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You have to think about why keyword cannibalization takes place. You essentially tell Google that two different pages on your site are the important pages for the exact same keyword. This is done by:

1. Having similar content on both pages

2. Having identical anchor text to both pages in your internal links

3. Having identical anchor test to both pages in inbound external links.

Are any of these three taking place? If so, just stop. Link to the pages differently. Alter the content on the pages and the page titles. Make them unique and different so that they target two different phrases. Google will rank them accordingly. Instead of 301ing an old, link rich page, just stop cannibalizing.

If your rankings slipped significantly after a redesign and never came back, I would be a whole heck of a lot more concerned at other issues instead of your internal link anchors. To answer your question though, just make the alt tag of that masthead match your keyword. Keywords in alt tags is not spammy to Google; keyword stuffed alt tags are. Just put the main keyword and not a bunch of other crap.

Other issues to consider might be number of indexed pages, duplicate content potential, presence and submission of a sitemap, keywords across the whole site, etc. Chances are very strong that your rankings slipped because of a lot bigger issues than just internal anchors.

Did you block the /demo/ directory in your robots.txt file? This is step number one to try and ensure they don't get crawled. Also, are you using wordpress? If so, wordpress automatically pings search engines when you add a post and if you use the common sitemap plugin, when it creates the sitemap it submits it automatically to Google, so that's another way Google could have found it.

Instead of using the htaccess file, you should download a wordpress plugin called SImple 301 Redirects. It's very easy. Maybe if you do the 301 reidrects at the wordpress plugin level then wordpress can handle them better.

Can't you look up the source code of the page with the link to you? In there you should find your link at

Try making it www.gpscity.com. Your sans www URL redirects to the www version, so include the www and see if that helps.

The Panda update had nothing to do with bounce rate and everything to do with shallow and duplicate content. If you feel your content is not shallow, low quality or copied, then your rankings dropped because you may have had a lot of links from websites there were shallow, low quality or copied. If the pages don't have unique text, then that right there could have hurt you. I would advocate putting unique, relevant, original text on all these catalog pages.

No difference from an SEO perspective. After the Q&A last year at SMX Advanced with Matt Cutts, I went up and asked him this very question. He said make sure one version redirects to the other, and if it is an existing site, Google will likely display the version with more pagerank. If this site is still in development, when you release it, have all links go to the sans www versions and make sure the www versions 301 redirect to the sans www URL's.

From a branding perspective, it only matters if you plan on displaying the .com on the page or in the logo or something like that. If you plan to display the .com, then sans www. Looks cleaner and just better recognition overall.

If you aren't planning to display the .com anywhere, then it really doesn't matter as hardly anyone outside this industry pays attention to which version of a URL they are on.

Yeah we had tons of top 10 rankings and now nothing is better than 100. I thought the way I did it would work the fastest but needed some validation I guess.

I recently redesigned a website that is now in WordPress. It was previously in some odd, custom platform that didn't work very well. The URL's for all the pages are now more search engine friendly and more concise.

The problem is, now Google has all of the old pages and all of the new pages in its index. This is a duplicate problem since content is the same.

I have set up a 301 redirect for every old URL to it's new counterpart. I was going to do a remove URL request in Webmaster Tools but it seems I need to have a 404 code and not a 301 on those pages to do that.

Which is better to do to get the old URL's out of the index? 404 them and do a removal request or 301 them to the new URL? How long will it take Google to find these 301 redirects and keep just the new pages in the index?

I would create navigation links that put each brand page just one click away from the root domain. Make the anchor text of each link the brand name and have it point to the brand page. This way the brand pages are higher up in your site architecture and hierarchy and should clue Google into which page is most important for the term Snazzy.

Having deep links on very low level pages with links that have Snazzy for anchor text will not influence a search engine as much as links on your home page and in the site's navigation.

Always pay attention to quality score. Your position in the paid ads section is dependent upon your quality score and your bid. The higher your quality score, the less you need to bid to show up higher. The lower your quality score, the higher you have to bid and at times it still doesn't matter, you can't outrank those with high quality scores.

If you want to lower your cost per click and thus lower the cost per acquisition, focus on getting a higher quality score. You will get better rankings, more clicks and pay less per click.

When leaving blog comments, isntead of trying to get a link out of them in any way, simply be a normal person, give your opinion of the blog post, then encourage readers to search something. If you have coupon sites this works great because you can comment on a blog in your industry, then tell anyone if they are going to buy the product to be sure to Google for some coupons first, because they can save money that way. No link, no brand mention, but you get more search traffic for a phrase.

The all in one seo pack plugin for wordpress automatically sets your category and tags pages to noindex, so that's a good clue right there. I never indesx them for duplicate content issues. I also don't index the date archives either. Of course I never link to them either or really use categories or tags, so it's never been much of an issue for me.

There's not enough information here to help you. How long did they rank? How old is the site? When were the pages removed from the rankings? Are they still indexed? Did this happen at the time of the recent algorithm change? Answer some of these questions and we can more easily answer yours.

I learned Google PPC years ago and got certified by Google. Back then and for a long time since I know it was best practice to capitalize words in your domain name. I know Google no longer does this and that words in your domain name of your ad are now all lowercase.

I hear recommendations and see them practice that adding keywords in a directory are a good way to still get capitalized words in your ad. When I learned PPC, I was told your display URL and your destination URL had to match. Now I'm seeing ads where that is not the case.

If I have an ad that takes someone to my homepage of a coupon site, can I have a display URL that says:

mysite.com/Coupons

Even if the destination URL is just mysite.com ? I'm seeing conflicting things online and it's hard because I don't know what the current guidelines are after this change.

I've seen text-indent: -9999px in css all over the web. Perhaps this is the code you are looking for?

Redirect all old URL's to their new counterparts as mentioned by Richard, but also make sure your site architecture and navigation remain similar. If in your old site your internal link structure made pages A, B and C seem the most important, make sure in your new sites layout that dosn't suddenly change so that pages X, Y and Z suddenly seem like the most important pages.

If a page took three clicks to get to before, it should still take three clicks to get there.

Ok I see this happening all of the time. I get my hands on a new website and there are one of four header tag issues:

1. There are no H1 tags at all

2. There are multiple H1 tags on the same page

3. Every page has an identical H1 tag

4. Header tags are used all out of order

Do any of these have a negative impact on rankings? I've always tried to get one H1 tag on each page, have it be the first header tag, and make it unique to each page. Is this a waste of itme? Could improper header tag use hurt a website?

Well I think its obvious why an EMD would rank so well. If someone searches "best buy" then the top results will all be from bestbuy.com. Because Google cannot separate a brand from a commercial phrase in the URL yet, it looks like they just have to reward the EMD simply so that people looking for a brand will find it.

My guess is in the not too distant future you will see Google differentiate between domain names that are brands and domain names that are exact matches of commercial phrases. Once they can separate them, getting the EMD for a commercial phrase will lose some value for sure.