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Just to follow this up. We're now seeing the mobile usability error reports gradually being removed from pages at approximagely 100 pages / day. It just seemed to me that the whole validation request process didn't actually appear to do anything and we just had to wait for the site to be recrawled?!

That's the route I'd push for as well I think. Agreed on experimentation. Please report back if you get a chance to test this. Perhaps choose a small number of PDFs on this site redesign and leave the link off of them?

I know this is an old question and I don't have anything to add myself but I'd be interested in hearing if anyone has any thoughts on this because we're looking at doing a similar thing.

Well the good news is, after all that, the development server is now safely behind authentication and the level of traffic to the site has returned to previous levels for the last three weeks. Fingers crossed it won't be going anywhere. It has been a wake-up call for the client though and it's started some useful discussions. Every cloud... Thanks for the support!

Thanks Matt, Andy, Looking at how they've had automated link building done to every page on their domain it does look like it's automated link building gone wrong. You don't normally see so many boring product pages getting as many links as they have! It wouldn't surprise me if were trying to supply the sitemap.xml or rss feed as a list of target URLs to build links to and ended up building links directly to these.

Hi Doug, In my experience, the client has to be convinced on his own that there will be value in the investment. Part of this comes from his realization that he must get this work done in order to compete and see returns from being visible on the Internet. If he is under-educated about the power of the web, he may not realize this and you have the chance to teach him. Sometimes this works out well! Sometimes, however, a potential client just doesn't grasp the value of being visible and is unwilling to commit resources to it. Often, he ends up going with some quickie/cheapie deal instead and winds up blowing what money he has on services that either won't help the business or will actually harm it. I've had small business owners come to me in a state of a disaster after going down that path. Business owners who are ready to learn and willing to rely on the expertise of the marketer are my favorites. Those who come to you with bad information they've learned elsewhere and who are not willing to learn better ways of doing things are seldom good clients. It's quite common for Local Search Marketing contracts to cover at least a few months, sometimes even a year or more. The difference between a big budge project and a small budget one will be the amount of work you are able to do for them per month. But even the smaller amount of work will have cumulative value over time. Bottom line: the client must believe in the value of what is happening. If he doesn't, the project will likely either not happen or will be a stressful one. You can help shore up their belief, but it's my feeling that there has to be some measure of faith on their side in the marketer they've hired that will keep them going until results start to become apparent.

Hi Paul. On many CMS's you'll find that the additional comments don't change the page's Last Modified http header or indeed the posted date in the body of the article. The comments are so far down the page that their perceived importance is going to be pretty low. That said, active commends do show that there's significant visitor engagement which has got to be a good thing! Interesting question about running a poll regarding the order of comments. I think however the order of the comments can work either way depending on the content/context. For example, "news" type articles with a relatively short shelf-life tend to work better with comments in chronological order. There tend to be fewer comments (which dry-up as the article ages) so the ability to follow disussions in the comments is greatly improved. For "ever-green" content it doesn't work so well. It can be jarring to come to the comments and be presented with one from 5 years ago! The other SEO issues related to comments (especially out of the box on many CMS's) is the use of links (followed or no-followed). If I've got a VERY popular page that's earning lots of real links, having all those links in the comments is going to be eating into the page equity that's going to be available to other pages I'm linking to on my own site. Paginating comments might be one way affect this? I'm hoping to get some time to make the changes to the page in question - it'll be interesting to see what (if anything) changes! Thanks!

Thanks for sharing your experience! The title tags on the site in question were being automatically generated by the content management system. Due to the particular subject matter some titles tend to be quite long so it was decided to drop the company name which was being automatically appended and is itself rather long. Unfortunately I don't have total discretion to modify page titles as I see fit, which makes things interesting! I'm now implementing custom <title>tags so that the company name can be appended where it needs to be, in a consistent manner and drop it from the longer titles that need to take precedence. The company name isn't added to the longer titles.</p> <p>I agree that keeping your title short and specific helps, and adding the company name can boost trust and click-through.</p> <p>I guess we all need to remember to regularly check the titles being displayed in the SERPS and to really make an effort to educate content creators about creating good titles.</p> <p>Thanks.</p></title>