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Dunamis did really well in pointing out core issues, and a technique that I highly recommend to clients.  What I'll add here is that if you go the route of excerpts, and do not add unique content to those - enough that the majority of content is the unique new portion, the site will be very poorly received by visitors and search engines.

Individual articles should be at least a few hundred words of unique content.  Anything less will result in those pages either being completely ignored by the search engines, or worse, flagged as either duplicate content (you don't have to have an exact copy of another page to get the dupe content flag - even if only a good portion of the page is replicated, that's enough without that extra unique content), or even possibly not even indexed at all.

Your sitemap.xml file has three entries.  I recommend automating the URL generation in it to include new content as it's posted, with lastmod set to the date/time of posting.  I'd then get that file pinged out to Google at least once a day if you've got new content every day, or even each time a new article is written.

I'd also put a date/time stamp tag in the header using the HTML standard meta tag format for dates

That isn't guaranteed to help, however it has helped some sites I've worked on in the past.

I'm not sure why you're worried about what Term Extractor sees or recognizes compared to the visits that come to the site.  They're what matters.  Are the people coming to the site coming there because they're looking for what the site offers? Or are they coming there and leaving right away after finding out the site isn't what they want?

SEO tools are only as useful as their capability, which is never the ultimate factor for making site decisions.

Unless there's only one company in each combination of service and industry, having the company name or another differentiator as the last element in the URL is vital for individual page topical relevance.  Company Names make the most sense from a user perspective.

I think it all depends on how shiny the object is (how interesting the site, data and market are) for me.  The shinier the object, the more I want to gaze.  Fortunately over the years I've come to realize this and catch it earlier in the gazing process. So when I feel like I've turned into a deer in headlights, I take action.

What's really a blessing for me is that as I've become more and more skilled, I've been able to increase my rates to the point where I spend about 80% of my time blogging, reading articles, tweeting, and participating in the community, and the rest actually working on client projects.

Which means when I'm focused on client projects, I have a major need to stay focused and not get lost in the data - it's an even bigger priority than it ever was before.

Regarding the source ownership factor, I'd also recommend using the Google Source Attribution tag on all your articles.

Do you mean a link you have on your site pointing to someone else's site?  If so, that's their issue and should not negatively affect your site or rankings.

two or three layers into it, hyphens vs. slashes is not as critical as too many hyphens in the primary domain name.

Personally, I believe it's better user experience to go with slashes rather than hyphens to clearly visually split out services vs. industries vs. company names.  But that's just my preference and belief regarding usability.

Yeah it can get really confusing.  Here's the concept.  Each Root domain can have many subdomains, as well as sub-folders.

Any link pointing to any subdomain or subfolder will provide some linking value to the entire root.  It's not as much as that individual subdomain or subfolder gets, however the cumulative impact is there and it's real.

The reason is pretty straight forward - any sub, (domain or folder) is naturally associated with the root.  It contributes to the overall weight of that root.

It's not unlike the branches of a tree.  While the rain may fall directly on a branch, some of the water has the ability to work it's way back to the main trunk of the tree.

Just like water that seeps into the ground and soaks into the roots, can and will work it's way up the trunk and to the branches.

It's easy to get confused with terminology. All pages, however, should have high quality, unique, paragraph based content, no matter what you call them.

You have the right idea for organization.

From the home page, there should be links to the top level categories

White Tea

Black Tea

Oolong Tea

British Tea

Then all of your articles having anything to do with White Tea would be linked from within the White Tea section of the site.

So the tree would then look like:

• White Tea
  • Organic White Tea
  • White Tea Recipes
  • How to Brew White Tea
• Black Tea
• Oolong Tea
• British Tea

This is, in fact, high quality content organization.  So congratulations for having understood the concept.

this is why I'm glad EGOL is around when I'm not.  Not only does he really know what he's doing from an SEO perspective, he runs his own site - proof from real world stuff.

Myopic SEO says "how little can I get away with".  Sustainable SEO says "What can I do to eventually dominate in this niche, and not have to play the games other sites do."

100 words?  Sorry - My recommendation to clients is 400 words on category pages, 1000 on information pages.

400 too much for you to swallow?  Start with 200 each.  Do other best practices SEO tasking - if you still find you're not getting the visits and conversions you want, write more high quality content.

There's a couple thousand pages indexed (2,390 when I checked just now).

Then, do search for inurl:diamondexchange.com +DiamondID that search (if you click on the "repeat the search with the omitted results" link) reveals an additional 3900 "pages" indexed, all with "loose diamond" as a topical focus.  Which tells me that Google's internal system has given a lot of weight to the site for anything to do with loose diamonds.

There could be questionable SEO going on, but that would take a bit more time to research, and from my own experience with product sites that have a similar architecture, it's not surprising that the above issue is definitely part of the equation.

you don't just get a link either.  You get the value that comes from those people who see "accredited" and think it makes a business more trustworthy.  And you can't get an A+ rating without accreditation.

It doesn't hold the same value as if every page on oldsite.com were redirected to the proper equivalent page on newsite.com - the long term value would be in links pointing to those redirecting to the new ones, combined with the links pointing to the old site's home page redirecting to the new site's home page.

How much value it gets that will last depends on how many links pointed to oldsite.com's home page.  Yet ultimately, if no new signals are generated and newsite.com doesn't build out in depth or spread of keywords, it's going to fall off over time.

Exactly how much time is anybody's guess.

