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Try some AB or multi variate testing. It neednt cost the earth, or anything. You can use content experiments via Analytics. A few comments on current home page: The images on the home page look like ads rather than navigation. I dont think that works. What is it you want people to do when they get to the home page? Do a wine search? If so make the wine form search facility more prominent. I would include 'any' in your dropdowns. Its feasible people get to your site and dont know what winery name they want. Get rid of 'start over' you dont need it until they've done a a search. Look at your in-page analytics and see where people navigate to from the home page. That will tell you alot about what you should be featuring more on that page. Andy

Unfortunately neither OSE nor the link: command will give you a complete list of your links.  I have had some sites where the list from WMT is 10x as many links as shown in OSE. Here is how you get a list of links from WMT: Click on Traffic, then "Links to your site".  Then click on Download latest links.  (see image below). I have found that this gives a very full list. Now, some will tell you that you will need to merge the list of links from WMT with ones you can get from OSE, ahrefs and Majestic. If you have less than 1000 links then I wouldn't worry about this. If you did have a LOT of links to your site then I would probably use ahrefs to get a list and combine it with the one that WMT gives you. A word of caution:  You can easily shoot yourself in the foot by trying to clean up a link profile because you can end up removing links that are actually good links.  I would not recommend doing this unless you have a warning of unnatural links in your WMT.  If you feel that you have been affected by Penguin, then removing spammy links could help but at this point we haven't seen a whole lot of credible cases of recovery.  So, be careful! downloadlatestlinks1.png

I think if the site in question is not an established news site (appearing in Google News results) then it won't do a thing...  Of course, a blogger that scoops other "real journalists" and is heavily cited ought to at least give it  a try!  If the blog is later given News (Publisher) authority, that standout article could be valuable.

50 redirects is a lot of redirects for one week! Sometimes when that much change has happened on a site it can longer than a few days for the site to be fully re-crawled/indexed and your rankings to normalize.  Have you updated your sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools? I always like to put a self-canonical tag in where it makes sense, just because there are a lot of URL parameters (session IDs, tracking code, etc) that can cause duplicate URLs and it's nice to have the stripped-down plain URL be the canonical version. Can you clarify what you mean by "the old pages are still visible to Google's bot"?  Do you mean they're still showing up in the index after the redirect is in place? If so it could just be that your site hasn't been re-crawled yet.  Some other things to check: Have you updated your internal links that pointed to the old pages so that they point to the new page?  Have you done a link building push to try to get some external link love to the new page?  Basically I would say don't rely on the redirects alone to help the bot find the new page. Kristinn's suggestion would be another way to go: don't redirect the other pages, instead post a link at the top saying "for updated info go over here" and then canonical the old pages to the new page.  Over time though a 301 is going to be the best long-term solution. If the URL is redirecting you shouldn't need to keep the content up on the page.

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

I couldn't find exactly your exact problem mentioned above, but I downloaded XENU and crawled your site and I strongly suggest you hire a SEO expert to help clean your site. You have URLS like this: http://www.northwest-wine.com/Ice-Wine.html/www.northwest-wine.com/p7apm/p7apm/p7apm/p7pmm/p7pmm/p7apm/www.northwest-wine.com/Oregon-Red-Wine.html and thousands of other strange and duplicate URL's

Good on 301. On rel=canon, I did not mean to imply "each page to itself." There are various issues that arise in coding pages, making changes to pages, etc. So, here is a classic: to a non coder, www.example.com and www.example.com/ are the same page. To the bots they are two. So by inserting rel=canon for that page you are saying if example.com/ comes up treat it the same as example.com. For your example, if it were me, manual juicer and highest rated manual juicer are very distinctly different pages. The first could lead to a description of 4 and the second speaks only to one. You have to be careful with this in the SEO because if you get too diffuse in adding modifiers to the keyword (making them long tail for example) you can draw strength from the main keyword page. Sometimes it is good to do, sometimes not....this part is the art of SEO. BTW........what type of OR wine???? (Nothing like a Willamette Valley Pinot....and, yes, I know how to pronounce Willamette!)

To me this sounds like a completely legitimate reason to 301 the pages to that new location. If you do get in trouble with Google it will be pretty straightforward to explain it. If you run into an algorithmic penalty the solution would be to remove 301s. This, however is not a likely scenario at all. Another option you have is to use rel="canonical" to tell Google that the page they're crawling has a correct canonical version. This will not only fix duplication but will also consolidate link juice much like 301 redirection.

Jean, Although this does sound tempting to get a quick win, I'd advise not to go ahead with a scheme such as this. Focus more on building strong links such as the one from your SEOmoz profile (after 200 points) - and forums and blog commenting. Getting keyword rich links are obviously the best, but you can compete with that by a number of links from pages with high domain and page authority with less keyword input. 50 Links isn't that many, so don't be put off! It also seems that now the competitor has these links they might be happy to stop link building. Link building is an ongoing process, and sudden peaks and troughs in link numbers might attract the attention of search engines Let me know if this helps!

Yes, watch Rand's White Board Friday on 2011 Ranking Factors. I just put it on my site yesterday. It's at the bottom: http://www.shipoverseas.com/us/ship-car/europe/shipping-car-to-germany.html

No worries... you can give me a thumbs up and a "this answered my question" if you like... I want that SEOmoz t-shirt lol.

The only additional suggestion I'd make here is that maybe you 301 redirect to the closest current product instead of the winery page. If they're looking for a 2006 vintage and you now have the 2007 vintage, possibly redirect to the 2007 vintage.