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Google has a helpful article in Webmaster Tools about Authorship.

In the case of Atul...

• If his "representative" site is located at http://www.ultraseo.com/author/atul/, then you could apply the rel="author" attribute to links pointing to that page.
• If his site is located somewhere else like http://www.example.com/, then you would need to either: link to the offsite page from each of your articles (again, using the rel="author" attribute on the links)..... Or, if you wanted to keep these links on site and just link to the offsite page where you have "Visit Authors Website" on his profile page.  On that link you would have the rel="author" attribute.

In my opinion, I think you should include the profile page link in the article "condensed list" type pages, which are more likely to fall into a noindex situation.  Then on the actual article pages you could include the authorship link, giving proper credit where credit is due.

Gabriel, I think we're close here... give this a try:

<title></p> <p><?php wp_title('«', true, 'right'); ?></p> <p><?php echo mb_convert_encoding(get_bloginfo('name', 'display'), 'UTF-8', 'HTML-ENTITIES'); ?></p> <p></title>

Look in your header.php file.  Here's what the <title>tag code might look like.  Again, you may need to wrap the mb function around more than one piece.  This should get you started.</p> <blockquote style="color: #5e5e5e; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: #f7f7f7; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 2px; padding-bottom: 5px; white-space: nowrap; overflow-y: auto; font-family: monospace; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><title><?php</span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"> </span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">/*</span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span> </span>Print the <title> tag based on what is being viewed.</span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span> </span> */</span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"> </span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">global $page, $paged;</span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><br /></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span> </span></span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">wp_title( '|', true, 'right' );</span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><br /></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span> </span></span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">// Add the blog name.</span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span> </span>bloginfo( 'name' );</span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><br /></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span> </span></span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">// Add the blog description for the home/front page.</span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">$site_description = mb_convert_encoding(get_bloginfo( 'description', 'display' ), 'UTF-8', 'HTML-ENTITIES');</span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><br /></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span> </span></span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">if ( $site_description && ( is_home() || is_front_page() ) )</span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>echo " | $site_description";</span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><br /></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span> </span></span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">// Add a page number if necessary:</span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">if ( $paged >= 2 || $page >= 2 )</span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>echo ' | ' . sprintf( __( 'Page %s', 'oldheidelbergdeli' ), max( $paged, $page ) );</span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><br /></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span> </span></span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">?></title>

This worked for me....

$site_description = mb_convert_encoding(get_bloginfo( 'description', 'display' ), 'UTF-8', 'HTML-ENTITIES');

The text is getting encoding in the second half of your meta tag, so if you convert the encoding you should be able to get around this.  You may need to apply this to several sections of that depending on what's going on... check the tag out on several pages.

Let me know how it works out.

Ahh, you are right about the first ampersand.  You should probably take a look at the wp_title() function and see if it's doing any html_special_chars filtering.  Again, if nothing else seems to work, you could change up the "and" remove the possessive on Vancouver.

Hey Gabriel-

Quick and dirty... you could change the meta title to Function 5 - Metro Vancouver IT and Web Experts.

Have you tried putting the full & in the meta title?  There might be a double-conversion issue going on there.

-John

I agree with EGOL on this one... keep it all under one roof.  If you're looking for SEO value on the mini sites, why not turn them into landers that point back to your main site instead of the other way around?

Hi Peter-

I'm assuming you're question is in regards to SEO support.  If not, this might not be the best place to ask if it's just usability as a Wordpress theme.

You say you're a non-coder.  Do you have design skills?  Certainly, you would still need to have a good eye for aesthetics & layout.

As for the SEO support in these themes, I know many SEO-type plugs are getting better and better all the time.  Having said that, even if you're going the DIY route, I'd still encourage you to have someone take a look at the code at some point in the process so you get the value out of the site that you're looking for!

-John

I agree with adding it as well - anywhere there is potential for creating social awareness/buzz about the topic at hand.  As for usage, it's like anything else...  We're all tuned into Google on day 1 releasing this as a new feature; it will take a bit for regular users to get into using it and the impact it will have on their time spent on the web.

Are you currently running a campaign to see how your rankings are positioned?  Have you had any site troubles, down-time, etc?

Do you have a site link we could take a look at... and as EGOL mentioned, any specific questions?

Definitely!  Check out this link about creating a video sitemap via Google:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80472

What browser are you using?

What terms are you trying to rank for nationally?  Unless the terms are particularly unique, it will be more competitive for sure!

I ran some tests last night... looks like it's back up!

You are right about the ecommerce layouts... typically product organization is by category then you can click in deeper for the product detail.  Categories are commonly nested as well... like your Shoes category branching to dress, casual, and athletic.

Most decent ecommerce platforms will allow a full description on the product detail page and a short description for display on the category page.  Furthermore, category pages themselves will often have a description/content field of some sort.  Obviously, you want to avoid duplicate content issues, but you can use the combination of the category descriptions and product short descriptions on your list pages for ranking on the category.  Then, you can use your product pages to rank as well.  Again, you can keep the content different between the short and long product descriptions.

I've seen sites handle the category pages without much content; however I don't think you can go wrong with the additionally ranked pages if you set them up correctly.

Also, check to see if you can get an ecommerce template that supports related products - this will help with your internal linking.  You can also check out up-sell/cross-sell areas of the product page as well.

Do you have a link we could check out for content suggestions?  That may give a better idea of why the product pages aren't ranking well for you.

John

How long ago were the sites put online?  Check out this thread to see if this might apply to your situation:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/unable-to-use-open-site-explorer

-John

+1 ... I'm seeing the error too.  Hopefully it will be fixed soon!

Bill-

There are several SEO plugs available for WP that will handle these issues.  Yes, you are right that adding "noindex" will be beneficial on tag, category, and archive pages.  The idea here is avoiding duplicate content issues.  BTW, check out: Yoast SEO for Wordpress.

Here is how the values for the robots meta tag work:

• noindex will keep a page from being crawled
• nofollow will prevent a page's links from being followed

I agree with noindex'ing these pages; though I would argue that a nofollow is still worth leaving out.  If these pages have any juice you want to allow this to flow to the other links on the page.

Since we're talking about two different result sets, you will need to find a way to get some link juice passed to your plural phrase since you're already ranking well on the singular.  At least for now, Google does consider these as separate searches.

There are a few schools of thought here.  One of these might fit the bill:

• Single Landing.  Introduce the second phrase onto your existing landing page, making sure to monitor your successful phrase and make sure it does not lose ranking power.
• Multiple Landers.  Build a separate landing page, optimized just for the plural phrase.

Have you run any tests including the word 'vets' on a page?

-John