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You are not alone. Facebook wants to make money and is essentially another ad network. Yes, there is some organic reach but it is very, very little. Company pages promoting their own content now have to pay to reach their fans. That is just the way it is. The best way to tap into Facebook's "organic reach" is to have content that gets it's own likes and shares.

Consider creating a page on your site for both terms. Weddings are a big deal for people and ultimately, they are going to book a venue that they love and relate to. If you have a great venue, you shouldn't be afraid to list a few other venues (perhaps not your primary competitors) that are good alternatives. Perhaps you could even make a referral arrangement with them and earn some income from people who book their venues from your page.

• Your home page could target the singular, Wedding Venue term - and of course highlight your venue.
• An additional page would be created to highlight the plural, Venues for Weddings, and the content would focus on the Top Venues in your city.

It's a great chance for you to highlight what is special about your venue and deliver value to the searchers of either term.

No, Moz's tools do not provide this.

You can check out SEMrush or SpyFu as two options to do this. Both will give you some free data without an account, although the paid plans will give you more data.

The big concern with a page like this, is that this is not unique content. I copied and pasted a line from the text into google with quotes: "Having grown out of the earlier religious forms of worship of the family gods" and found many pages with the exact same content, the book posted.

Worrying about 'optimizing' duplicate content is a no win game. You need to create new content. If you have duplicate content like this, you need to add a significant amount of additional value to it to make it unique. You could NoIndex these pages as well, as there are certainly times it makes sense to have duplicate content on your site, for the users benefit.

If I'm understanding correctly, I think you need to simply do a 301 redirect of your index pages to the canonical version of each URL.

I've seen this debated numerous times as to whether or not a penalty will pass. Personally, I wouldn't risk a good clean site with another website's troubles. I mean, why risk a "totally clean" website?

A better route may be to simply contact the website owners of the good links your penalized website has and ask them to point them towards the same content you've put on your clean site.

To add to what the others have written:

Consider writing your title tags for the users as well. What does your page content offer them? Ranking is only 1/2 of the battle. You need a snippet that gets people to click your result as well.

As Kevin said, HTML is a better format for the web.

Perhaps you can offer this as a downloadable PDF on a lead generation page? You can certainly use this asset in more than one way.

Hi James,

I think you are on the right path with these three statements:

1. Get as many as possible of the "directory" links removed
2. Remove keywords from 50-60% of links and replace with branding
3. Forget about whats been done previously / changing it will not help in anyway / and focus on branding in anchor text for any future link building?

I wouldn't consider #3 to be exclusive from 1 and 2. If it was my site, I'd work on all of these.

I don't know your website URL, but if you feel like it is very Keyword Heavy, I would also consider "de-optimizing" it a bit. Bascially- just make sure you've written page titles and copy for humans.

Yes, you should do what you described. You don't need to "delete" the content on the old page before moving it to the new one. Create the new page, redirect the old one.

Smashing Magazine often posts about free WordPress themes.

Link to Google results

It's tough to find a theme that is well designed, free, decently optimized out of the box, and not being used by 500 other bloggers. Good luck.

As others have mentioned, it sounds like these links have little potential value. You could always drop a few comment URLs, tweets, G+ posts to those pages to help them get indexed, but they would still pass very little authority and I can't say it would be worth the effort.

Perhaps you could contact those same Suppliers and offer to give them a testimonial or find some other way to get your company linked on a more prominent page of their website. Think about what you can offer of value for their website.

You can contact the websites and see if they will remove them.

If that doesn't work, you can disavow the linking domains.

If you want to permanently remove URLs from the index, this is the basic process:

Have your developer implement NoIndex, Follow to all pages that have the URL parameter you want removed. For example, if the URL contains categoryFilter= (like above), then add the NoIndex, Follow tag to the of the page. Do this for all URL paramters you want removed from the index.

Make sure Google is allowed to crawl those pages. If they are blocked by robots.txt or told not to crawl them via Google Webmaster Tools, Google will not be able to see the newly implement NoIndex, Follow tag.

Then, give it some time and wait. It may take Google a long time to crawl all of these paramtered URLs again. Fallout of the index might be slow.

Once the URLs are gone, consider blocking the crawling of them via robots.txt or in GWT parameter handling.

1. I wouldn't worry about dilution. They may look spammy if the anchor text is highly optimized and they are really only there for SEO purposes. Or if there are a ton.

2. Don't worry about dilution/sculpting. Put links on your site for usability. Use descriptive anchors. Make the site easy to use and navigate.

That being said, I agree with you that removing them is probably a good idea. If they are all present in the top nav, I see no reason to duplicate it all again in the footer. Instead, use the footer to highlight some other important pages on your site that are important but not header worthy. Help, About, FAQ, Popular Pages and others.

Judging from your original comment, it sounds like you know what you are doing. Just give it some time.

Sometimes, I find that a FAQ or something similar will rank over a more Category based page because despite being less targeted, the FAQ is full of content and the category page is quite thin in comparison.

Here is what I would do:

• Update the Loft Conversions Essex page to include more content. Better content.
• Build a few external links to that page to strengthen the authority.
• Give it some time.

This is completely normal, especially in the deeper pages of the SERPs.

Focus on creating the best page you can about "borescope" and then building some external links to that page and you will see it climb the rankings and likely stop bouncing around between similar pages on your site.

Hi Zach -

A quick glance shows no major red flags. Content is indexed, not blocked via robots.txt and appears to be unique, not thin.

I think you need to give it more time and continue to build some site authority via external backlinks. It is pretty normal for the homepage to rank over internal pages on smaller, newer sites.

You always have to remember that it is more important how the search engines view your site than your SEO reporting tools.

If you see the search engines having any problems with duplicate pages being indexed, do these steps.

1. Use Google Webmaster Tools to Ignore the Parameters (?wr=1)

2. Use the canonical tag on the pages with this parameter added to reflect the regular URL

3. Make sure you link internally/externally to the canonical version of your page

Hi Pete-

Your set-up here is pretty good.

Ideally, you would want your Canonical Tag to point to your view all page, as that page might be the best experience for users. If your category has too many products in it to display a reasonably sized view all page, consider breaking it up into more niche categories/subcategories.

The canoncial tag on these pages and the rel prev/next is essentially telling Google not to rank those individual pages. There is no need to worry about the H1/H2 pages in those series. Update them only if you think they will provide the user a better experience.