The one example I looked at: /spanish/entertainment/ is being redirected to es/servicios.html

That's what your htaccess file redirect does

Redirect permanent /spanish/entertainment/ http://www.meliacaribetropical.co...

Not sure I see the problem here?

Tyler, don't worry too much about the page rank - it only gets updated a few times each year and is (at best) a very, very rough measure.

Ads are fine and the one you've described sounds perfectly okay.

I'm in the UK and used geoedge proxy to search google.com - that showed your site about half-way down the serp. Try a new browser, if you use firefox, install chrome/safari/opera and try a few searches on one of them..but two of us have reported you're ranking okay...

You could also try adding &pws=0 to the end of the url after you've done a google search to try and de-personalise it.

Also, there are a stack of rank checkers...have you tried any, seomoz has one.

Are you seeing a fall-off in search traffic commensurate with the drop you're seeing in rankings? If yes, then investigate further, if no, then perhaps there's nothing to worry about.

I did a quick scan through the links on OSE and it seems like many of them are links with anchor text that matches your products 100%  - I certainly didn't do any kind of exhaustive or thorough review. Perhaps you could try using this http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-profile-tool-to-discover-linking-activity to compare your link profile against competitors?

By spammy, I meant (for example) your site appearing in a long list of unrelated sites - in what is obviously a paid link. I'm not sure if that would be the cause though.

BTW, I just noticed that I'm seeing a toolbar pagerank of 1, if the site had a higher toolbar pagerank before, that might be a clue that google has somehow devalued your site...but I'd treat that with a heavy pinch of salt.

Like Brian, I see you on page one of google US (I tried plastic bins) and DA is lower than others, in fact I'd say you're actually doing rather well compared to the other sites!

Google says you've got 21,800+ pages indexed and majestic says 496 linking RDs...so that sounds okay. Are any of the links spammy perhaps?.

OSE shows a lot of exact match links from forums etc. (at first glance) - did you know that?

They don't look particularly spammy... do you know how your link profile compares to competitors or (better) the people ranking higher than you?

Have you changed the urls from the old site to the new one? If so, I'd be inclined to create a sitemap with everything and submit it to encourage the pages to be crawled.

Some of the categories in the sitemap don't have any content - that looks a bit odd - (e.g. coronation street)

Also, if the URL structure is all new, have you 301'd the old pages?

Every tool is different, has different update rates, rules for inclusion of links etc. As a sanity check why not try majestic numbers too?

I usually find majestic reports  more links than ose.

You're welcome Luke.

Not seen any testing about the importance of those counters with respect to Google. I'm not sure they would have an effect...if Google can find the links in tweets etc. I don't think it would need to 'check' what a page says/claims the number of tweets is too.

I see those counters as more of a signal to human visitors...the 'implicit message of 100 tweets on a counter is: 'hey this is great, it got a hundred tweets, you should read it!'

Hi Luke, there are a few posts on the blog that might help.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tracking-the-roi-of-social-media and http://www.seomoz.org/blog/facebook-twitters-influence-google-search-rankings

I think the consensus is that social shares (by that I mean tweets, likes, facebook shares, +1s) do affect rankings.

If I understand the question correctly, A is the relevant thing here - social signals relating to the pages that you want to rank.

B - If we treat the number/quality of followers etc. as the 'social authority' (who said klout?) of your social media accounts then I believe (don't recall seeing any data) that social shares from high 'social authority' accounts will be more influential for ranking than others.

So, yes, put URLs in your tweets (probably want to use a shortener that gives you some metrics e.g. bit.ly)

Most links in social channels (and I'm thinking of fb and Twitter here), are no follow.

I do wonder, if another way of looking at it might be: I want quality traffic that converts...links can help with that, so can social media (i.e. even if you get no ranking boost from social media, if it brings you the right traffic  then that's a good thing right?)

Schmeetz, did you actually see a drop in rankings after creating a blog?  Seems odd. If that happened, there's probably other things going on that need looking at.

I would target the content for the 'jar' related pages towards jars. Perhaps create some internal links with jar-related phrases to those pages too.

