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Hi David,

If you have a good structure on your website then there is no need for a HTML sitemap. By good structure I mean, is every important page on your site easily accessible within 2 clicks from any other page on your website? Are your menu's SEO friendly? Are your main products/services highlighted on your home page in summary? I do not use an HTML sitemap on any of my sites, I just make sure that Google can access every page that is important to me no matter where they land on my site.

If you want to target multiple locations then do it properly, do not duplicate your site over ever state, rather create a unique website with its own content that is more relevant to the location you are targeting. If they are unique enough then Google may consider them as you have put the time and effort into making them different. This also includes local phone numbers in each state to show that you are actually in the state.

As for "What does a user in Montana care if the website looks the same as the one in New York?" - The problem is that local search may not dominate the right way in every state so the poor user in California see's 7 sites that all lead to the same place. This now becomes spam that annoys the hell out of the user. It is all about quality, 50+ pages all leading to the same place will result in a low quality experience to the users therefor will likely be denied.

Hi John,

I have taken a look at your site and believe that you are doing the structure right. Many people will say that you should not have a parent page however I tend to disagree. In WordPress "Siloing" works very well.

So to answer your question, do not mix up your pages and articles (posts), your pages must be siloed (eg www.greensidelawncare.com/lawn-tips/turf-weed-help) however your POSTS (blog) do not have to silo (eg: www.greensidelawncare.com/name-of-article-1)

Structure:

Lawn Care (links to www.greensidelawncare.com/lawn-care) (page)

• Grass Diseases (links to www.greensidelawncare.com/lawn-tips/grass-dieases) (page)

• Turf Weeds Help (links to www.greensidelawncare.com/lawn-tips/turf-weed-help) (page)

• Selecting Grass Types (links to www.greensidelawncare.com/lawn-tips/selecting-grass-types) (page)

Lawn Tips (links to www.greensidelawncare.com/lawn-tips) (main blog page)

• Article 1 (links to www.greensidelawncare.com/name-of-article-1) (blog article)

• Article 2 (links to www.greensidelawncare.com/name-of-article-1) (blog article)

-  Article 3 (links to www.greensidelawncare.com/name-of-article-1) (blog article)

Landscaping (links to www.greensidelawncare.com/landscaping/) (page)

• idea (links to www.greensidelawncare.com/landscaping/child-1) (page)

• idea (links to www.greensidelawncare.com/landscaping/child-2) (page)

• idea. (links to www.greensidelawncare.com/landscaping/child-3) (page)

Side note: I suggest that on your blog page greensidelawncare.com/lawn-tips/ that you do not show the full post for each article, make sure that it only shows the excerpt (just a small summary linking through to the full article) in the main blog feed or you may have duplicate content issues.

Hi Macky,

I personally would 301 redirect site 2 to site 1 if site 1 is more than 5 years older than site 2. The reason being is that I think that site 1 is likely to have more authority over so many years (even though it may not be ranking and is dormant). However, if site 1 is really outdated then I would say redirect site 1 to site 2. As mentioned by the others it is important that you do not just redirect the whole domain from one to the other. Try and match as many pages as possible with relevant, matching 301 redirects.

Lastly, I would also check the amount of backlinks on each domain, if one heavy outweighs the other then this should be a factor in your decision.

So in summary, your decision should be based on the following order:

• Domain Age
• Keyword in the domain www.healthinsurance.com vs www.drwho.com
• Backlinks
• Modern Website build with modern code

I would not be able to tell you the exact best method unless you PM your domains so I can give you an indepth report, as there are many other smaller factors like tables vs divs, sitemaps, penalty history etc.

Manipulating like buttons would not work as Google reads that info from the Facebook API and not from the button itself, as for the was Google measures the likes I do not believe anyone knows as that is part of Google's algorithm and if we knew that we would all be rich... we can only guess at this point

Social Metrics do indeed seem to line up with higher rankings in Google, a while back Rand Fishkin wrote an article called : Facebook + Twitter's Influence on Google's Search Rankings with some strong evidence that shows that having a high amount of likes or social response leads to higher ranking.

Besides from the reasons mentioned in the article, one factor to note is the fact that if your blog post of article gets many likes then it is possible that your content will get re-written and you are more likely to get some natural links to your websites

I would say you are right, may descriptions of natural backlinks are written by copywriters and not actual SEO experts.

