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I'm in agreement with Chris on this one as well.

That said, your checklist is an excellent idea, just don't put it on the home page. Instead use the home page to explain why your company is different from all the competitors you have alluded to, and direct them to a separate page with the checklist. Make it compelling. "Get real-world, practical advice in the form of a checklist" or "Avoid over-spending using our requirements checklist" or something else that clearly states what's in it for them.

Blueprint shared a lot of excellent resources. I'll add one other - http://moz.com/blog/what-should-i-put-on-the-homepage-whiteboard-friday - a Whiteboard Friday post published in January of this year.

Hi Urban33,

If you're new to Moz and SEO start with http://moz.com/learn/seo. SEO is about a whole bunch of things that add up, not one small trick or tactic that skyrockets you to the top of search results quickly. Then I'd plug your own website into a MozPro Campaign. It's a great way to learn about the tools as it's likely the site you know best. Third, I'd monitor this forum. You'll not only learn a lot of the subtleties of SEO, you'll learn about the community and how we help one another.

Welcome!

Seems to me if the posts were valuable enough to link to, maybe you shouldn't be getting rid of them. You should noindex or redirect them instead.

It's probably best to create a list and decide on a case-by-case basis what you want to do with them. I'd customize my 404 page to explain that a site cleanup was done on XYZ date and if you (a visitor) are here because you can't find the post you were looking for, I recommend ...  and point them to your human readable sitemap or the main blog page. Then I'd go thru the post inventory and redirect the pages with links and/or social mentions to the closest related page or main blog page. The other ones I'd noindex. Any you miss will land on the 404 page and understand what has happened.

Greenstone,

How do your customers differentiate between stores? Use whatever language they use. So for example, you could name the pages sunshine-rd-ice-cream or a rte-13-ice-cream. That's how I'd do it.

I'd also customize title and description tags, and include a keyword-named photo of each shop (with corresponding alt tags) and an embedded map showing it's location. That's another way to ensure the content of each page is unique b/c that will need to be the case. You could talk about the most popular flavors per location, or the busiest times (in case site visitors are trying to avoid crowds or alternatively, seeking them out).

D

Hi lnevo,

I had a similar situation last year and am not aware of a faster way to get pages deindexed. You're feeding WMT an  updated sitemap right?

It took 8 months for the excess pages to get dropped off my client's site. I'll be listening to hear if anyone knows a faster way.

How are his citations, relative to the competition?

That's very strange. Do you have anything conflicting in your htaccess file and redirect plugin (if you're using one)? Does weekend.visitsweden.com (without the /no/) reside on the same servers and is it using conflicting canonical or redirect tags?

weekend.visitsweden.com/ IS getting indexed. I did a search for "Slottet er et av Skånes eldsteog mest bemerkelsesverdige slottmed anertilbake til 1200-tallet" and weekend.visitsweden.com/ was the #2 result. My tools tell me the page has 0 links though. Thought that was odd too.

Have you tried asking Google to specifically deindex weekend.visitsweden.com?

That's all I can think of.

Hi Surfsup,

I agree you should concentrate on one domain and agree that it should be the older one. Before deciding on whether to redirect or not, I recommend you profile the links to the site. There might be some good ones that would, as you say, give your elder site a needed boost. If that's the case, you should consider redirects or asking the source to point to your older site directly so the entire link value transfers and can be sustained over time.

If you have bad incoming links, then you'll have to weigh the decision to disavow them before redirecting or not bothering to redirect at all.

Character width is now a consideration when deciding what to put in your title tags. Keep that in mind too. I think the pipe most likely consumes the least real estate.

Hello / Bonjour.

It looks like you might have an awful lot of duplicate content (e.g. category pages, date archives) on the site. I'd try getting rid of that before deciding to switch domains.

Thanks for your research Kevin. I saw the same thing. Was looking for work-arounds actually.

Thanks.

I think you might have lost a slight advantage now that your domain name does not contain your primary keyword phrase. I'm not saying having your primary keyword phrase in the domain name is the b-all, end-all, but it helps.

Try putting more content on the page. It's pretty thin now, especially compared to the current top ranking sites. You're short on links too, and going up against some pretty big hitters. Try getting some direct links to your Japanese Spicy Mayo page. See if those two things help.

Meantime, I agree with Jim McKaye. Stick with it. The dust hasn't completely settled.

Hi DeanAndrews.

Thanks for your response.

The client has renamed the offending wordpress-seo plugin directory to wordpress-seo-old and that restored the site immediately. Can we just leave it that way, reactivate the plugin, and move forward from there or will other problems arise?

If we "wrap the class and functions" as you suggest, is it a large effort? Will it impede our upgrade ability should the Standard Theme release an upgrade?

Just trying to understand all our options and am very appreciative of your help.

D

Hi all-

A client has tried installing Yoast on her site and received at fatal error (below). She's been able to restore her site and get it functioning again, but I'm wondering if there's a work around so we can use the plugin. It's a Wordpress site using the Standard Theme.

I've searched the forums (and here!) and haven't found anything helpful yet. Do you have any suggestions?

Thanks!

"Fatal error: Cannot redeclare yoast_breadcrumb() (previously declared in /vservers/nwconstructi/htdocs/NWCL/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/inc/wpseo-functions.php:108) in /vservers/nwconstructi/htdocs/NWCL/wp-content/themes/StandardTheme_272/lib/standard_yoast_breadcrumbs.php on line 280"

I misunderstood what you said about having 3 reviews. I thought that was all you had and they were all from Yelp.

I'm stumped too, based on your information. Hopefully it's a temporary thing and you'll soon recover. Do you want to share the name of the firm and the terms you're trying to rank for so I can take one last look?

I hear ya. Why don't you register a free account for the website owner, verify the domain and use that one for now?

I'd keep my eye on it for a while longer vzPro. Maybe it's a temporary thing, and your rankings will recover.

I do have a couple of suggestions though, based on what you've said above. The suggestions probably won't help you recover from such a drastic change, but could help sustain your rankings after recovery.

• I'd try to diversify my reviews if I were you. Too many coming from a single source might look forced or unduly influenced to Google.
• I'd embed a Google map on your landing page.

It's good you fixed your categories, and I agree that using a local landing page for your listing is appropriate.

Are your competitors significantly closer to the city or town center than your client? It looks like the Google local algorithm update released a week and a half ago might be giving that more weight than it did in the past (although I find that hard to imagine, and it's probably too soon to tell).

Hi Rajaindiain,

Here are some excellent resources I think will help answer your questions.

• http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2049167/Content-Syndication-How-to-Get-Started
• moz.com/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday
• http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/04/04/how-to-use-hashtags-to-increase-your-online-presence/

Good luck!