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One reason to change all URLs from _ to - is conformity.

If you have some that are _ and some that are -

the question is how will you remember which one to use, for a particular page?

For that reason, I would convert them all.

As for using a canonical tag, I don't know, you'd need to know what google and otehr search engines do with that information, if anything. I would also worry about what they will do with it in the future, because these things are liable to change.

If it was me, I would change them all and redirect the stragglers.

I tried this a few years ago.

The strategy was to find good writers and help promote them and get them into news writing and reporting.

It wasn't about links, other than linking to stories in the newspaper, to get more readers.

It was a miserable failure.

It is a lot of work and you have to find people who are interested, get them fired up and keep them interested.

We got a couple of writers and we have one lone blogger left. I shut down the rest of the network.

We probably went about it the wrong way, but I had someone managing it, who we paid, but it just never worked out. If you consider this, you really need a lot of things in place, a great plan, a fired-up evangelist, and ways to build and increase interest.

You could go out and find people who have done this and seek their opinion and advice.

I know, it is horrible.

I don't mind them testing stuff, but I wish they wouldn't do it on my sites.

It would be nice if they had an opt-in to be their beta tester.

Thank you algri.

I wouldn't do that.

I think I did something like that a long time ago, but "natural" is a much better thing to do now.

That is what google might call "doing something for the search engines,"

rather than "doing something for your readers."

If your page is really about that keyword, then I believe you would be better off getting that keyword into your page headline, which would be in the H1.

What you are doing is manipulating the power of the H1 to achieve your SEO goal, whereas you should be doing it for your reader, but structuring it so it works for the search engine as well.

I would change what you have.

Slow down Ofer, or you will cause more damage to yourself

I know you want to fix this as fast as possible, but don't ask until you are sure you got everything.

If you fix a little bit but not all and keep asking, they may stop responding to you.

You should also thoroughly check things on your own site. I could be wrong, but I think a page rank drop penalty will not be because bad sites link to you or that strong sites link to you, but more likely that you sell links based on your PR, so google's way to stop you is by hitting your PR. Certainly your PR could drop because of the loss of incoming PR due to their sites being hit, but that would just be ranking, not a penalty. Even if you made no money, but you did a trade, it amounts to the same thing.

Did you sell paid links? If so, either nofollow or remove them.
Did you do a lot of multiway links? ( that was stupid) Remove them
Did you trade links with bad sites? ( that was stupid) Remove them
Did you spin content and point links to your site? ( that was stupid) Try to have it removed.

I think removing them is better than no following them, but if you have a quick way to nofollow, then remove afterwards, that might be useful to do.

Make sure your site is clean, then try to have other sites remove links. You need to go after the ones that don't make sense - unrelated sites.

Good luck - and don't ask for reconsideration until you fixed the problem.
When you do ask, document the changes you made, so write them down as you do them..
When you make hundreds of changes, you will never remember them all.

From what I can see, there is no way to change the color of the G+ button.

They wanted it that way, most people seem to hate it, but we're stuck with it until enough people complain - and maybe not even then.

Remember when everyone hated Microsoft because they knew what was best for us, and they never listened?

google is the new Microsoft.

Site looks nice, Paul. If you haven't done this already, use the SeoMoz tool to check your onpage setup: http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new Fix anything that needs work and then start promoting your site. You can set up tracking here: http://www.seomoz.org/rank-tracker You will be emailed regular updates, that show if you are making progress. As it is a real site, issue a press release every week, about something interesting you are doing or that is of interest to people buying travel insurance in Ireland. Change which pr site you use, so they aren't all from the same one. Write other articles and get them published in other places - offer them to your local news sites.

Hello Christian.

It depends on many things.

In my logs, I see four googlebots today. Each one has read the robots.txt at hourly intervals.

Good advice from Andrea and Brent.

To use multiple sitemaps, do something like this:

The main sitemap points to the other sitemap files.

You can have up to 50,000 URLs in those files.

