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I like your plan from a relevance standpoint. Speaking from my gut I think it would work; purchasing a new vehicle is rarely a 'hurry up let me get to the buy button already' situation. That's a lot of money to most people, so I think the conventional wisdom of 'get them to the funnel right away' might not be appropriate to this situation. People are going to hit the site for two reasons from what I can tell 1)Feature Research/Do I want to buy this, which your rich category approach above supports. 2)Price Check/Inventory Check. I'm going to assume you can't buy these online, and that a person has to walk into the dealership to buy something. In the second case, it's possible that price seekers might resent that extra click, but I'm guessing if you made it very obvious where they would have to go that would be offset by the better relevance/information given by the expanded category pages.

It's kind of an apples to oranges thing; Dream Weaver is an authoring tool that has a lot of CMS like extensions. WordPress is a full on CMS that makes authoring very easy. I'll restrict my comments to SEO and general practicability:

The main difference really is going to be that with Dream Weaver you theoretically have total control over every page you make. If you want to edit page (x) way down in the sub-hierarchy to have meta keywords/canonical you can do that very easily. Want to make a unique page totally outside the template? You can do that too. The downside is that it's mostly manual and you spend more time on development.

WordPress automates many of the publication/management processes but loses the granularity Dream Weaver is capable of. It's possible to hand-tweak specific WordPress pages/properties, but it's not easy (nor feels as easy!) as just opening up the file and editing it. I'm saying this as someone who still handcodes HTML in Notepad sometimes, so your mileage may vary.

I think in the end it depends on what you want the system to accomplish. If your page and content turnover is low either will probably suit your needs. If you feel you need that granularity Dream Weaver. If you want to spend less time managing the site WordPress.

Brett -

You've probably already down the road on this but just thought I'd chime in, that most of the review services (e.g. PowerReviews/Buzzilions/etc.) are really geared toward ecommerce. I know for a fact that they help conversion on products based on past experience, but they're not really appropriate for realtors. The fact you're in Canada is unfortunately even worse, since Canada of course often gets the short end of the traffic stick for this kind of thing. There's www.rate-my-agent.com but to be frank, it looks pretty unappealing (you're not there, don't worry!). Even ResellerRatings doesn't really have a realtor section.

One could argue that this is a crisistunity, and that all it'll take is someone like you to make a great, social media enabled, non-scummy review site, but based on my past experience Real Estate is one of the shark tanks of SEO. This might be something worth kicking back to RE/Max and seeing if they want to manage it, but I doubt they'll bite on it (what if there's a bad review?). It also might take an outsider to do it, since as a Realtor you may not be considered a trustworthy source.

Only thing I can think of is have a testimonials page and give it some link juice from your other pages. Then at least it'll show up for 'brett cairns reviews' and 'brett cairns testimonials' etc. Maybe if your customers have websites (if you do commercial business) get them to link to you perhaps. It's sad really that the real estate industry as a whole has invested a lot of money into SEO/internet marketing but there still aren't really any 'killer apps' that service it.

I've never had a problem; I didn't even know there were requirements other than 'don't be a hotbed of viruses' or something like that. Have probably over 200 sites to them. Maybe check out your competitors that are already listed there and see what quality level they're at.

I just checked and they even have dodgy stuff like porno sites, dating, poker, payday loans, mesothelioma lawyers, etc. I think your site would have to be pretty thin not to make it.

You're thinking about it the right way at least. Many clients come to me with "get rid of that bad listing right now!!!" and I have to respond with "I'm sorry but if I controlled the internet I wouldn't be working for you" and then they storm out and it's generally a bad scene.

All those things you mentioned are good tactics to push something down the SERP. Some others off the top of my head:

• Press Releases
• Guest Blog/Friend Blogs about the company
• Bizarrely, YouTube works sometimes if the account is co-branded
• Registering for services like Manta, TechVibes, citdirectory, macrae's, other industry directories
• Legitimate forum postings made in the company's name

There's others, but I think you get the idea.

Argh, sorry for the delay I wrote up a great response but the Moz system ate it and then I was in client meetings. I'll try to summarize it from memory.

It sounds like you want to know if WordPress is worth replacing DW with. From what I can see you've got 3 choices:

1. Do it all manually in DW as you are now. Pros: Familiarity, total control. Cons: Time of maintenance, time of creation. Also less functionality for moderation, comments, etc.

