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Hi Dan, I depends on the model, I would recommend all the obvious stuff like: Branch information like opening times and addresses for individual agents Individual property information like area, price etc Some of the more interesting/new things are actions. You could potentially use: Ask question action: https://schema.org/AskAction Rent Action: https://schema.org/RentAction On the sitemap question, you want to make sure your sitemaps are "clean" meaning there are only pages that return a 200 response. There shouldn't be any redirects or 404s. Only put pages you want to show up in the index in the sitemap. Hope that helps. https://schema.org/RentAction

I am my own client, so I can be as picky as a want, and I take care of the details that I feel are important. I pay close attention to how the site is responding and rendering when I pretend that I am a visitor.  I pay even more attention when a customer or visitor writes to me with a complaint.   In my opinion, if the site is working great then all is good.     W3C validation seems to be of jugular importance to W3C evangelists.  They will tell you that you will burn in Hell if you don't achieve it with flying colors.  People who want to sell you their services will point at any fault that can be detected. Practical people have a different opinion.  I try to be as practical as possible.

So your footer links, top nav bar, are only visible in code? But can you see them on the page? To elaborate on my answer, I feel that schema markups for links in the footer, sidebar and top nav are irrelevant and not worth exhausting the effort. What benefit does the markup have to the user? The markups should highlight the most important parts of your site for the benefit of the searcher, not the search engine. Therefore my answer is really that same, put yourself in the shoes of the searcher. Is there something in those links worth highlighting that could possibly increase your CTR? My guess is that there probably isn't. Without seeing your site, I couldn't really assume otherwise. The benefit is not to the engine as these markups are for user experience alone. Highlighting the data won't help you rank better if it is irrelevant to the searcher.

Yes it's most definitely a factor in rankings but as you say, to achieve visual perfection on a budget (using a theme and not coding from scratch) you do end up with a lot of code. I always ensure my sites score as high as possible in speed tests, and the Html, Css, and Java are all properly minified (when possible), and that's about all you can do. If the site scores at least a 90/100 in the page speed test then Google are not going to hold back a site that looks good and has great content because it has a lot of code in the site. Most of all that code is for the browsers to render the site correctly but good Seo is mainly dependant on the content contained within certain tags. I just checked one of my sites, and it has 600 lines of code before my H1 tag, thanks to the revolution slider. But the site still ranks top 3 for many keywords and still achieves a 93/100 on page speed test. All things equal, custom built flat html sites will always rank better than themes php template sites, but it's quite rare that all things are equal. Those 400 lines of code may be holding you back by 1 spot or 5 spots, but it's nothing that some good links or great content can't fix. I understand your point though, as it's a painfully slow process to fix that code.

I started using Genesis framework about 10 weeks ago, and I couldn't be happier with the change. I really recommend it

Yes, that is exactly it. And yes, your curiosity should never be completely satisfied...

Do "/houses" and "/houses?page=1" have exactly the same content? I'd definitely want to see rel=canonical on the "page=1" version - those are just duplicates. Google has expressly said that they don't want you to canonical pages 2, 3, etc. back to page 1. That doesn't mean it never works, just that it's a bit dicey. As Chris said, rel=prev/next is another option. Theoretically, it would allow all of the results pages to rank, but let Google know they're a series and not count them against you as thin content. In practice, even my enterprise SEO colleagues have mixed feelings. There's just very limited evidence regarding how effective it is. It is low-risk. The other option is to go a bit more old-school and META NOINDEX anything with "page=", and just let the original version get indexed and rank. This can help prevent any dilution and would also solve your "page=1" issue. The biggest risk here is if that cut off PR flow across your site or if you had links to the paginated results. In most cases, that's unlikely (people don't link to or tweet page 17 of your search results), but it's a case-by-case thing. Unfortunately, the "best" solution can be very situational, and even Google isn't very clear about it.

Hi There Karl's answer was fantastic - and I just want to emphasize as well - if this is decently strong brand I would put some more effort into recovering from the manual penalty. As tedious as this can be, if it was just a "churn and burn" site I'd say just axe it and re-build. But go to Keyword Planner - how much brand search volume does the company receive? Try [brand] [brand.com] [www.brand.com] etc - if this number is at least in the hundreds or thousands of brand searches a month, I'd work to remove that penalty and let the brand signals help you recover. Also, does the main site receive a lot of direct traffic? It just sounds like if you can get the penalty lifted it will be an easier recovery than just some exact match domain that's not really a brand. -Dan

Thanks for taking the time to reply Michael, much appreciated!

Hi Yiannis, As far as I'm aware, there isn't really a way to "block" a link.  The link is seen on the other site.  Returning a 404 for the page being linked to doesn't change the fact that there are a 100K links from one site pointing at your site.  The only options I'm aware of are to 1.) contact the owner of the website with the links and ask them to remove the links and 2.) if that doesn't work disavow the links. I understand your hesitancy to use the disavow tool, but quite frankly, this is exactly what it is intended for. If you feel comfortably with the links being there and think Google has already dealt with them, then do nothing, but if you want to do something about the links, you either have to get them removed or disavow them. BTW - My understanding of the partial manual actions is that often times Google not only deals with the suspicious links (devaluing them), but they also penalize the pages/keywords they think you were attempting to manipulate.  So, just because it was a partial action and not a full site action doesn't mean it's not effecting some of your rankings.  It's just not going to affect all your rankings for all your pages. Kurt Steinbrueck OurChurch.Com

Thank you all for your replies. yes it was re branding. I advised what you both recommended but I am afraid it is a little too late. Oh well

For me it depends on the design.  The search engine robot gobbles text or code if you will in order.  So if there's no other content in the way and it's a page full of links then either one will do.  The first link gets the most juice but they all get divided by the number of links.  So while it may be a good idea to do a site map of sorts it's not necessarily boosting your site as much as it is helping to map it.  Since you didn't say it was a sitemap directly, then I'd say design it for google & people. Since there's no content, I don't really think it matters.