• mine are gzipped

This one is sitemap_index.xml

<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"><sitemap><loc>http://yourdomain.com/writermap.xml.gz</loc>
 <lastmod>2012-03-15</lastmod></sitemap>
<sitemap><loc>http://yourdomain.com/mainmap.xml.gz</loc>
 <lastmod>2012-03-15</lastmod></sitemap>
<sitemap><loc>http://yourdomain.com/201201.xml.gz</loc>
 <lastmod>2012-03-15</lastmod></sitemap></sitemapindex>

<sitemap><loc>http://yourdomain.com/201202.xml.gz</loc>
 <lastmod>2012-03-15</lastmod></sitemap>

Here is a tip:

Google will index some of those pages and some it will not index.

If you have 5,000 urls in one sitemap and they only index 4957

you probably can't work out which 43 URLs they didn't index,

so if you make the numbers smaller, it can be easier to discover the pages they don't like.

• not easy, but easier

John.

You should definitely not rank for Toy Soldiers, with that page, unless you are the only site with anything about them.

You should read the SEOMoz docs about what you need to do, before worrying about the reason you aren't ranking.

You have what anyone would call "thin content" - you are not being penalizes, you just don't have anything useful.

You could probably rank quite well for that term.

Check out who is ranking for those terms and see how good a job they did of it.

From what I have seen, it will be relatively easy, but your current page needs work.

What I mean is the website logs:

66.249.73.219 - - [21/May/2012:21:50:58 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 435 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.206 - - [21/May/2012:21:53:00 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 239 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
72.21.83.124 - - [21/May/2012:22:05:33 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.219 - - [21/May/2012:22:50:58 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 435 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.206 - - [21/May/2012:23:01:31 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 239 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
72.21.83.124 - - [21/May/2012:23:44:15 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.219 - - [21/May/2012:23:50:58 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 435 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.206 - - [22/May/2012:00:16:58 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 239 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
72.21.83.124 - - [22/May/2012:00:46:02 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.219 - - [22/May/2012:00:50:59 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 435 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.206 - - [22/May/2012:01:24:08 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 239 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.219 - - [22/May/2012:01:51:00 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 435 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
72.21.83.124 - - [22/May/2012:01:51:17 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.206 - - [22/May/2012:02:32:28 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 239 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.219 - - [22/May/2012:02:50:59 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 435 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
72.21.83.124 - - [22/May/2012:02:56:28 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.206 - - [22/May/2012:03:40:58 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 239 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.219 - - [22/May/2012:03:51:00 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 435 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
72.21.83.124 - - [22/May/2012:04:01:29 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
72.21.88.227 - - [22/May/2012:04:38:59 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.206 - - [22/May/2012:04:43:06 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 239 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.219 - - [22/May/2012:04:51:02 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 435 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

Melissa,

Brent tells you exactly what is happening on your site.

The only thing I have to add is that you also are causing yourself some problems.

Your HOME link points to this:

http://vamospaella.com/index.php

So that means you are telling all the search engines and visitors that http://vamospaella.com/ is not your home page, but http://vamospaella.com/index.php is.

So you need to stop doing that. Make sure your internal links only point to one URL.

(as well as doing the 301 redirects that ensure your site only responds one consistent way.)

Robert,

EGOL and Robert are both right.

There are some things you can do to stop the drift, and possibly reverse it, but that is more effort

I'm out with my ipad, so the formatting of this may not be good.

First, look for content that is 100% yours and see if that is falling too.

• let me know what you find.

Fix the red group problems that SEOMoz tells you about

Then

1. go to your WMT account and see if there are any problems listed. - fix them

2. check to seee if you have any outgoing links that are boroken - fix them.

3. check for duplicate titles and descriptions and content. - fix them or delete and redirect.

4. rewrite posts that are not uniquely yours - this is the hard work, especially if you have a lot of pages

5. Get a G+ profile if you don't already have one and link your site to that and link that to your site.

Consider uploading images that are correctly scaled. You have large images and then you scale them smaller, That means you are loading half a megabyte of images too much.

