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In addition to Dan's answer remember just because Google has seen the changes and taken them into consideration there is no guarantee that your rankings will improve.

It can take months of optimising and tweaking to get improvements. One of my old sites took 6 months tweaking and steadily climbing the rankings until it got to number 1 for its main keyphrases - it has been there for a few years now though

If you confirm the site you are referring too and what issues the diagnostic tool raised then I am sure that we can point you in the right direction.

There are lots of useful guides on this site and information on Google's website too that should be helpful to build up your knowledge. You mention you have already looked but perhaps you just need someone to point out the relevant pages or sections.

If you have pages optimised for each of your products that you are happy with then I would consider whether there is a term that might be used to describe the group of products that people might use when searching less specifically. Is there a term that a competitor site uses?

Many searchers start quite generic and get more specific when there initial search doesn't throw up any suitable results.

As you have done for the product pages see which collective phrase has the best search volume/lowest competition.

Have you looked at which pages the falls in visitors are on or is it spread across the whole site? Can you see if certain keyphrases are particularly affected. You are obviously monitoring traffic but are you monitoring rankings? Did Google News previously send a lot of traffic? Are you still a Google News source?

Without more information and access to the analytics it is difficult to give a definitive answer. If it happened at the time of the panda/farmer update then I would suggest that perhaps the sites you have links from have been devalued.

Is there anything else in the .htaccess file that may be causing the loop?

If the file looks correct I would try copying and pasting the text into a new htaccess file and deleting the original and seeing if the problem remains.

I have fixed a random issue with htaccess before by effectively recreating the file.

Will they work? Perhaps as the Google Algo's are flawed.

Are they a good thing to do? Probably not as the Panda/Farmer update has shown Google are looking to improve the quality of the results so at some point may roll out an update that impacts them.

Hi Dave

Not every local business can afford or even needs a uniquely designed site costing them 1000's of dollars. Often a decently constructed and designed template (and they do exist) will meet both their business needs and their budget.

If you are unable to differentiate to a custimer the advantages of your skills and service over a template provider then that is not the fault of SEO Moz who are providing SEO and CRO advice in the webinar.

Please note I have no affiliation with SEO Moz and am actually a freelance web designer whose day job includes SEO so I have feet in both camps.

If you have set up the 301 correctly then if a user tries to visit the old page either via typing the old URL or via the search engine then they will be directed to the new content. When the site is reindexed the old results should fall out of the index.

Pipes are increasingly popular but a great deal of 'expert' SEO's still use hyphens. I tend to use pipes on new sites and haven't changed the hyphens on old sites.

I'd kindly ask them to remove it with the veiled threat of legal action.

If they decline then I would approach their webhosts, which can often be worked out from the Whois record, and ask them to remove the offending site giving them the full details.

If none of that works then perhaps you could go blackhat on them (not that I would condone that)

There may be other issues. Is the content the same on the two sites? Why should Google index both if that is the case? Also any inbound links gained may be split between the two domains.

Seems a little convoluted to me.

As well as pagination pages I have read, but not done it myself, that you should consider using it on low value pages that you are wouldn't want to rank above other pages on the site (hopefully they wouldn't anyway) and also sitemaps as don't necessarily want them to appear in the index but definitely want them followed.

Looks like its a nofollow link and to quote the Google support site...

"How does Google handle nofollowed links?

In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow"

This can be found at:- http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=96569

Hope this helps.

Getting links from seemingly unrelated businesses will not negatively affect your ranking unless as mentioned below you suddenly gain a lot of links from dubious sources.

There is value in an authorative link even if it isn't relevant so i would recommend that you ask the schools that are your clients if they can link to your site. As well as the SEO value, someone may see it who needs a marquee for their organisation or event.

Have to agree with Gianluca as many people have to do SEO on sites that are on Windows platforms that the businesses involved won't move away from for non-SEO reasons.

I would assume that from your analytics you can see how much traffic is generated by search terms with the words small business in them. There could be a very real danger of a reduction in traffic from those using this phrase or phrases with these words in them.

There are no Usability benefits from the shorter URL

I have to agree with the other responses.

One obvious answer is to google seo and the town you are in e.g SEO Seattle and see which companies have managed to get themselves optimised for that.

If any companies look promising try searches like company name scam, company name problems, company name reviews to see if there are any known issues with the company.

Try to build more quality links, contact the sites where the paid links are and ask them to be removed.

When you are confident everything has been put right you can ask Google for a reconsideration. There are more details at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35843

Hope this helps.

If the links you have to your site were effectively devalued by the update as they came from sites that were hit by the update then you will need to look at strengthening your link profile not just adding more content to your site.

I have only ever seen it used in the first format in ninjamarketers post and when it is recommended as a course of action on SEO sites and in SEO books it is also in that format.