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Thanks EGOL! We are already seeing the effects of our better quality work.  I guess I'm just venting.  Thanks for helping me regain focus on what matters.  I just need to ignore those bad practices, and not let it take so much energy away.  Thanks again.

Thanks Istvan for commenting and reassuring good always wins in the end!

We continuously receive comments on our partners' websites which are obviously spam from a third world country trying to build backlinks that some SEO firm outsourced.

Out of curiosity, and what I've added to my prayers at night is for the search engines to apply an algorithm update to discredit comments posted under a certain time frame to help identify spam, and these garbage practices.  Do you think something like this would happen?

My most important thought is...how can we compete with companies that are doing these practices trying to get that quick buck?  Look, we want to play the game with the highest ethics and morals and not "cheat" the system because we know a "work around".

Thoughts...

Yea, they're not going to let you bog down their server with that many requests! LOL

I was unaware of the 1000s of pages and URLs you now want redirected.  And if those pages had links going to your other pages, you've officially removed any link juice they were providing for one another which would impact your rank.  Page A to Page B and so on...

Good luck!!!

Do you have this for your first example:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^meliacozumel.com

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.meliacozumel.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Also make sure you have the Apache Rewrite Module turned on.  Check the httpd.conf file, and take the comments off LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so in order for it to be active.

On my end, I'm seeing a redirection loop for  www.meliacozumel.com.  This error:

Error 310 (net::ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS): There were too many redirects.

Not that it's not loading. It's in a infinite loop.  Could something probably be cached server side that needs to be removed to kill the loop?

What server?  Apache, Microsoft IIS, etc?

This covers both: http://www.stepforth.com/resources/web-marketing-knowledgebase/non-www-redirect/#.TyL01qVSSRg

1.) Go to your business page on Yelp.

2.) Under Your Business>Activity.

This shows a bar graph of the number of visits to your actual business page.  You can view by day or by month.

Hope this helps!!!

Duh, server side...

Try this: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

Thanks for reminding me.  I need to claim a listing there.  I'll check to see if they have Insights for their website like Facebook does their's. Stay tuned...

Oh, set both the www and non-www to your preferred www setting.  Then you can delete your non-www from the "Add Site" list in Webmaster Tools, and only your www will exist to eliminate confusion when using the tool.  This is just preference.  Doesn't matter if both are on your list.  They are now the same...

From my experiences, I've told all my webmaster tools that www is my default.  I do not use 301 redirects.  What you have to do is register both URLs under your Google Webmaster Tools.  When they see you as the owner of both, you can now change the setting:

1.) Login to Google Webmaster Tools.

2.) Add site (both the www and non-www)

3.) Drop verification file on root directory for both.

4.) Once both are verified, click on your site with www.

5.) Then under Site Configuration>Settings select your preferred domain.

Viola!!!

Hope this helps!!!

If you are completely removing these pages, you also want them removed from the search engine directories.  Google has Webmaster Tools to do this, and you also have to update robots.txt so the search engines will stop trying to crawl pages that do not exist anymore.

This may help: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164734

Not sure about the "other guys".  With Microsoft creating Bing and taking over Yahoo, I'm not sure they're up to snuff yet.  However, Bing does have Webmaster Tools as well (http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster/), but I haven't played around with all of its features just yet.

Hope this helps!!!

This topic has me entirely confused, and unsure if we should keep a website focused on one keyword group, and using synonym contextual links to rank it for other keyword  synonyms. We simply have not seen enough data or run enough tests to find our answer, and wanted to reach out to the community to see if anyone has. I have seen Google rank a synonym to my search query on the first page, and is why we are confused.

Let's use an example:

We'll use "Industry" as the main keyword for our page. "Company" or "Companies" is viewed as a synonym by Google of this keyword.  When we query "Industry", "Company" and "Companies" are also found in bold.

1.) Is it best practice to also create a unique page targeting synonyms? Our thinking is that it would be best to try and target exactly what the user is looking for rather than having a synonym to their search for better conversions, but as mentioned above we feel it's best to hit exactly what they query because that's their way of thinking.  That they're looking for that exact match.

2.) Have the page "Industry", but do some link building using contextual links "Company" or "Companies" pointing back at our "Industry" page. Would this help rank our "Industry" page for "Company"  or "Companies" even though the main page is "Industry"? Just not sure we want to do this as the reasoning explained in #1.

Thanks for your help!

Yea, I just thought it was a bug in the app. I think we'll run some experiments on titles with hyphens for a month or so to see if it truly impacts conversions. Then we'll write about it!!! I think you are right though.

I am pretty sure hyphens are looked at as spaces no matter what programming language you are using for text purposes.  The On-page Report Card is not counting them as spaces in the page title, therefore, we're not getting the grade for having the keyword in the page title because it's divided by hyphens.

Is this a fix that needs to be implemented into the SEOmoz app or should I not have hyphens in the title or does it really not matter?

Up for discussion!  Thanks!