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Hi Gregster. I feel your pain. Having worked on Magento for the past three years, I've come across a lot of "issues" you'd expect a top-tier e-commerce solution provider to have under control.

I've written about getting canonical URLs in CMS pages here, something that many Magento SEO extensions don't do. I also had a custom SEO extension created and would be happy to share with you. No cost. Just use it.

I don't know if you have multiple languages, but that alone will create an exponential amount of duplicate content from dynamic parameters. Go into your WMT and set those parameters to be ignored. If you aren't sure how to do that, it's well documented here and on Google, Yahoo, and Bing webmaster sites.

I recommend you nofollow the login, search, and cart pages through XML layout. That will cross off another 500 pages or so.

One last mention is that RocketTheme has created a pretty neat extension that will get rid of the p parameter altogether by using JS to switch from grid and list views. Or you could just select in your admin to only allow either grid or list instead of both.

Any more questions just ask.

I notice similar behavior in my campaigns. Comparing LRD here to the list at Google WMT, I find dozens of LRSs (even from domains I'm not familiar with) that don't show in my SEOmoz campaign reports or Open Site Explorer. I second the question and have even posted one of my own here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/linking-domain-dropped-followed-by-significant-decrease-in-domain-authority.

Ah, I see. Many of those school review sites and forums charge users to access them, and I see they want to charge you to post your profile. If this is the case, you might want to check to see how other links show up to search engines. Just try a few searches with the exact anchor text seen in these sites to see where the pages come up in SERPs. This would be a good way to quickly gauge the value of your links from this site. Make sure you're logged out of Goolge, Yahoo, Bing, etc. before searching.

Now these are not paid links per se. You can read up about nofollow at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=96569 and then judge for yourself if these sites are breaking any rules, so to speak.

Hi Nicole. Really, you should focus on whether or not those links will bring traffic to your site. I would rather spend that kind of money on an adword campaign that targets visitors much more effectively than that offer you posted above. I assume by "embedding to our site" that you mean linking to your site, and when a bunch of sites start linking to your site with that anchor text, this tends to bring up the key words within that text in the SERPs, granted these sites are legitimate and of value. You're in a very competitive industry, so I wouldn't recommend chasing pages like this. Stay focused on the business and target the sites that your visitors are more likely to go to. It's far more time consuming, but the results will show to be far more lucrative than higher numbers here on SEOmoz.

Likewise, your posted links lead to white pages. If you still need help with this, get those links fixed for us.

Is there any equivalent SEO add-on for phpBB3 that people here have used and liked? A quick search shows quite a few out there, some with extremely complex installation instructions, so it'd be great to learn what you guys out there have found to work.

Looking forward, if you plan on keeping your old domain well into the future, search engines do take into account the domain expiration date. This indicates to search engines how permanent the site is, but I can't say how much this will affect your ranking.

Well, I can share an experience with a client of mine who, without my condonation, ran a Groupon campaign hoping to drive more customers to his restaurant but also to drive traffic to his site. He intentionally stuffed links in his Groupon description posted on Groupon. I monitored local search results for two months after he ran this campaign, and while he made out okay on his Groupon, his site traffic didn't move all that much.

I know this is different than a PR service, but I think it'd be safe to assume Google has quite a bit of information on who charges money for "descriptions" and "public relation" postings. If you really want an inbound link from this site, and assuming the domain authority is significantly high, see if there is any other way to get that particular site to post a link to your website. I'm not convinced the cost is worth a few mentions in an article that will become outdated and probably won't generate much traffic to your site.

Now if I've misunderstood your situation, please clarify and maybe I can add something to help you make a better choice on how to spend your hard earned money.

Check out my post here as I'm sure the problem is the same. http://www.seomoz.org/q/juicy-link-finder-doesn-t-support-hebrew-utf8-input

I'm not convinced social media is on a path of convergence. Each platform offers something different for its user base. But if you want to overcome the duplicity of multiple platforms, I found that Hootsuite.com has really helped me put a leash around social media management. Simply put, this platform combines all your social networks (Facebook, Facebooke pages, Flickr, Ping.fm, WorPress, etc.) and can post to all at once, or you can select which networks to post to at any given time. You can also schedule posts to be delivered on a schedule, which I find very convenient. Reports are pretty good in letting you know which post on each platform gives you the best response. I've also tried Hubspot but found it a bit under-featured and overpriced.

