Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I agree with DJ123. Also recommend John Cooper's link building site - Point Blank SEO. You'll find most, if not all, of the answers to your questions there.

I hear ya! I find one of the biggest issues ecommerce sites have with rankings has to do with their data. That and a lack of canonicalization to help Google figure out which are the money pages.

Hey Gerry,

How much time elapsed between implementation of new directories and did you put redirects in place to ensure you didn't lose any link equity in the process? If I were you, I'd give it several months before I passed judgment. Also, you might not feel a benefit if traffic and links are low, but will later down the line as both of those things pick up.

D

I'd recommend using pagination over canonicals.

Refer to this post to learn how to implement them.

http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/conquering-pagination-guide.html

Again, if the content is all on one page, partitioned into separate tabs, then there's no need for canonicals or anything else for that matter. You can configure your tabs so the overview is the default tab, the one that displays on entry to the page.

If the page becomes too lengthy or takes to long to load, then another option is to split it onto separate URLs and use page (rel=next and rel=prev) tags to relate them.

In my opinion, the content would ideally be located on the same page.

You have to balance that with the length of the content and the ability of the page to load quickly. Assuming you can get it all on one page, then you don't need canonical tags.

I think I'm not understanding something. Why do you want to partition the content onto three pages? Why not just lay out the content so it displays in a tabular format? That way you don't have to worry about canonicalizing or paginating the content at all.

if you are concerned about page load tomes, then if would consider pagination instead. This post is an excellent resource for how (and when) to do that.

http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/conquering-pagination-guide.html

Phil Rozek of Local Visibility Systems has an excellent blog post from April of last year that explains exactly where you can go to list your business without having to disclose an address. Highly recommended.

They complement one another. I use both.

Moz Local facilitates quick, consistent and easy creation of all the most important local listings - listings with the data aggregators (Acxiom, Localeze, Infogroup, and Factual) and the ones that require claiming and phone, postcard or legal verification (e.g. Google and Acxiom).

Whitespark states "Any important listings that require claiming with phone or postcard verification should really be handled directly by the business, or at least by the SEO agency who can coordinate the phone verification calls with the business."

Once the essentials are out of the way, Whitespark helps you find hundreds of other sources of local citations and gives you the tips and tools to be successful in acquiring them.

Hope that helps.

As to your point about " it looks as though Google is still indexing pages... ", pull up a cached version of the old, still indexed, but redirected page. See if it is a cached version of the NEW page.

I know that was a confusing question. Let me try saying it a different way.

Type the site:strongolddomain.ext command and view the cached version of one of the pages shown as still being indexed. See if the message from Google laid over the top of the cached page says "This is Google's cache of http://www.weaknewdomain.ext" or if it says "This is Google's cache of http://www.strongolddomain.ext ", If it's weaknew then you know you don't have a problem. I've seen that happen before.

Hope that makes sense...

Did you also notify google of the domain change via webmaster tools?

Ask yourself, who is my target audience? What are their burning information wants or needs? Then give them what they want or need in the form of pages and posts.

Establish yourself and grow your connections on the social media platforms where your intended audience likes to hang out. Share your stuff as well as other's. People will remember and seek you out when a need arises.

A single page cannot be optimized for 130 keywords or keyword phrases.

Best practice is to aim for 1, at most 2, keyword phrases per page.

Think about it, if you want to rank in the top 10 on Google for a keyword phrase, best practice suggests you should include that phrase in the page URL, title tag, description, headers, body text, inbound links and so on. It just doesn't make sense to even try to include that many keywords or keyword phrases in all those places.

KempRuge suggests you change tactics and try to spread the wealth (so to speak) across a larger number of  different pages and/or posts. It's good advice.

Agree totally with Matt-Antonino.

This Moz post, by Dan Shure, was the one I found most helpful when trying to figure out how to index (or not index) pages and posts. http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

The post speaks specifically to Wordpress, but concepts are transferable to any implementation.

You don't need to "remove "nofollow" from first custom URL on profile". Erwan is suggesting you make helpful contributions to the Moz community and by doing so, rack up your Moz points. When you earn 200 or more points, Moz will remove the nofollow attribute from the link to the first custom URL in your profile. A nofollow link from Moz is a very valuable incoming link to have. Moz's root domain authority is 92 out of 100.

Erwan's suggestion that you ingest the link building guide from Backlinko is a also a good one. Here are a few other sources of good link building information - http://www.pinterest.com/beseenontop/linkbuilding/.

Can you expand on your question a bit more? I don't understand.

I have experience with a very large ecommerce site with hundreds of thousands of pages and a completely flat architecture. It's not good. Think of the distribution of your link equity like you would an organ donation. Would you rather give two kidneys to two people or 200,000? Which choice is going to make a difference to the recipients?

Possibly, if the change was recent. But I'd expect the impact to be temporary, until Google catches up to what has changed.

It would help if you standardized on the way you linked to your site from various profiles. I did a sampling and I noticed Yelp, Twitter and G+ link to http://brownboxbranding.com whereas Facebook and YouTube link to the www version of your site. That doesn't explain your problem though.

Have you (Jeff) checked your site to make sure Google Analytics is still installed on all pages? Is the same code installed on all pages? You should be able to tell if there's been a change by looking at your traffic reports as well. If there's a sudden drop on some pages, there's been a change.

Agree.

Dr. Pete, I don't think you sound defensive at all. It's good to share all perspectives. And EGOL, as usual, is very open with his thinking.

Clearly it's a balancing act and there is no miracle cure. I suggest that we could ask the original poster to indicate if they're satisfied with the answer(s) provided and state that the question will be marked closed when we hear back from them OR in X days, which ever comes first.

Of course there's many ways to skin a cat and you've probably considered that, or a similar suggestion and quite a few others. If nothing else, this discussion clearly demonstrates Moz TAGFEE in action!

Yes Jennita, it does help. Thank you for the explanation.