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Anyone out there have some suggestions for how I can improve my home page and increase my lousy conversion rate?

I've spent years on the content and SEO optimization of my site and very little time on making a home page that sells stuff. Caveat - I don't have the money to go to one of those fancy companies who do a complete makeover and charge in the tens of thousands.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Jean

http://www.northwest-wine.com

I'm trying to clean up my spam incoming links and can't find where to download a complete list. Google Webmaster Tools has a button to download "Sample Links" or "Latest Links" but they don't show them all.

Looking for wisdom from all the gurus out there.

Thanks,

Jean

In November 2010 Google introduced the "standout tag"

http://support.google.com/news/publisher/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=191283

I can't find any articles/blog posts/etc in google after that date, but its use was suggested in a google forum today to help with original content issues.

Has anyone used them?

Does anyone know what's the latest with them? Are they worth trying for SEO? Is there a possible SEO penalty for using them?

Thanks, Jean

So do you think google will take me back and show my site in its organic listings again?  The new pages are nowhere to be found today, even though they were in good positions a few days ago.

The site has been up since 1998, I have fresh content, lots of Facebook activity, regular blog entries, etc etc.

Thanks!

Should I remove the redirected old pages from my site after the redirects are in place?

Google is hating the redirects and we have tanked. I did over 50 redirects this week, consolidating content and making one great page our of 3-10 pages with very little content per page.

But the old pages are still visible to google's bot.

Also, I have not put a rel canonical to itself on the new pages. Is that necessary?

Thanks!

Jean

Thanks so much for your response - and for reminding me to be patient.

I've tried leaving the pages intact with a link to the new url and found that the five or six pages of old vintages all pointing to the new page resulted in hundreds of almost empty pages.

I thought that it was effecting my SEO, having so many pages with almost nothing on them.

I have to put the info about all the older vintages on the current product so the customer can get the full story. So I can't put the info about each past vintage on its one page and then put all of the content on the current page.

Google counts that as duplicate content.

I'm not sure what you mean by "archive them"?

Thanks again,

Jean

Thanks so much for your words of wisdom.

Re the url with 2008 in the title - the "2008" is an unfortunate consequence of the way we named the pages originally. It is the most relevant page and lists the 2010 wine. This is not a page that was incorrectly redirected, the url's name was poorly designed.

Should I rename the pages to leave off the vintage?  Ideally I'd think the url would be something like "shea-wine-cellar-homer-pinot-noir.html and not have the vintage in it at all. But, renaming all of those differently dated pages would require 301's, wouldn't it? That's a lot of 301s - a lot of the pages have the wrong vintage in the url.

Re why google is liking the blog post link that seems less on target versus the wine's own page - this has been happening since 1)I started posting good fresh content on the blog everyday; and 2) especially since the redirects - it's been more in the last few days than ever before.

I'll check, but the 301's were put i place by a very very good IT guy.

Again, thank you so much.

Jean

http://www.northwest-wine.com is the site.

Here's an example of an old page that has not yet been redirected:

http://www.northwest-wine.com/Beaux-Freres-Willamette-Valley-Pinot-noir-2009.html

Here's the new page we'll redirect it to when it is sold out:

http://www.northwest-wine.com/Beaux-Freres-Pinot-noir-WV-2010.html

You can see why we are redirecting - the older page has the same content as the newer one, except the newer one has the additional content for the new vintage. I'm consolidating all of the older vintage tasting notes onto one page with the newer ones.

Is this the info you need? Thanks SO much for the quick response.

Jean

We had several hundred old pages on the site with duplicate content and new pages with fresh info on the same topics.

So I redirected the old pages to the new pages. Next day, plop, we're dumped off google for almost every keyword.

Dang I thought they didn't want duplicate content and old funky pages.

What did I do wrong and what can I do to fix it?

Thanks so much for anyone who can share their expertise.

Jean

http://www.northwest-wine.com

Thanks!

Jean

Thanks so much you are very helpful.

I've had the same pull down menus on my site since 1998! I guess it's time to try something new.

I have over 250,000 links into my site that I did not ask for, did not buy, and frankly, do not want. Some are from pages covered with links, some are from what look like "normal" websites.

I'm afraid these crazy links are going to destroy my credibility with google. My site has been up since 1997, and I've never had anything like this happen before. If I follow your argument correctly, you are saying that I should be blacklisted?

But I did nothing NOTHING to get these links in. There are links from about sixty sites into my site - links I asked for and from high quality sites. The rest are all just there, I had nothing to do with it.

Any expertise you could offer would be deeply appreciated. I wake up having nightmares about these links.