A natural backlink is simply a link from the main content area of a blog, page or article (eg: Not from the footer, sidebar or header section but rather from the part of the page where the main information is presented)

One of the best ways to get natural backlinks is by writing quality content that others want to write about and give you credit for. Another great way to get natural backlinks is to guest blog.

I would always prefer to use text based navigation for my main menu. Google likes text and looks for text in all elements of the page including the "alt" pictures, however I always feel that for both robots and human users text based menus are the way to go. What happens if your image menu does not load? What happens if the images take a while to load and slow down your site? There is nothing quicker that a text menu. Don't forget, you also lose your anchor text. If you feel that the image menu if the only thing that will work with your design then go ahead and use it, but make sure:

1. It is fast

2. Uses "alt tags"

3. Add some text links to that page... maybe as footer links.

"Wordpressing" a site does wonders for old outdated sites, mostly due to the ease of content creation as well as the automatic pinging serves & rss feeds built in. Almost all my websites have been redesigned into Wordpress and the results have been fantastic. Just remember to do those 301 redirects and things will work out eventually.

Exactly right, and remember, Google does not only use the alt tag to determine what the image is about, it also uses the surrounding text to get an idea. You can see it uses this method when searching in Google images, many times the target image does not even have an alt tag but Google seems to be relevant.

Not the best idea, Google will hunt you down and shut you down, my guess is that they may even track you over multiple Google accounts and closely watch any related material. This is black hat all the way, I spend my life reporting pages like yours and get them shut down as quick as possible, they are viruses and have no reason to be in the results as they offer absolutely nothing to user experience. The only thing they give value to is your own pocket. There are Google Quality experts that are likely watching your sites like a hawk, my guess is that your re-inclusion requests will never be granted. I don't mean to be so blunt.. actually I do. What value are your bringing to the users?

I do not believe Google will have any problem whatsoever crawling that page. They will certainly not assign any penalty to the page with regards to the tags used. They are more likely to frown on the fact they are using a "keywords" metatag. Come on people, lets unite to get rid of the keywords tag once and for all.

If it makes you feel any better, I have tons of very well ranked sites with similar CMS systems in place. No problems at all.

Interesting, I did not know they had a test like this, I will definitely use this.

If you want to increase the domain authority then I always suggest option 3. The reason for this is that Google has most likely already assigned some authority to your main domain name www.domain.com. If you decide to use blog.domain.com or a brand new domain then you will have to build both up with their own separate authority (yes some authority goes transfer but nothing worth the effort). So rather use option 3 am make one primary domain stronger. Far less work on your part and far better results. Lastly, by adding a blog to your main domain you in turn offer fresh content to your domain and we all know that Google loves fresh content.

Well you could experiment by replacing the structure of the results:

Instead of: 1 - 12 of 236 products

Try: Viewing 1 - 12 of a possible 236 products

Maybe the long version will throw Google off

This result does seem to fool us into thinking it is a rich snippet, however, I think it is one generated by Google and not manually. My guess is that Google has a robot that looks for the "of" with a numerical prefix and suffix and automatically generates a snippet for it.

Google takes a while to catch these things and believe me, white hat SEO if much harder than black hat so I understand your frustration.

The best thing you can do is locate the site and then submit a paid link report then hope that Google gets around to penalizing them, the competition will soon gain no value from the links and the link-juice may be reversed. The Google part is that a Google Quality Expert will likely follow the trail and treat your competitor according to how much they violated Google's TOS

So the Results 1-15 is not in the description then, it is in the rich snippet section. How about posting a small screenshot of the SERP and I will be able to find which rich snippet you need to kill.

By simply writing a unique description on the pages that have the "Results 1-20" should fix that as Google will display your description as the snippet. If the description feed is blank then Google will either pull the first 160 chars it sees from your page and use that as the description, or Google will find a relevant match of page content according to your search query.

My opinion is that the tag pages if done correctly are not considered duplicate content, just make sure that you only use excerpts on your tag pages and not the full article. Custom descriptions for tags is not found in Platinum SEO as there is no need, you can assign tag descriptions directly from Wordpress > Posts > Tags . Just like you, my tag pages rank very well and bring me a lot of traffic