after in the leftmost position is better. So if you already analyzed which keywords are the most relevant for you, you should try to place them in the leftmost position. If for example you are fighting a battle to improve your serp position for the query "property-name", you could decide to choose the second url in your example. But, as others have already mentioned, serp positions are influenced by many many many factors, and focusing too much one technicality can mislead you and shift your focus from the general picture. In general you should structure your content in folders, because google algo expect to find content structured that way, but it doesn't mean you have to in your specific case or for all your pages, or all your products, etc... You should structure your url, after analyzing your content, the keywords you are after and your visitors behavior (and I would give a look at your competitors as well). At the end you will have to make decisions between different possible url structures; you will have to take a risk making you best educated guess based on the analysis you have done, that's why I said the best thing you can do is "test". I can't tell which structure is best for you, because it depends on that lengthy analysis you should perform, there's not an answer which fit them all.

Awesome. Makes total sense. I've dropped this: User-agent: * Disallow: /community/member/ Into our robots.txt file. Thanks Ray!

As the others have already said, it largely depends on the website and how much work you put into it. If you have a good PR team and are able to generate some buzz around the product/service you offer then there is more chance of you gaining a higher PA and DA. Don't get too hung up on PA and DA though, they aren't the be all and end all of the quality of the website. Good luck!

Both measures are not really reliable to know how many pages are actually in the index. Googles definition on 'Total Indexed': Shows the total URLs available to appear in search results, along with other URLs Google might discover by other means. This number changes over time as you add and remove pages. The number of indexed URLs is almost always significantly smaller than the number of crawled URLs, because Total indexed excludes URLs identified as duplicatesor non-canonical, as less useful, or that contain a meta noindex tag. (source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2642366)  => basically this number contains all the pages Google has been crawling since the launch of your site, and is quite useless as absolute figure, it's the evolution over time which is more important site:domain.com will show you pages that are eligible to show in the search results, but is not a really reliable measure either  - it's quite possible that more pages are indexed. On very big sites you will see this number change when you go to page 2,3,...Etc It is a good check to see if your site is indexed or not. That said, the number of pages in the index is not a very important figure, it's rather the ranking of your site for your main keywords which is important, as it is the main driver of your traffic.

Moz local is a subscription that is billed annually. Yes, I believe that it does auto-renew every year.

Facebook shares/likes, Google +1, Tweet counts, etc... All will stay the same, all social signals do follow 301 properly... As long as you keep the same (old) url in the social plugins. If you trade the old url with the new one you will have split count. As for google algo, it's not open source yet, so no one knows what it is doing with these social signs exactly. Since google is pretty good at managing redirects my guess is they know what it means for social signs too.

We use Dreamweaver...

Thanks Moosa.  Great read.

Hello benseb, From what I'm understanding, your best bet is to 301 to the new page (assuming it provides quality content). Even though you may lose some "link juice" in the process, it is still a better option than risking poor url structure and link equity. Even producing some mildly relevant content would help you out in this case - using the same old, tired content and making the 301 simply for Google's sake might not be the best strategy, but if you can freshen it up and 301 correctly that would be optimal. Best of luck, Rob

Thank you for the tips Miriam! I will definitely keep all that that in mind, and if we still can't seem to get things fixed after taking these basic steps (some of which we indeed do need to follow up on), will consider reaching out to Andrew as I'm sure he's also an amazing source of knowledge.

Hello Vlad, You are using the tool correctly - as Mat said, this is what the tool is for. There seems to be something of a consensus that removing an entire link profile (due to extended poor linking processes) is a red flag and might be negatively assessed. That being said, if you are removing a couple bad pages from your profile in order to provide a better experience (or as a response to negative SEO), this is in line with "best practices" and will not be penalized. If you have already gone to the trouble of nofollow-ing them, you should also have them removed as they might hurt you in the future if they are not addressed. Of course, you could stick with the nofollow for now and see if it impacts your rankings negatively - if so, move to the removal. If not, there's no risk in doing nothing. Cheers! Rob

Thank you both!

Good point! I need to check with all the users involved! Regards Peru

You've very welcome!

We have seen quite a few ranking changes in the UK SERPS across the weekend. For both local terms with geographical qualifiers and those without. Not huge swings either way maybe + or - 5 places but enough of a pattern to think it is more than just coincidence. Niches include legal, B2B, consumer goods, fashion, web design, home and gardens and recruitment. Mainly positive movements for us. We keep a close eye on them across the week.

Hello Monica, Many thanks for your response. We currently don't have any user generated content on these pages. It is something we are looking at doing but being a tool rental business , reviews is something, I have found that the industry (my competitors etc) have previously stayed aways from. Thoughts, being that most people who give a review with regards to this, would tend to give a negative review as opposed to saying the carpet cleaner they rented was ace !.. We are currently spending alot of money on the location content writting, it's just with over 100 categories and so many locations, the cost of doing this for everything would be way beyond our budgets. We have like you said, picked our most  valuable locations depending on category (where we rent more of a certain product) and have written unique content for these pages. If we Rel Canonical Tag the remaining location pages with the duplicate content, is this not going to cause problems as the main location varies category to category and these duplicate location pages still have their own NAP etc etc so , in effect I am pointing one branch page to another branch page at a different location which gets more rentals ?.. Would the location pages with the duplicate content still get affected by panda ?... There's nothing really on the web I can find about this specific problem but I am sure , there must be loads of multiple location business who have done similar to us. I will take a read and research on your suggestion and probably try it out for a few of them to see what happens in the rankings. Many thanks Pete

Thank you so much Dan, this is the answer I was looking for.