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You're welcome.  I hope that the numbers are large!

Don't be fooled in to thinking that it is about the number of links. It never has been and it is probably less so now than ever. You could build 8000 links very cheaply and very easily if that was the only thing that was important. However it probably wouldn't help.

Start looking at what the links are rather than how many of them there are. What are their 10 best links? What would it take to get links like or better than those? What about their top 50 links? At least assume that it is only authentic looking links that are going to help and then start thinking about what you can do to match or better those.  The methods used will depend on the market and your website. The cost will depend on the methods and how well you do it.

I know that you were probably looking for an answer in $, but it's impossible to say and pointless to do so.

It'll get there in it's own time.  However a few fresh links & a bit of new front page content never harms the crawl rate.

OSE doesn't provide a definitive list of all backlinks.  The internet is massive and any data provider only crawls a portion of it.  Even Google doesn't have 100% coverage.

OSE focuses on what it sees as the more important links.  I do find that it can miss links that are fairly buried on  very large sites though.  I know that it often fails to pick up links from the BBC which is irritating for us, as that is a "dream site" link for many projects that we work on.

One that isn't on that webgnomes list that I think is quite good is sitebeam.net .  Worth a look for a general overview that isn't just focused on "pure" seo metrics.

I would say though, that I wouldn't trust any automated tool as an audit - even as a basic one.  They all focus on issues that are easy to spot programmatically. Some of those issues can be important, but I tend to find that the approach puts undue emphasis on minor issues and can detract from bigger ones.

My usual approach for a "15 minute feel for the site" is to spend a few minutes clicking around to understand the site, take a look at their link profile, do a few test searches and see where they rank then go back over the landing pages that appeared for those searches, do a site: search etc.  That is in no way thorough, but in a few minutes I think it can give you a better feel than many of those tools can.

I presume you mean switching to a friendlier URL structure.  I'd only do it if there is a clear advantage to your site to change, not for the sake of it.

The key question is whether the site is getting properly crawled or indexed. If it isn't then you need to understand whether the URLs are the cause of that and then change if they are. However, if your site is getting crawled and indexed properly then you are doing it just for the possibility of some advantage in ranking for "nice" URLs. That's a riskier move in my eyes.

Depending on the size of the site it can take months for Google to update it's listings and remove all the old URLs.  301ing the pages can be fairly painless if your CMS understands both the old and new URL format, but you still lose a small proportion of value from each link (in practice I wouldn't be concerned about that too much).  However it is still a big job to do if you are not clear about the benefit to be had.

That is exactly how I would handle it.  If you get penalised from having large amounts of duplicate content it can be a slow process to get gbot to crawl the whole site again and lift that penalty - particularly if it is large site.

I'd also be looking at other ways to bring unique content in to those pages beyond just descriptions.

As Peter says, it is best to use a business page for a business.  Various features (including the friend limits) are geared for businesses.  It is also worth noting that it is against TOS to create a person page for something that isn't a person.  I don't believe that they enforce that much, but why risk your business page?

Presumably you have a trademark on the name?  If so this is really straight forward. If not then it is likely passing off anyway.

If it were anyone other than amazon then my order to attack would be:

• Cease and desist letter
• Discuss damages claim with trusted legal advisor
• DMCA request

With amazon it might be worth taking the "My legal advisors want me to pursue it,but I can't believe amazon would do this deliberately" approach.

In truch no-one at amazon probably even knows about it.  Someone on the marketplace probably listed a product as being your brand once an that created the brand page. Since then they've just filled it in automatically with whatever they can find.

Definitely pursue this though. What they are doing is wrong and enforceable by law (here in the UK at least - but I believe that it is even more so in the US)

The easiest way to fix this is to tell google to ignore the URL variable no_redirect . You can do this in webmaster tools under Configuration > URL parameters. find where no_redirect is listed, click edit and set it to "used for tracking".

Remember to do similar for bing.

You could also block these in robots.txt

sounds like you have some bad html in one of your templates.  Looking at it there appears to be a missing " on an image tag.

Your server logs should show you the referring page. However I'd guess that those image names are a pretty good clue. Find the appropriate page. View source. Search for the following:

images/products/detail/AD9058RoundGlassTableChairs.jpg target=

(because %20 is an encoded space)

You might find that either the domain or the IP got blacklisted.  Many mail providers use realtime blacklists and automatically mark as spam anything from matching senders.  This can cause delivery rates to plummet.

