Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Will... just a note. to use a personal profile for a business persona is not allowed by the Facebook guidelines, and can cause the ban of the profile.

Apart that, using a personal profile is an impediment if you want to really integrate Facebook and your site. In fact, only being the administrator of a business page you can have the Admin and App ID to use while integrating the open graph code in your site.

Right now you cannot really use and/or take advantage of all the FB social plugins as, for instance, the Facepile in your site...

Finally, independently by what solution you prefer, try to optimize your marketing action in FB:  don't use it just as a place were to repost your products... that's not really the way to use Facebook for business.

Without more infos about your site is not that easy to answer.

For instance it could be so because your site have a very good links' profile both at page level and domain level, so that you PA and DA are better than your competitors.

Anyway, there is no official information - from what I know - between traffic and rankings, therefore a site can rank high and not receiving the traffic expected.

Honestly, the no-traffic issue is what I would look to solve first of all.

Ask yourself these questions:

1. I am ranking well for the correct keywords?
2. That keyword is the correct one? For instance you are ranking for a query that is used for a totally different kind of Search than the one you have "assigned" to the KW itself.
3. If I am ranking and keyword correctly target my public, are the meta description and the landing pages well done... I remind you that now, with instant even more fast, many sites risk to be checked just using the instant preview function.

30 posts per page surely increase the long tail of the forum page and can solve the pagination problem, even though that issue could be solved using the first forum thread page as canonical or using the noindex,follow meta robots tag in the pages 2,3...

Only organic searches.

Oh yes... it was a mistyping from my part, sorry

It always better to do a 301... also because exists also Bing as a search engine, and it does not know what you have done in GWT

If you use Wordpress, as I suppose, check out for a plugin that can update the sitemap.xml of all the sites, not just the blog.

This one is just an example of plugin that does what I tell: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

301 all the other versions to the www.example.ca domain.

I mean...

1. redirect 301 the .com domain to the .ca domain (this will take care both of sub-domain and root domain)
2. redirect 301 example.com to www.example.com via .htaccess

If you don't do it you have a massive duplication issue... being www.example.ca stronger in link building, it is normal that the other (which are dupes) doesn't go well.

Why don't you use your keyword in the alt text? The alt text will work as anchor text of the link of the image.

If you do searches with regular expression and you have the SEOmoz bar installed, that way you can find what should be the most powerful pages for a keyword and kind of site (i.e.: blogs).

Not scientific, but the closest you can related to your question.

Delete this for double posting (sorry)

In fact that's the way to have just the sub-domain www. appearing online.

And, sorry, I don't really understand the .ca e .com question... does those domains show the same content. In that case one of the two (.com if you target public worldwide or .ca if you target only Canada) should be redirected 301 to the other.

Well... what about the links in the footer of the home page? I don't like them, but that would help your "home page" issue.

Or, without giving up with the IP detection, still offer the opportunity to choose the territorial version using a selector?

Mmm... it is not the webmaster that does the 301... it is your server that does it.

I mean:

1. the inbound link send to your old url page
2. search engines bot (and users) follow that link and arrive to your site
3. your server sees that a visit is directed to the old url
4. the server then apply the rule you gave him via .htaccess (for instance) and redirect the visit to the new url of the page

In this "transfer" a little bit of pagerank seems getting lost, that is why is alway better to ask to the owner of the site where the backlink is to update the link itself, if possible.

Mmm...

Before think well if it is the case to cancel the subscription... you are going to loose all the collected data if you do it.

if you are super mega archi sure to cancel the Pro subscription, go to My Account here in the menu above and click "Billing and subscription". There, in a box down on the right, you'll find a button "cancel my subscription".

Click it.

Read this Google webmaster help: https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=83105&hl=en

That page explains very easily what to do, but you can sum it with

• 301 old urls to new site urls;
• control the inbound links and eventually ask to change the URL in the link to the new page. If not possible, the 301 will redirect the visits from that link to the new page, but will loose a little bit of PR;
• use the Webmaster Tools > Change of address function to alert Google of the change of address;
• Add the new site in Google Webmaster Tool
• Notify Google with a sitemap of the new site

There will be a period where Google will crawl both the old and the new site... but I believe that you will have to block Google from indexing the old one due to the legal issue you told. That can be done via robots.txt and noindex, nofollow in the meta robots

Hi David,

I too prefer the play.com example. And no... Search Engines does not consider the content into tabs as hidden, because - if you think it - it is not hidden at all as the users can click on the tab and read the content.

If the users weren't able to access to content in the tabs, that would be hidden.

Amazon model, on the other side, is ugly to see, but somehow it is such a "visual trademark" that people do not care to scroll the page... but it is Amazon: I don't believe that a new site would have the same condiscendence.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Paid links surely works, but are too much a risk, as they are not something Google likes at all.

Reciprocal link building... if meant as the classic page "links/resources" not as well, because: the quality of your backlink is crap and, second, because for Google is so easy to detect them and discount the minimum PR they pass.

No, follow the way I suggested. Then, if you want to compensate the blogger who reviewed the product, use their same review as testimonial in your product page. That will also give more force to the product itself toward the visitors of the page, hence, it may better the conversion rate.

About Social Bookmarking... they are ok if they are not alone. And more: if they give some quality. For instance, have you ever thought to create a Power Point as a manual of use of the tools and publish it in Slideshare? Or, better, to create a video and publish it both in your YouTube profile and site, and then create a video-sitemap xml? That way you could be in first page also for the video result in the universal search.

About article marketing... mmmm... if doing 1 article for article portal and writing a quality content. But I would prefer to try the guest blogging way.

What I'm trying to tell you is to think out of the box, not to rely to classic and old fashioned tactics that a time consuming and not have a long lasting effect.

Social Signals are a ranking factor indeed, but not enough in order to rank a page for a mid/high competitive KW. You need links, that's the real way to reach the first page and hopefully the 1st position

Pardon me if I answer first to question 2, then to 3 and last to 1.

Question 2.

I would not worry about conflicts. If you assign to a subfolder a territory as target, Google is quite good in following the indication you give. Therefore, if the main domain .com is generally focused to co.uk and the /us sub-folder to the USA, Google will not have problem in targeting correctly the two. Just a suggestion: eventually specify in the header that the language used in .com us en-uk and in the /us is en-us... not that Google is really paying a strong attention to that signals, but I would use any possible additional suggestion of the target.

Question 3

You are right... but, if there aren't other reasons you don't want to show to an USA  users the Uk version of the site, why don't you think to put the links to the other language/territory versions of the site in a  "About us" page? In that page, editorially you could list the markets the site is active, and those link would be direct.

I say this also for an usability reason. I don't know how the site is going to be developed, but maybe it should be interesting for an usa user to read the british blog of the website...

Question 1

I agree with the USA guys: subfolder is better, because that way it starts his online life with a strong authority domain, so that any links the sub-folder will obtain will have a bigger power than if obtained being an sub-domain.

About your Panda fear.. .you are right to fear it, but the reaction - IMO - is not the correct one. If you fear Panda you don't have to react in a defensive way (going sub-domain), but in a pro-active and positive one: creating worthwhile and useful content, avoiding thin one, paying great attention to any duplicate issue and checking any other pandarank factor.

Ciao