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I've been pushing to take back the root domain, but have so far hit resistance.  Perhaps I can convince people to at least give it a try.

As far as moving everything into sub-folders of the root domain, as opposed to an obscene amount of sub domains, we could give that a try for some of the sub domains, but not all of them.  Unfortunately, several of the sub domains are _extremely _large sites that require a lot of processing power on the server.  Nearly every single one of these sites has it's own dedicated server.  I think it would be heinous to move them all - but I will see what we can do about moving some.

Thanks again!

BJS1976 is correct.  Take a look at Google's cached page and view the source:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yU6szekyDqkJ:www.perspex.co.uk/products/palopaque-cladding/+&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us. 

The meta robots tag is not there, so Google hasn't re-crawled your site since this line of code was added.

Hello everyone!

I manage 3 large eCommerce sites that sell textbooks, digital learning solutions, electronic teaching resources, etc., to three different markets in the education space (K-12, College, and Post-College/Career Search).

Currently, the 3 sites live on three different sub domains of the companies main domain.  Is this best practice?  I assume we want all three under the same domain to consolidate domain authority. But...

What if I told you that we have dozens of sub domains of the companies main domain?  Some are for marketing sites, some are for digital products, some are customer-specific sites, etc.  We probably have close to 100 sub domains that are used regularly.

Then what if I told you that the company doesn't hardly even use the root domain (other than a handful of old pages)?  Even the root domain redirects to a sub domain.

Just looking for some insight on this, as I will be doing an SEO/marketing/conversion overhaul going forward.

On a side note, we use Magento as an eCommerce platform, and it's rampant with duplicate content, duplicate page titles, pages with too many links, and so on and so forth.  That's another problem for another day...

Their permalink structure is awful for SEO.  These pages provide very little use for search engines, and should probably be set to "noindex".

As Charles pointed out, Joomla! is not a great platform for a heavy eCommerce site like this.  I would also suggest Magento (although with it's advantages comes disadvantages - for one it's a processing beast and you'll likely need to upgrade to a better hosting company).

Out of the box, a self-hosted WordPress site is flawed when it comes to SEO.  Your permalink structure will be poor, there is rampant duplicate content and titles, frankly it's a bit of a mess.

With a little work though, you can turn WordPress into a very SEO friendly platform.  WordPress SEO by Yoast is an essential plugin in my mind, and makes things a whole lot easier.

Check out this very helpful Mozinar on the subject: http://moz.com/webinars/advanced-wordpress-seo

It's hard to say, and I admit that I would have also expected them to reindex the pages by now.

A while back I was working for a client who accidentally turned on noindex, nofollow in their WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin site-wide.  I didn't catch it for a week, and after I turned it off it took an additional 3 weeks before a single page of the site was reindexed.  Granted, this was a low ranked site, and it probably wasn't high on Google's priority, but it did take much longer than I hoped to recover from.

Unfortunately I think you just have to wait it out.  Just keep doing what your doing, creating new content, etc.  Maybe if you build a new link to the page, Google will recrawl it then?

If the page was set to "noindex" for a long time, Google may have flagged the page as such and chosen to skip over it when it was crawling your site.

It's a very real possibility that Google will tag these sites as duplicate content, and only rank the "original" content creator - whatever it deems that to be.

It may be more productive to have one site, and a location-specific page for each site.  You can 301 redirect the unique URLs to each location-specific page if you still want to have unique domain names for each location.

You can ask Google to crawl your page: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1352276

Ask Google to crawl a page or site:

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. On the Dashboard, under Health, click Fetch as Google.
3. In the text box, type the path to the page you want to check.
4. In the dropdown list, select Web. (You can select another type of page, but currently we only accept submissions for our Web Search index.)
5. Click Fetch. Google will fetch the URL you requested. It may take up to 10 or 15 minutes for Fetch status to be updated.
6. Once you see a Fetch status of "Successful", click Submit to Index, and then click one of the following:
   • To submit the individual URL to Google's index, select URL and click Submit. You can submit up to 500 URLs a week in this way.
   • To submit the URL and all pages linked from it, click URL and all linked pages. You can submit up to 10 of these requests a month.