2. Do normal site in DW, blog in WP. Pros: WP will automate posting dates, categorization, comments, trackbacks. Cons: You have to learn WP. You have make a WP template in DW that matches your current site. Two systems to maintain.

3. Convert entire site to WP. Pros: All in one solution. WP will probably help automate mundane site tasks you do manually now. Cons: Loss of total control, WP run-up learning time, WP template creation time, possible SEO implications if sitemap/linking structure changes (positively or negatively)

If you know you're in this for the long haul, and the blog is going to be fairly active I'd suggest #2, with an eye to going to #3 when you're comfortable, or deciding on something else if you decide you hate WP. WP is very easy to maintain and create content for, but it's not a fit for everyone (see my final note). The hybrid approach of #2 lets you get familiar with WP, make a template for it, and see how Google indexes content published in it, without having to commit to having your entire site on it like #3.

Final note: Speaking personally I'm not super comfortable with WordPress because it feels like every 3 months or so there's an exploit that hits nearly everyone. I've worked with it and maintain current installs, but that's always at the back of my mind when considering it for a new project.

Are you saying the default page isn't in the site:name.com results >at all<, or just that it's not the first result? If the latter, it may be possible that there's a canonical/no-index situation going that is pushing all the internal link structure juice onto another page. I believe Google will order site: results by relevance/strength by default, and this implies either that A)the strength of the home page is weak or B)the link structure/canonical layout is passing all the home page's link juice elsewhere. This is entirely guesswork mind you, but is my first impression.

To add to that ahrefs.com is another service that has a pretty good sized database, but is of course not 'all of the internet' either.

Basically it shouldn't really have an affect; those unformatted file listings are literally the web server automatically saying 'here's the files that are in this folder', there's no meta tags, description, on page elements, etc.

If you have these pages and they're ranking well, you generally don't want them to be. The automatic file browsing pages don't have your name, your company, etc. in them, and they're generally pretty ugly. They also theoretically could be 'stealing' juice from your 'real' pages, if your internal structure isn't flowing relevance properly.

Basically what I'm saying is that if these pages are having some kind of SEO effect, you probably don't want them to be since they're so basic.

Also I can't overstate the security concerns that directory browsing might be introducing. If someone can directory browse to where your code lives (.php, .aspx.vb, whatever) they may be able to read it. Code sometimes has important things like logins, passwords, merchant account ids, etc. in it that you definitely don't want people reading.

This one can have a variety of responses depending on the shopping pattern of the customer. For example I've dealt with similar products in the past (e.g. MAP, commodified) and it would depend on a couple of factors. First of which is to determine, which is better known? The product, or the brand? Which is searched for more?

A quick Google Fight indicates (sorry I know it's old but I love this site):

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=IQAir&word2=%22HealthPro+Plus%22

That there are far more documents with IQAir in them as opposed to 'HealthPro Plus' (this is by no means scientific; I didn't use 'HealthPro' by itself because there's some noise from other products). If you use the Keyword Difficulty Tool you'll see that IQAir has a keyword difficulty rating of 50%, HealthPro 40%, and HealthPro Plus 38%. So this tells us a few things:

1. The competition may be more likely to be targeting the brand since its competition is higher

2. The product specific keywords are 'easier'

Take a grain of salt with these difficulties obviously; if SEOMoz could pinpoint exactly what was easiest and what was hardest they'd be making a lot more money than they are now!

The other thing to examine is how do your customers shop. Are they informed usually, and know they want an IQAir HealthPro Plus air purifier? Or do they start by looking for 'air purifier' or 'allergen reducing air purifier', etc. If the brand has a very strong position then you can safely assume that it's the more relevant keyword to be targeting; if it isn't (e.g. dozens of other people offer the same product) then the general product keyword is. So basically it would go:

1. Brand strongest: (Brandname) (Product Title) (Product Type)

2. Product strongest: (Product Title) (Brand Name) (Product Type)

3. Product Type strongest: (Product Type) (Brand Name) (Product Title)

Obviously the second and third criteria might shift based on their strength/shopping patterns too.

