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It's never too early to add great content to a site.

I think you might want to read up on the subject to determine just what you would like to do. Personally, I wouldn't "noindex" the pages themselves if they provide useful information for students (and/or others), but I would "nofollow" outbound links by default if I was unable to control what types of links will be placed on those pages.

Here is some reading on the subject:

http://www.blueglass.com/blog/to-nofollow-or-to-noindex-that-is-the-question/

http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts.shtml

Hope this helps!

You are correct. You shouldn't be using just the IMG filename for the page title.

One suggestion would be to add alt attributes to your images and use the alt text to populate your titles. The alt text would describe the image it is attached to.

Another suggestion would be to come up with a title for each picture, but still provide an alt attribute with descriptive text and then use the alt text to populate the meta description tag instead. I prefer this one, but it requires more work.

I see you are using HTML5 to produce the same effects provided by the Flash site. I'm not as familiar with HTML5 as I should be, but a lot of your markup doesn't lend to helping crawlers so maybe updating your markup would help. What I mean is: your JavaScript spills out into the bottom of your HTML document and could be included in an external ".js" file. This would help clean up the HTML some. The same is true for your CSS.

One final note: you don't need to use the meta keywords tag any longer if you don't want to. Also, all of your page descriptions are the same for all of your HTML5 pages. You are using a canonical link to your home page, but if you could use different descriptions once you get your title tag issue figured out I believe it will help your pages when indexed individually.

What kind of link building are you doing? Good links shouldn't be the cause of decreased rankings. Also, are you using exact match keyword phrases in your links? This can contribute to lower rankings if all your links are exact match keywords (even if your domain name is an EMD).

If you are just buying links, my suggestion is to stop. If you need some suggestions for good ways to build links I say start here with a post from Jon Cooper: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies.

Unless they are creating duplicate content issues or other problems, I personally would not noindex them.

Side note: Did you know your Image Search at the bottom of each page takes you off-site to this location "http://pa.photoshelter.com/c/thadallender/search"? I'd fix the action of that form or remove the widget until it's fixed if I were you. Right now it is not searching your site and is sending people off your site.

Ok, and what is your site?

What is the competitor's site? You can direct message if you don't want to post here.

Do you know if your competitor is also using Google Merchant Center?

If Penguin has taught us anything it's that low-quality links will hurt you. So whatever you do, I suggest being very careful. If you think you might be getting low-quality links or shares, don't do it because it's not worth it in the long run. Also, Facebook has recently begun purging fake "likes" and Twitter often purges fake followers. I'm not saying "don't experiment" if that is something you are wanting to do and you are willing to accept the risks, but I am saying you should stick to quality versus quantity.

Maybe it's time to run your own contests.

Being active on the Facebook page will help her shared new content on her site as it gets further developed. She can link to her blog posts once it is up and running and soon people will be bookmarking and linking to her blog versus solely following her on Facebook.

Good luck with the site, it looks like a great opportunity for building SEO experience!

I know you probably don't want to hear this, but after looking at the site itself I would say the reason is because the site has very thin content. Both Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO have no data for looking at the link profile either. I'd imagine this is also because the site is very thin.

I think if you built out more content, you might see the site back on top in Google very easily. It's still on top in Bing.

You can also build links as Matt describes above, but I'd still try to put a little more depth into the site so people have a reason to stay. Reviews and a blog which Margaret writes actively on would be great content to provide for this.

Good luck and hope this helps!

Since you know your content will need to be reviewed by everyone in your list above, perhaps you can suggest the content have just a panel review (Marketing Manager, Legal, and QA) before being sent for executive approval. If Legal/QA is always involved, they may as well be involved right away; this can reduce one iteration of revisions.

Not only the tools, analytics and Roger, SEOmoz also has such a great community. The Q&A forums are a great resource and the blog consistently provides actionable advice. I agree with you totally Cesar. Jared, I had to steal mine heh.

Ahh, good to know. Thank you.

Hi David, I think you can find current webinar information here (looks like they are using gotomeeting):

http://www.seomoz.org/dp/wednesday-webinar

They posted about it in early September:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wednesday-webinar-series

Hope this helps!

I agree with EGOL and Ryan, it looks like you have a lot to go on already. Good luck to you!

I don't know what you're doing wrong, but if you want to know how you match up against your competitors for "jigsaw puzzles" then start with Open Site Explorer and see how you rank in different areas against a couple of the top sites.

Example:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.yourjigsawpuzzles.co.uk&comparisons[0]=www.jigzone.com&comparisons[1]=thejigsawpuzzles.com

Hope this helps!

I'm thinking the data might just be delayed. Here's a page with some information regarding link analysis: http://www.seomoz.org/help/link-analysis.

There's an FAQ on the page that reads as follows:

How often is the link analysis data updated? Your link analysis data is pulled directly from the SEOmoz Mozscape index which updates every 3-4 weeks.

If you've removed the links through Google Webmaster Tools you should be OK. You will want to make sure you aren't still linking to those URLs of course.

Hope this helps!

Also, Marko is right. It doesn't matter for SEO, you won't get hit for using underscores vs. hyphens, but it is suggested to use dashes.

Hello 858,

Here's the short answer: dashes.

For the long answer, check this post out: http://www.seomoz.org/q/hyphens-vs-underscores

Hope this helps!