It's probably just Google slowly making their way around to re-crawling these pages.  I would fetch the page, and just wait a little while longer.

Companies that offer services like Moz Analytics, Majestic, Raven Tools, and others probably aren't helping the situation for individuals

I have found it much easier to find projects and clients when presenting myself as a web developer/designer with a strong knowledge of SEO and marketing, rather than just a developer or just an SEO.  For me, SEO is just another tool in my belt.

I think that it will become harder and harder to get strictly "SEO" work, as companies with access to the plethora of online tools (free and paid) will begin to bring a lot of that work in-house.

Yes the presence of BingSiteAuth.xml or the lack-thereof doesn't really give you a definitive answer, but it does give you a little insight into the situation.

There is really no way to know for sure if they have activated or are using Webmaster Tools accounts unfortunately, unless you have access to their email accounts.

It's definitely possible, I would consolidate your efforts in one Google Places account and encourage people you know to promote you there.

I don't see a presence for your site on Google+, which might explain the drop in traffic.

David Mihm did a great Whiteboard Friday about "How Business Listings Are Made": http://moz.com/blog/how-business-listings-made-whiteboard-friday.  I would run a search for your target keyword in your location and see if your business is listed.  If not, consider creating a Google Places account for your business, and encourage friends, family, and customers to promote you and give you positive reviews there.

I am not aware of anyway to determine if a site has implemented Google Webmaster Tools or not, as they could have verified it with by uploading a randomly named file, or through Google Analytics.  I would say if they are fairly large site and have Google Analytics (which you can determime by viewing the source code of the site) they probably have GWMT as well.

To determine if Bing Webmaster Tools are in use, you can go to http://example.com/BingSiteAuth.xml (replace the domain name) and see if the file exists.  If it does, then they activated Bing Webmaster Tools.  If the file does not exist, it either means that they never activated Bing Webmaster Tools, or they did and were smart enough to delete the file from their server.

Hope this helps!

I would first confirm that you have authorship set up correctly by using the Rich Snippet Testing Tool: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets.

If Google shows you that everything is set up properly, then you shouldn't need to worry about it.  It's possible that Google hasn't updated its index since you added the authorship link, so that could be why some people don't see your Google+ picture in the SERPs, but Google also could just be choosing not to show it for some reason.

I've seen some of my own pages with authorship set up properly on not display my Google+ picture in SERPs before, and I was logged into my account as the author.  I'm not sure what causes Google to choose to not display the image, but it does happen sometimes.

For #1, you should choose whether you want www or non-www, not both.  Set up a 301 redirect so that search engines don't confuse your the two and think you have duplicate content.

If you are running an Apache server, you can use this .htaccess 301 redirect to only have a non-www version of your site (entering www will redirect to the same page without www.)

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

If you have old pages that still exist but are no longer relevant - you'll definitely want to 301 redirect them to the new page or new content.  Check Open Site Explorer to see what type of inbound links these pages have, so you know what type of Page Authority you'll have pointing at your new page.

If the pages no longer exist (404 as Mike suggested above), there will be no benefit from 301 redirecting them to new pages, as Google has long since removed these pages from their index.  It won't hurt you, but it won't benefit you either, so it's probably not worth the time.

Moz has published a lot of posts on Link Building: http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building most of them have some solid advice.

As Chris stated above, many in the SEO community feel that guest blogging will be the next target for a Google update, so while short term it may pay off to put some time in and find a site to post your content - in the long run your content might be better off being posted on your own site.

I've always felt that if my content was good enough to be posted on some other site, then I would rather it be on my site in the first place.  This is unfortunately the only real future-proof method, as it's hard to say what will happen to guest blogging as a link-building tactic.

I don't know why you would want to

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