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Search engines will definitely take your keywords in the slug into consideration whether in the folder or the file name but as Matt Cutts says long exact match file names can start to look a little spammy from a user experience perspective. If you keep your categories / subcategories in folder paths not only will your site appear easier to navigate for a user from SERPS but you will also find the site easier to manage and organise as your environment grows.

We have used a range of both free and paid press release services As part of an overall marketing blend.  Of the paid services Marketwire and Pitch Engine releases have performed well in terms of pickup in search but ultimately of course, it's about the news you're pushing out there. If your story is the same as every other man and his dog then it's not going to bring huge benefit.

It's really important that users find what they are looking for in that the title should be as descriptive as possible otherwise they will just bounce off the page.  That said, I would try to ensure that you word your titles well for SEO by keeping irrelevant stop words to a minimum and keep your primary target keywords or phrase early in the page title

Some time ago Google changed its text regarding number of links from a specific amount to a 'reasonable number of links'

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

I would agree with Jemin in that its not a huge deal his you have more than 100 links on a page. However, bear in mind that the link equity passed through your hierarchy will be reduced. If you are concerned then consider gathering together some related links and creating a new page from which these can link and therefore reducing the volume on your page going over 100.

Definitely seen that.  Some of the most competitive terms out there being hijacked by new domains practically.  Seeing huge lifts and drops across many verticals on a number of sites I monitor daily.  Changes every few hours when running AWR across a lot of terms yesterday in particular.  Deeper pages seemed to be affected more than home pages.

Hope so.  Results are terrible at present.  I'm seeing some really spammy sites sitting at the top of the tree for some terms.  Can't be right surely.

SERPS.com shows on it's SERPs volatility metrics that activity is very high today.

https://serps.com/tools/volatility

I monitor about 50 different sites using AWR daily updates.  Seeing huge fluctuations across many verticals.  Some much more than others (i.e. different competitor groups with same business types).

I've checked them a few times over past 24 hours and the results are all over the place.  Constantly changing.  Some results dropping out altogether, others being added.

I'm with Highland on this one.  Once your new sites are up and running submit them via GWT to ensure that they get found.

301 for now.

Hi David,

We also have large sites with automatically generated titles etc which vary according to category / subcategory etc.   Naturally, it's very difficult to manually configure tens of thousands of page titles manually on a large site.  We therefore programmed the site so that the page titles pulled in their most relevant bits automatically but also built editable fields in our backend so that we could manually configure them for further uniqueness / granularity over time.  We had a default page title pattern there in case that field was empty.  As we've gone through these pages we have seen a good lift across many many terms.

Hope this helps.

Glad to hear you appear to be back on the right track

Hi,

To some extent your answer above may be a large contributor to the steady decline in rankings over time.

If your pages aren't refreshed and you're not doing anything much to update them and also not doing any link building then I should imagine that it would be relatively natural for your rankings to drop over time, particular if there are competitors who do do these things as they're naturally going to be working their way upwards with their efforts.

Thumbs up to you too Joel and good luck with your project.

I haven't seen anything about an optimal alt description size, however I always aim to bear in mind that the true purpose of these is to provide assistance to those who can't see the images.  I always ensure that my target page keyword is in there to tick the SEO box but endeavour to make it useful for those who need it from a human perspective.

Hi Santiago,

I would echo Dana on this with a rel="canonical".  Like yourself, we also have a site which has a non root home page which has caused similar problems.  I'm always a little fearful of asking Google to remove a URL from the index, hence it's important that you do something like a rel="canonical".  If you're anything like you 301'ing a page such as this could cause some tech issues on a wider scale.  If you're link building you need to ensure you sort it a.s.a.p., not just for your own link building efforts but to avoid natural link building from others wanting to link to your site and choosing the wrong duplicate URL.  Diluted link juice is so frustrating.

Hope this helps.

Dawn

I also second Keri.  Have you made any on site changes?  I see that there's a lot of dynamic commenting going on on your home page.  Has this always been there, e.g. or has this grown and possibly diluted something?  Is it all your rankings or just some?

As the other commenters have said, it's really difficult to give any feedback with so little info.

Regards

Dawn

Very important.  Particularly if you have a large site.  We operate a large site with 100,000's of pages and as Dan said it can be difficult to maintain.  We use something called Unlimited XML Sitemap Generator which builds XML sitemaps for us automatically.  I'd highly recommend it although it takes a bit of fiddling with to get it up and running as it's software which sits on site.  We couldn't manage without it as we'd be forever on sitemaps.

We found that getting sitemaps right on a large site made a huge difference to the crawl rate that we encountered in GWT and a huge indexation to follow.

In particular check for 302's.  I made the mistake of leaving those for a while and am sure that we suffered from some loss of link equity along the way.

Hope it helps

Dawn

Hi Joel,

I echo Marek's comments.  However, I'm a great fan of making 100% sure that the bots can access everything that I want them to so if I'm ever in doubt I go with css and html combination as much as possible.  We use Ajax and jQuery totally etc only on pages which we believe are 100% to be used primarily for user experience and engagement.  E.g. When they're doing searches for specific things and the page needs to be ultra fast and efficient.  However, we also try to ensure that we have crawlable pages which output the full content of a search wherever possible so that we can get the SEO benefit too.  It also helps for when people have javascript disabled (not many granted).

I've seen so many ecommerce sites with great content but it's often got some kind of blockage that means a button has to be pressed or a form submitted to see it and if I'm not mistaken bots can't access this easily.

Hope this helps.

I'd definitely recommend writing for the humans with quality, focused content, but then optimizing the page so that it ticks the boxes from an SEO perspective.  Nothing is worse than a page which is obviously written for SEO.  Likewise, it's also no good if the page never gets seen as it doesn't rank.

A few tweaks here and there with written content to optimize subtly should do the trick.