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I absolutely agree as far as Google Adwords certification and recommend reading this post for more information on those:

• How to Become a Google Authorized Adwords, Analytics or Website Optimiser Consultant by Tom Critchlow

I don't tend to think of the Google certifications as SEO, strictly speaking, but for overall inbound / online marketing, they're absolutely respected, at least among other practitioners.

InboundMarketing.com is the closest thing to SEO certification that I have seen that I consider respectable. The courses they post are created by a number of well-respected authorities. Their FAQ says all courses are free, I assume that includes the exam as well.

I'd probably value branding if it's clear what the store provides. For example, I'd certainly click on Fred's Pet Store, but I wouldn't necessarily click on Fred's Home Goods, even if they happen to have tons of pet supplies.

Title changes like that are typically something Google does on their own that you can't change. Take a look at the articles below for other recent info (Jan 2012) about Google changing titles and snippets.

For what it's worth, "New Hampshire Cat Toys" isn't showing any local results for me

• SEO by the Sea: How Classification of Page Elements and Search Results May Influence Alternative Titles and Snippets Displayed in Google
• Google Webmaster Blog - 01/12/2012: Better Page Titles in Search Results

Your second URL got cut off, so I can't see the exact length.

You'll definitely want to keep the URL shorter, but when I think of Site Structure in terms of site indexation, I'm thinking more in terms of # of clicks from the homepage than I am about URL structure (not to say URL isn't important).

Matt Cutts has indicated that Google places less priority on keywords towards the end of a long URL (source), so keep that in mind when considering the value that will be placed on the page name itself (which will often be more important than the subfolder keywords used).

I'd personally change them for user experience and because it looks cleaner and less spammy.

Do you already have a job where you can practice SEO? Alternatively, do you have a personal website you can practice on? That experience is far more valuable then a certification. I don't think it lends much credence to any SEO agencies that are hiring, they're looking for things like hustle & creative thinking.

Between reading every SEOMoz blog post ever written (or at least most of the ones written in the last 2-3 years), as well as the Beginners Guide to SEO, and actually doing it on a site, you'll learn most of what you need to know.

Just my 2 cents, I've never heard of SEOCertification.org but for all I know they might be reputable to someone...

You should be monitoring them periodically. A quick scan monthly or quarterly depending on how large your site is should be sufficient. I've read reports within the last year that say Bing tends to be picky about sites with 404s in their sitemaps and will begin to distrust them if they get too messy.  I am assuming that Google doesn't like it much, either.

It's very easy to check a large number of links easily, luckily: download the Check My Links Chrome Add-on here:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ojkcdipcgfaekbeaelaapakgnjflfglf

Click that while looking at your sitemap, and it will test all of the URLs and make any errors stick out in red. Then fix them.

On the other hand, GWT will report them within a few days of finding them. If you're already in your GWT on a frequent basis, make that one more task to check on.

You should be fixing all 404s with 301 directs. Read "How to Fix Crawl Errors in GWT" for any tricky ones that you can't figure out.

After seeing your actual domain, I see what's going on - you're hosting the press release content, I though you were the company releasing the press releases.

This is a clear cut case of duplicate content. You have great domain authority in the 80s, but you're pitting exact duplicate content against the likes of Bloomberg.com (DA 100), CNBC.com (DA 93), and Yahoo Finance (DA 100). Unfortunately, they're going to win that contest every time, UNLESS you can find a way to make your content more unique, such as adding relevant content to each press release in a useful way.

Frankly, that's going to be hard to implement well on an automatic basis. Unless the press release companies are paying you well to host all of this content, or it's somehow valuable to your other readers, I'd say it might be hurting more than helping. I'd even be worried about Panda effects from hosting that much duplicate content. Can you track your traffic drop off to a specific day in your analytics software? That might help pinpoint if you are indeed being penalized.

All of that said, I don't typically work with larger news sites hosting that much content, so there could be other ways to leverage that content that I'm not aware of.

I always refer back to a post from 2006 that you can find here: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/200-prefixes-and-suffixes-for-domain-names/

It has a long list of common domain prefixes, suffixes, and other add-ons that can be used to modify a keyword.

I'll take a large list of those in excel, pump them into a bulk domain lookup tool like the one on namecheap.com, and see what comes out.

I've never found an actual suggestion tool that was any good, most are junk.

If your goal is to send most people to the page1.html content, then yes, adding rel="next" and rel="prev" would be a good solution. But, if you want people reaching different content on each page, then it might not be the effect that you're looking for. Typically I see it used for search results and archive/category/tag pages.

Is there a reason you're paginating all that content manually? Sometimes a longer page can be an asset...

There's a company called FutureSimple that does a good job of this in my opinion. Take a look at their pages for these two keywords:

"Online CRM Software" - http://bit.ly/xK3KZQ

"Web Based CRM Software" - http://bit.ly/yZaAow

That is a good way to handle two slightly different keywords, that mean the same thing, but both have enough search traffic and competition that you have to target both of them individually.

You'll note that they use a very similar page structure, but the images are different, and all of the text is different. If you use that method and all text and images are completely custom, then yes, I would create separate pages with unique URLs for each of those keywords that are fairly difficult.

For keywords that are more similar, such as "send money to Cina from the US" and "send money to China from the United States", then no, I would not create multiple pages. Use the method above for synonym terms with lots of traffic going to each keyword.

Sounds like you're getting bounced from the SERPs because your content is very similar to other content.