Another thing to watch out for is see if someone is trying to snake your design/business model. I know in the past when I would get suspicious traffic like that I would quickly take a spin around elance/odesk/etc. and often find a competitor had posted something like 'make me a site just like (mysite.com) but cheap and scrape all their products so they're already in a database'.

If Bangladesh is nowhere near your customer base I'd do what Ryan suggests as well and block em.

I think it goes that after the initial expiry date there's a two week 'grace' period where the original owner can renew, and then another period. This article explains it all, though it's from 2005:

http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2005/03/how-to-snatch-an-expiring-domain

I've never actually sniped an expired domain but to be frank I haven't tried that often either. The impression I get is if a domain is actually valuable there's an army of domain squatters/speculators out there who can snag them way better than I.

Yes, a visit to example.com/dir should now return a 404 error (if you haven't done any redirecting/canonicalizing). This will increase your 404 count in Web Master tools but it's far preferable to the alternative. If you're not redirecting the robots.txt will eventually work and hopefully the links will just fall out of WMT.

That is... a whole lotta links. What is the context of this page? Is it meant to be like your sitemap, and does it rank highly? You can nofollow them, but I'm kind of wondering if there's a structural need to have this page at all. You might want to review your logs to see if people even visit it for example, since the impression I get is that there's nothing here that can't be accessed by your category menus on the left.

You also have another problem; the title tag for that page has HTML in it (e.g. Wall Quotes) which is kind of a no-no.

Speaking personally I'm not in favor of it but more from an appearance perspective. I've seen a lot of cases where this is abused by smaller operations who aren't taking their customer's overall outbound link profiles into account. We've inherited projects where the previous designer put about 100 words into the META author tag spamming his keywords, and then in addition put at least a paragraph of ALT text on his footer link. The client didn't even know it was there, or what it necessarily meant.

I also think it detracts from the appearance/professionalism of larger clients sites. I think personally I'm moving towards either very subtle and small center-footer links, with the full knowledge of the client, or a paragraph and link on the About US/Partners page. Note this is my opinion on what we're doing and not meant as an indictment of anyone else's practices.

Just going to add to what these guys have said, you're thinking of the right thing.

One thing I'd suggest (but you've probably already thought of) is you say your URL structure is changing pretty radically. Is that because you're going to more englishy, SEO friendly URLs? If the URLs all change to just numbers and URL parameters that's obviously a bad thing.

Agree with Egol; there's just so much synergy available here that I don't think any kind of SEO benefit from segmenting the sites would be worth it. It helps that the age of the micro-site/keyword stuffed domains seems to be behind us. I also disagree with the premise that kids are a different target market, because they rarely have credit cards and are shopping online unmonitored. I think segmenting would make sense if the categories and/or audiences were more diverse, but there are many commonalities here that I think would be better served by existing on the same site.

EDIT-Also I saw the clothes and... wow I guess that's a thing. I'm surprised the kids category didn't come >first<

I would agree, but not necessarily from an SEO/'Google will downgrade you' perspective. It's not exactly clear what effect the title has, though it very obviously does have an effect. However the title is often the first thing a searcher sees when they are presented with your link as a search result, which means to me that making them as 'human' readable friendly is as important as having keyword prominence. Mind you I'm coming from an ecommerce angle, where information about the product has to be communicated clearly in those 70 characters, it may be different in other categories.

As for the keyword stuffing and H1, yes those are definitely onpage elements that you should get sorted out.

Nice summary at SEWatch:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2217602/Google-Disavow-Links-Tool-Now-Available

I'm curious about the "Most sites shouldn’t use this tool,” Cutts said. “Use caution." caveat. I've basically got only one client out of many that I'd even need to consider using this for. But I can't help but imagine hyper paranoid SEOs trying to massage their link profile down to the last drop of relevance. My gut feel is that this is a 'last resort' tool, and not a 'everyday SEO' tool.

Twitter is trying to cut down on unattributed tweets by forcing people to use their API for automated/user not present tweets, and for the application to have a name. As Corey said though, you can easily fake out an auto-completed form page. It would look like your options are:

1. Make your own twitter oAuth app with it's own name (e.g. 'via MozCrush')

2. Manually log into each account and tweet accordingly

3. Make a database of clients and make your own platform that fakes logging in and posting. Probably take 2-3 days in php or .net or something like that. Probably want to build in timers so it doesn't look like you're posting to more than twitter account near-simultaneously.