The vast majority of people who do such things do it for the short (whatever that means) term boost, and if there are ads on newsite.com, the clicks on those ads.

Good question as to whether the search engines know about this and if so, how they deal with it.  Ultimately they don't say exactly.

In the past couple years I have not heard of anyone doing such things as their primary path to long-term success.

The actual length of time it lasts would definitely depend on the market it's in.  Are many other sites actively doing across-the-board SEO - both on-site and off-site?  If so, it'd last less time than if the market was relatively quiet.

How long it would take you to bypass newsite.com is also an unknown factor, regardless of method you chose.  SEO best practices call for putting in the footwork to do best practices and trusting that over time, you'll see value.  And you may or may not overcome newsite.com depending on what they do and the rest of the market.

Dan,

Here are a couple suggestions that always work for me on eCommerce sites.

1.  for the highest level brand (producer) page such as this, the brand (producer)'s name should be the first word in the page Title.

2. Each brand (producer) page at this level should have a couple paragraphs of descriptive text about them, and including their brand name in that text.  If you prefer not having all that text above the product images, consider at least one or two sentences above the products, and then the rest of that descriptive text below them.  When done that way, use the brand name in the opening sentence that's above the products, and also again in the descriptive text that's below the products.

3.  The Brand name should be in an H1 header at the top of the content area.  Right now, you have "Produkter i kategorien" as the headline.  While it's not critical to do so, having "Dundalina" there instead, is both good for SEO and helps users to immediately visually know that's the producer for these products.

Beyond that, yes, waiting may be all you need given all you've done.  However by doing the above things, it sends much stronger signals that "this is the most important page about this topic".

This is only a cursory look so it's only going to touch on some of the most obvious, important factors.

1. Just because we can get rankings for some pages does not automatically mean we'll get them for others.  Each phrase set needs to be evaluated as a unique topical focus, in it's own competitive landscape.

2. While your site architecture might work for the locations you've got ranking for, it's upside down site architecture.

You have

http://stoneycreekinn.com/locations/index.cfm/DesMoines

http://stoneycreekinn.com/locations/rooms/index.cfm/DesMoines

http://stoneycreekinn.com/locations/amenities/index.cfm/DesMoines

http://stoneycreekinn.com/locations/gallery/index.cfm/DesMoines

etc.

Ideal site architecture would be something like:

http://stoneycreekinn.com/locations/DesMoines/

http://stoneycreekinn.com/locations/DesMoines/rooms/

http://stoneycreekinn.com/locations/DesMoines/amenities/

etc.

This method helps search engines understand content relationships much more clearly.

3. When drilling down into Packages and Specials, clicking on an individual special goes to

http://stoneycreekinn.com/locations/specials/view.cfm?locationid=6&specialid=4

This page has no Des Moines topical emphasis (page Title, URL, content, etc.)  So this entire section is lacking in its ability to be recognized as relevant, and in turn, can not properly support the larger Des Moines focus.

4. OpenSiteExplorer.org only shows 20 links pointing to the top level Des Moines page.  From 2 domains.  That's hardly any indication that this is an authoritative set of content for an inner section of a site

5.  The photo gallery has no descriptive paragraph based text, and no Des Moines specific seeding (title, URL, content area, etc...

Any of these will help, however you may need all of them, to get significant rankings.

I have also seen the Moz system need time to find links after I added a new site to a campaign recently however also be aware that as vast as SEOmoz's data set is, it's not the entire web.

And in reality, no single link reporting solution in existence currently (even Google's) is going to show you all of the links that might be pointing to your site.

I like how EGOL summed it up in regard to the fact that search engines won't reveal their methods.

They claim hundreds of factors, yet when those are cross-related, that leads to exponential sub-factors (and thus why Google and Bing like to tout 10,000 factors behind the hundreds).

We live in a correlation industry.  Any true scientific analysis to reverse engineer the actual factors is by nature going to very likely miss something, and it could be quite significant in how much the results are actually false flag.

Where it gets more complex is that no two situations (in any truly competitive landscape) are exactly alike, and thus the need to replicate for verification is an even more elusive task.

Then add in that hundreds of changes occur to search algorithms throughout the year (some small, some big), and now we're talking about a barrier to true scientific evaluation.

Oh - and let's not forget that unless we have the exact same data set as any search engine, we move even further away from the mark of accepted scientific best practices methodology.

On a final note, the amount of time, computing power and analysis required in most situations, is more likely cost-prohibitive since the results of such effort can not be recouped.  So that leaves it to an entity that has the financial, technical, and academic willingness to take on such a task without expectation of compensation.

Rand gets hammered all the time for referring to Moz's process with the tag line "correlation is not causation", even though we work in a correlation industry.

Jeff's spot on. Come up with the briefest visitor readable URL that fits the proper understanding of the page identity along with its hierarchical relationship to content above it in that funnel. That's the URL that should be referenced in the canonical tag as well as links pointing to the page. If for some reason months or years later that URL needs to change (because the program name changes for some reason for example), then make that change and implement a 301 redirect to that new URL to pass any previously accumulated link value.

Yes - if there are X number of pages within a section, it becomes too many to reasonably link from a sub-nav.  X being a subjective value that needs to be determined case by case.

Ideally, it might lead to yet one more sub-level (such as in sub-sub categories), or in pagination (not blocked from search.  That itself is challenging to do in the right manner so as to avoid going too deep or too thin.

There's no other reason I can think of though, and no other method I'd consider a best practice.