Try and build some external links with partial or even exact match anchor text too - but try and keep the link profile looking un-spammy. (It may be worth doing some analysis of competitors to look at their link profiles before embarking on this.)

A blog that's about organic-type things that earns links in a folder vs subdomain? Keep it in a folder, the links will help the overall authority of your site.

I think the latter - robot and 301.

but (if you can) leave a couple without 301 and see what (if any) difference you get - would love to hear how it works out.

I'm not saying remove the whole robots.txt file - just the bits relating to the old urls (if you have entries in a robots.txt that affect the old urls).

e.g. say you're robots.txt blocks access to

mysite.com/old/url/format/

then you should remove that line from the robots.txt otherwise google won't be able to crawl those pages to 'see' the 404 and realise that they're not there.

My guess is a few weeks before it all settles down, but that really is a finger in the air guess. I went through a similar scenario with moving urls and then moving them again shortly after the first move - took a month or two.

Ok, got that, so that sounds like an external rewrite - which is fine. url only, but no title or description - that sounds like what you get when you block crawling via robots.txt - if you've got that situation, I'd suggest removing the block so that google can crawl them and find that they are 404s. Sounds like they'll fall out of the index eventually. Another thing you could try to hurry things along is: 301 the old urls to the new ones. submit a sitemap containing the old urls (so that they get crawled and the 301s are picked up) update your sitemap and resubmit with only the new urls.

Couple of things probably need clarifying: When you say URL rewrite, I'm assuming you mean an external rewrite (in effect, a redirect)? If you do an internal rewrite, that (of itself) should make no difference at all to how any external visitors/engines see your urls/pages. If the old pages had links or traffic I would be inclined to 301 them to the new pages. If the old pages didn't have traffic/links, leave them, they'll fall out eventually - they're not in an xml sitemap by any chance are they (in which case update the sitemap). You often see a drop in rankings when restructuring a site and (in my experience), it can take a few weeks to recover. To give you an example, it took nearly two months for the non-www version of our site to disappear from the index after a similar move (and messing about with redirects).

Hi Paul, try something like this, but there are many variations of these on the web.

Posted this just as the yoast post was coming on.

#add trailing slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,5}|/)$
RewriteRule (.*)([^/])$ http://www.capitalist.com/$1$2/ [R=301,L]

add www for non www pages

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^capitalist.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.capitalist.com/$1 [L,R=301]

I find it very inconsistent (in terms of accuracy that is). I'm really wondering whether I can share the results from it with clients because it does seem to vary so much from what we see.

I'm finding the seomoz rank checker is often out by several places - that's verified by people doing similar searches from different locations and different browsers. Logged in/out with google &pws=0 or not etc.

Perhaps it is a geographical thing? Most of my searches are in the UK and UK oriented.

Hi Matt, I'm not sure I understand the question, the www. sub-domain shows 35 linking root domains in OSE but the redirect is just wasting any link juice those links are giving -  did you know that the redirect from http://www.securitysystemsfortlauderdale.org to http://www.securitysystemsfortlauderdale.org/ADT-Home-Security-Alarm-Systems/ is a 302?

If you're trying to somehow transfer link juice from the home page to the ADT page, a 302 isn't going to do it for you - if you're going to do a redirect use a 301.

In fact, while we're on the subject, did you know that http://securitysystemsfortlauderdale.org redirects to http://www.securitysystemsfortlauderdale.org//home/index.php ?

there was a (really very good) blog post very recently about how to manage redirects and canonicalisation etc. on IIS (I'm assuming that's what you've got because of the .asp suffix) - recommend you work through that if you haven't already.

Can I suggest that you read through the docs? They're pretty good and have some nice intros:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/rewrite/

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/rewrite/intro.html

% needed since it is a variable

^(.*)$  is 'match the url'

? at the end deletes the query string that came in.

Note, the ^(.*)$ is calculated first, then the condition.

So the whole thing says:

^(.*)$   .... for any urls,

RewriteCond.... where there is a query string with score, rel etc.http://domain.com? .... replace the whole thing with http://domain.com/