I clicked on the link in your question, not sure if you put it there on purpose or accidentally. Frankly, the reason all of those press release sites like Yahoo Finance and CNBC and Bloomberg.com are ranking ahead of your main domain for the exact term is because they are way more important sites.

If I'm correct that you're wondering why Y_ _ _Companies.com isn't ranking at the top for the exact search term used in the Press Release, don't worry about that, that's not the goal of a press release.

Your site is ranking for the exact name of your company, which is good, and it's getting links from all of those press release re-listings, which is also great.

Content stricken out is not relevant to question, see below

Not sure if that gets to the heart of what you were trying to ask, let me know if not.

The 404 sounds strange. Not sure what would make that occur, but if everything else you have said is correct, that's the only signal thus far that anything is wrong. I would continue down that path and try to figure out what is causing GWT to report the 404, because that will likely be related to why the homepages are no longer indexed.

Gotcha. Unfortunately it's really difficult to diagnose without a full range of information to look at. For example, here's a random assortment of things that might cause your home page to dissappear:

Code issues: Implementing noindex on any pages, incorrect use of rel=canonical, robots.txt updated incorrectly

Backlinks: It would take a heck of a lot of crappy spam links to get both domains entirely removed I believe. Something like that would be more likely if there were shady things being done on site, like cloaking or other activities explicitly listed in the Webmaster Guildelines: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

Content: Is the content on both homepages unique?

Google issues: Any of the panda updates could potentially affect your site, although the homepage entirely dissappearing sounds drastic. Check through the recent algo updates here: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change and see if any of them seem applicable to the client.

Are there any alerts in your Google Webmaster Tools area that would give you a clue?

You say that there are two sites owned by the same client, and they both disappeared all of a sudden? To me that suggests either

• (A) someone screwed up the robots.txt or noindex or canonical tags,
• (B) something shady was done on both sites, or
• (C) this is a case of user error and the site hasn't actually been deindexed, but appears to be for whatever reason.

Have you tried uploading sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools? If so, what does the submitted vs. indexed count look like?

Are you using rel="canonical" anywhere throughout the site?

Is the content on sitename.com/widgets/red/large very similar to the content on sitename.com/widgets/red?

On the topic of /search/ pages showing up in Google, typically those search pages are going to be noindex. Are you using noindex anywhere in the site?

You're going to have to give a lot more information to properly diagnose a site being indexed. Unfortunately there are a number of potential issues, if not multiple. If you're comfortable posting the domain name, that would be a start.

Yes, use canonical on the mobile page and point it back to the primary www. version. Rand actually mentioned this in his post the other day:

Answers to 43 Questions About Search, Social, Content, Conversions and More:

Question from Ken Savage: _"@kensavage _@randfish love to know more about canonical issues with site redesigns. When to use them or do I 301 bunch of weird urls?"

Rand's Answer: If possible, most SEOs generally like to use 301 rewrite rules. They scale nicely - even if you have 500,000 pages of product URLs that all need to change, a single 301 rule through .htaccess can often address the problem - and they're still a best practice. I'd lean more towards canonical when you have a specific reason to want to keep the page accessible to users in multiple formats, e.g. print/mobile-friendly versions of articles or the same product with different image views.

Update: The Google Webmaster Central update listed by Alan below is the format I would likely go with if you're going to have multilingual content.

In most situations I would do the .COM, and focus that on US as well as general international. I would us a subfolder such as /ca/ for Canada, /fr/ for France, etc.

If there's some weird quirk with the company, product, or distribution then I might change that, but that's definitely the minority of examples.

Recommended Reading:

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/folders-vs-subdomains-vs-cctld-in-international-seo-an-overview

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-guide-international-versions-of-websites

Thanks for the response. My general feeling is to wait and see what they come out with officially, since there's a lot of people that feel strongly that they'll be rolling up Places pages with Plus pages in some format or another.

I think they might do a master brand page on Plus since there's no reason to split everything apart, and then find a good way to show location-specific information on a personalized basis. Just my hunch.

Subdomains are treated slightly differently by Google. Essentially they are seen as less connected to the rest of your content than a subfolder.

Take wordpress.com as an example:

• surferdude.wordpress.com has little relation to www.wordpress.com
• surferdude.wordpress.com has little relation to skaterguy.wordpress.com
• surferdude.wordpress.com has lots in common with surferdude.wordpress.com/surfboards/***

In the same regard, www.yourdomain.com/blog is more correlated with www.yourdomain.com than blog.yourdomain.com would be.

By using www.yourdomain.com/blog instead of a subdomain, you build more value to your www subdomain, everytime you post blog content or get links to your blog. This has more value to the rest of the www content on your site.

In that case, it doesn't sound like there are any blog posts that get frequent traffic from referrals? If that's the case, everything should get a broad 301 redirect to the new blog page. This can typically be done in one redirect depending on your URL structure, so you don't have to do each and every URL.

On the topic of subdomains, subfolders are typically a better choice for SEO purposes.

A few other questions for you first:

• Why on earth are you getting rid of everything?
• Are you going to replace that content with new content - either now or eventually?
• Is there any other content on your site that is relevant to the articles?

A few broad answers that I can say without hesitation:

• No, absolutely do not leave a bunch of 404s. IMO, everything should 301 somewhere. Sending people to relevant content is best, but sending them all to the homepage or a landing page that says "sorry but we deleted our blog" is better than a 404.
• No, "noindex/nofollow" is not worthwhile. If you want to keep the content and deindex it, choose "noindex/follow." At least then you keep some of the value of the pages (they can continue spreading some of their value to other pages on the site).