Something about something not so important!

[AlanMosley]

sure can

[RyanKent]

Hi tdsnet,

You clearly have made a tremendous amount of changes with your site. Any time you "kick up this much dirt", your rankings may bounce a bit over the next 30 days. Google does not crawl your site all at once, but in pieces. As each page is crawled, the ranking of other pages on your site is affected since you likely link to your home page and other important pages.

A few things to consider:

• you wont truly know your rankings for a month

• dropping a single rank (from 2 to 3 as you shared) may not be related to your site at all. A competitor could have acquired new links or otherwise made improvements to their page.

• overall the changes you listed are positive but there are a few which concern me. It sounds like you may have misinterpreted some SEO guidelines. For example, you do not have to 301 all 404 links to your site. You should ensure your site's links do not generate a 404. You should also redirect any old links to the most relevant page on your site. If you delete a page and no longer offer similar content on your site, it is perfectly fine to let the page 404. Be sure your 404 page offers your site's navigation and a Search function so it is helpful.

• you also mentioned changes like "created one or two external links on pages". This sounds kind of forced. Like you did it to improve your SEO ranking, in which case it would not be recommended. You want to naturally link out as appropriate. Sometimes that means no external links and other times you could offer 10.

If you can share your URL it would be helpful, as we are otherwise left to offering generic advice. Please also share the keywords which you are concerned about. If it helps to know, the content in Q&A answers is not visible to search engines for 2 weeks, and you can edit your own posts. You can add the URL, then when you receive satisfactory feedback you can remove it.

[tdsnet]

Hey thanks for the tip

[tdsnet]

All good now

[AlanMosley]

You have many broken hyperlinks, 851 one of themYou have a lot of un-necessary redirects, are you using WordPress?
There are over 1,000 of these each one leaking link juice, add them all to the nroken hyperlinks you are losing a lot of rank.

here Are a few examples, not the difference in the trailing slash "/"The link to "http://www.trustdeedscotland.net/blog" has resulted in HTTP redirection to "http://www.trustdeedscotland.net/blog/".The link to "http://www.trustdeedscotland.net/blog/index.php/author/trustdeed123/" has resulted in HTTP redirection to "http://www.trustdeedscotland.net/blog".you have canonicals pointing to pages that dont existThe page 'http://www.trustdeedscotland.net/blog/index.php/page/2/' links to a canonical URL 'http://www.trustdeedscotland.net/blog/page/2/' that returned the status code '404'.You also have more then one cannonical tags in your pagesThere are many others also. These are common errors i find in Wordpress sitesError 3 'Warning 15 
http://www.trustdeedscotland.net/blog/index.php/fsa-calls-uk-banks-transparent/" />http://www.trustdeedscotland.net/blog/index.php/fsa-calls-uk-banks-transparent/" />

[tdsnet]

Hi Alan,

Thanks for the analysis.

Did you see anything in the index or main structure that caused any issues do you think?

Regards

[AlanMosley]

The biigest concern is the un-necessary redirects and broken links, in such high numbers you are thouing away a lot of rank, each 301 loses you link juice.

By un-necessary I mean that the link is internal, it can be pointed directly at the correct page, there is no need to 301.

Matt cutts has confinmed that 301's leak,

They have to otherwise you would get internal loops.

going by the Goolge Algorithm realsed years ago, it seem that they leak 15%

And of case the broken links would leak 100%

fixing them has got to give you a boost.

There is also invalid markup, and many other violations in lower numbers.

[tdsnet]

Great thanks,

With Wordpress it seems to come up over and over again anytime you research Wordpress - people seme to run into problems with it.

[AlanMosley]

Yes thats what i believe.

I find ASP.MVC is the best for SEO, both clean code and seo friendly urls.

but if its not possible, what i advise is to create your landing pages with clean code and use the CMS where you need it.

[tdsnet]

Update on Blog situation:

Thanks

[AlanMosley]

i use the Bing SEO Toolkit.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-interview-the-bing-team

You need a microsoft webserver to set it up

i would not exclued them in robots, as you will still be leaking PR thought the broken links, you need to find and fix them

[tdsnet]

Yes will look at the Bing Webmaster tools and work of that finding broken links. Thanks again.

[AlanMosley]

Bing SEO Toolkit, is not BWMT

email me, and ill will find them all and send you a list tomorrow

mosley@thatsit.net.au