I pretty much do the same for clients, but I also correct errors, add more headings where appropriate, add bold text subtitles (basically follow the SEOmoz guide). I also go social. I recommend Hootsuite.com to manage and analyze social media campaigns. It's been noted that Google likes fresh content, so keeping active on Twitter, Facebook, forums, etc. does count. Starting a newsletter helps with inbound traffic, too.

I also take it offline. Getting the word out in mailings, ads, posters, etc. with your website address or a qr code makes things fun and does increase traffic. Hold events, participate in gatherings, join clubs, etc. to get the word out. If you have the budget and it's relevant to your business, building a mobile app for all smartphone platforms will get you an application page and inbound links to your site on very high ranking sites.

Oh there is so much more. I'll post again when I get a second wind.

Hum. Do you mean golf clubs or golf clubs? If I was to search for a membership club to join to play golf, I would want something else in the URL (or at least in the heading) to show me that the page was a list of clubs and not equipment. So in this particular instance, a category in the URL would be a consideration. golfsite.com/equipment/clubs or something along these lines.

Well you've found the best solution right here at SEOmoz! Instead of wasting time learning new systems to find out if they'll work or not, just solve your problem. Sign with PRO Elite and you can crawl 100,000 pages.

First thing's first; I found that only Google will validate extended sitemaps. Yahoo/Bing states in SE/WMT that they will parse the valid information in the sitemap regardless, but I'm not perfectly clear on this. You can search within sitemap category on the search engine pages.

Remember now that the src attribute is not a link, so if this is how you are adding multimedia to your pages, I'm not sure how you will include them in your sitemap. There are many discussions about iframes passing page rank, and the consensus is that they currently do not. If this is the way it has to be for this project, then of course you should add alternate text for iframe and frameset elements, add a title, and maybe include a link inside the iframe. Really, what else can you do?

But some good news can be found here http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts-012510.shtml. It's possible Google may change the way pageRank flows through these kinds of links.

I always get permission from a client to represent them as a product specialist or marketing consultant, but I usually open the discussion with site owners with: "I'm Kevin from XXX." I also have a shpeel down pretty well, always communicating the same major points of the business to each site owner I approach. I'm not the overzealous type who promises some sort of grand partnership; instead I speak sincerely about my client, the business, and how they can help us. I have about 60-70% success with that.

As a note, something that fails more often than not is mentioning the word "link." You want your business shining inside well-written content, not just links. Focus on the business aspect rather than the SEO part. This SEO buzz is really out of control, and I found that more people with popular sites tend to hoard their link juice. It's a risky approach, so I recommend promoting content over link building. It's just what works for me.

After sitting through some of SEOmoz webinars and other SEO videos, I gather that search engine technology has advanced to the point where certain sites will get treated differently than others when it comes to linking. Google does have a policy of nofollowing paid links (ads) and does "try" (was the word used by Matt Cutts) to identify sites that sell links and deal with them accordingly. So if the sites you're talking about are selling links, and I don't mean membership that allows linking, it stands to reason Google could catch on, which makes your investment a rather risky one. I would pass, but I'm a really conservative white hat guy.

When you say you're stuck behind competition, are you referring to sales, traffic, search results or some other measurement? I hope you're talking about sales, because even though we're here on SEOmoz, the point of all this is to get more people to buy (or whatever you consider a conversion to be). Share some more details about what you've done so far, and I'm sure we'll all pitch in to get you ahead (wherever that is). Good luck!

Your settings in Google supplements existing information, so setting a geographic target won't impact your appearance in search results unless a user limits the scope of the search to a certain country. Do you have a top level domain or a country specific domain? That will also single to Google where to list your site in search results. Lots of info at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=62399 Hope this helps!

Search results can differ when logged into search engines, so make sure you compare results when you're logged out.  After Google indexes your site again and finds the 404s gone, I'm sure you'll work your way back up.

Hi Eric,

I would recommend the Yoast WordPress plugin available at http://yoast.com/wordpress/. This plugin covers pretty much all the SEO issues you'll encounter in WordPress, plus there is a handy tool that will analyze important text fields in your posts to see if your articles are optimized for the keywords you're looking to rank for. This plugin won't put heading tags in the template, but I think it's worth a look.

Another consideration for WordPress is your permalink URL structure. As of WordPress 3.1.2, there is a definite performance issue when starting the permalink structure with either the category, tag, author, or postname fields. You can read more under "Structure Tags" at http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks. I'm not sure how this affects SEO, so it'd be great to get some feedback on ranking results using different WordPress URL structures.