Also, apply lossless compression and make them smaller without losing any quality.

The subdomains would have hurt your rankings.

It could be another site linked to you with the subdomain and that started the problem, because you didn't already have it handled.

About 5 years ago,  a big site linked to us, but they screwed up all the story URLs and my system knew what they really wanted it, so it provided the content. Google trashed all of our listings. It took a month to work out what the problem was, and it took months to recover.

Using what you think is a keyword on multiple pages isn't going to hurt you, unless you overdo it.

You should be thinking about how readers will accept and use the information you write. Don't overengineer it.

If you want your front page to rank for a specific keyword, and not a deeper page, then that is where the content that emphasizes that keyword should go.

The other pages that mention the keyword will not be "about" that topic, but related topics, so it isn't going to hurt. It will help because your site is about the main topic (that you say you want the home page to rank for) and those pages will reinforce that.

So I think your answer is #1, not #2, unless you purposely try to make every page rank for the one keyword.

Remember, you are writing your pages for the readers. Keep them informed and not confused and you will be doing OK.

Boodreaux

If you haven't already done this, consider doing my #5 in the answer below.

That should brand your ID into your text and photos

Here is what happens with google - which is not as smart as we (and they) think they are.

If you take a snippet of text that is keyword rich, and slap it on 10 other sites, they will almost always (in google search) outperform your whole unique story.

After almost 2 years of panda destruction, and constant work on my site with no recovery whatsoever, I don't know if I have anything useful to contribute yet, so take this as some input.

Large site with over 2.2 million pages.

Deleted around 1.5 million pages

Removed all duplicate titles (removed for fixed)

removed all duplicate descriptions (removed or fixed)

Removed all problem pages (extra short, damaged content, empty)

Removed all duplicate body content pages.

Prevent addition of any new duplicates and if any slip past, fix within 24 hours.

Also, checked for incoming links and discovered some sites with problems pointing in - fixed or had these removed.

RESULT after almost 2 years? - zero improvement.

Almost ready to slash wrists, but about to try subdomaining first.

It would be funny if not so sad.

Hello Norberto, Please check your link -that one is broken Here is what I do in our newspaper Within some stories, we have links to other relevant stories or to other pages, by linking internal text. For example, there is a page about Ban Kim Moon and we link to that. If a story refers to a previous story, for example it is a story about the fighting in Syria, we might link to the story about Kofi Annan making the announcement of the ceasefire agreement. After the story ends, there might be a few links to relevant stories, that we didn't link within the story. If you use Wordpress for your site, there are some really good plugins that can help. We don't use Wordpress, so I don't remember the name, but I think the best one is called Yet Another Related Page plugin

So you could list the other pages as though they are a threaded group of related items

SEOMoz suggests you try to keep total links on a page to 100 or less, but this isn't a limit and it isn't an error if you exceed the number.

I have a small number of pages that have up to 4000 links - these are for readers to see the most read stories , all in one page, and I don't care what the search engines think of them

• I make pages for readers, not search engines, and readers don't want to page through 400 pages looking to see if something they care about appears on these pages - they want to see immediately.

Your sitemap should only list pages that actually exist.

If you delete some pages, then you need to rebuild the sitemap.

Ditto if you delete them and redirect.

Google is always lagging, so if you delete 10 pages and then update the sitemap, even if google downloads the sitemap immediately, they will still be running crawls on the old map, and they may be crawling the now-missing pages, but haven't shown the failures in your WMT yet.

If you update your sitemap quickly, it is possible they will never crawl the missing pages and get a 404 or 301.

(but of course, there could be other sites pointing to the now-missing pages, and the 404s will show up elsewhere as missing)

I am always checking, adding, deleting and redirecting pages, and I update the current sitemap every hour and all the others are rebuilt at midnight every night. I usually do deletions just before midnight if I can, to minimize the time the sitemap is out of sync.