MX Toolbox provide a simple checker for this here: http://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx . You can set up monitoring for it as well.

If you find that the client is on a blacklist you need to visit that particular lists site to find out the rules for removal. Some expire automatically, some you have to contact when issues are resolved.  Be careful though - some charge for removal.  If you are on such a list read up about it first - not all are as above board as they seem.

Good luck with it.

Hate to say it, but if SEO is important to you I would dump the theme.  There are ways to mitigate the issue, but you are always going to be "swimming upstream" - working harder than you need to to get anywhere.

You can do these with forwarding etc.  However that isn't the most efficient way.

What you want to do is to "park" the old domain on the new one.  In technical terms this means pointing the nameservers at the new hosting account and ensuring that there is MX record for them.  Most hosting companies do this for you or have a built in tool. It's very easy and is usually called "domain parking", "domain mapping" or "add on domains".

Doing that will ensure that visitors (and bots) visiting olddomain.com will be served newdomain.com

With that working you can just add an .htaccess rule on newdomain.com to ensure that it 301s correctly to newdomain.com . The same directive can tidy up all your subdomain woes at the same time!

This method has the least points of failiure and creates the fewest redirects. It's also generally the cheapest and easiest to manage. Win!

Hi Alan.

I've had a quick look over this from both my phone and my laptop.  My first impression is that it is a great looking website (lovely part of the world too).  Text is clear, it's obvious what the site is, it's inviting and easy to navigate.  Responsive handling works well on my devices too.

A couple of thoughts though:

The first is an interim one: You might want to stop the development site from getting indexed.  Either get it blocked in robots.txt or add a noindex,nofollow tag.  You don't want that to get indexed whilst you are still working on it.

My initial thoughts were that I'd prefer to see the cottages before having a "book now" prompt.  I get the logic though (hoping to be booked out a lot!).

The date checker is actually very intuitive.  I use a lot of pretty big accommodation sites and they often do a worse job - particularly when fixed length stays are being used.

I'm not usually a fan at all of modal windows/lightboxes on mobile, but these actually work OK on the new site.  The thumbnails could do with being much bigger for me though.  They are way too small for my ageing eyes.

I hope that is a useful start.  I'll try to have a longer look later.

This might be a contentious point, but I would definitely go with a single site - especially if they are starting out.

On a practical level a single site will cost less to do well than doing three sites well. Looking forward it will also cost less to maintain and keep current.

Whilst cost shouldn't be the main driver, it is usually a concern. It does then mean that there has to be a compelling reason to take the more expensive route.  The question is really "Is there enough SEO benefit is dong 3 sites over 1 to warrant the additional costs/effort?".

In today's climate I would say not.  There certainly was a time when having the 3 sites (presumably with appropriate keyword in each domain) brought significant enough advantage to make this a good approach.

Today though it is much harder to build the authority of a website than it has been in recent years.  Those are 3 hotly competed areas and to build authority separately in each could be significant amount of work.  Certainly more work than is justified by having 3 keyword focused domains.

I'd do one site well. Build authority to that from across the 3 markets. That way each area is borrowing authority from the others as well. If you pitch it well then having expertise across the three areas will also lend credibility to your pitch and might help with conversions.

There are times when I would consider the multiple site approach.  However these are really when each is targeting a different market, or requires a different pitch.  In most cases though 1 site is likely to be the best approach.

I love it when people proclaim the death of different factors. Every time someone believes it my job gets a little easier!

The author of that post said "I've added on-page bold tags with no effect. I've added or changed h1 elements with no effect. Not too long ago, those might well have done something, but that's not the game anymore."

It's pretty clear that what they mean by "on-page seo" is actually "cheap tricks to get a ranking boost".  Definitely not the same thing.  On-page SEO to me means making the meaning of a page as clear as possible to a search engine.

That means using language that is aligned with that of searchers who you want to connect with, clear structure, good indicators through titles etc and a meta description that talks to those searchers and makes them want to click.

Dead? I don't think so.

Hi Simon - nice looking site

I suppose that the first question should be "ranking for what?". A quick skip through the site doesn't suggest any particular target area for the site, so what is it that you want to rank for?

At the moment it looks like you best hope is long tail phrases the product level: ie targeting "purple jegging" "dalmation print onsie"* etc.

If that is the aim I'd focus on adding product descriptions (which if well written will help with conversion as well) and generally building authority to the site through link building.  I'd imagine that the huge number of fashion bloggers out there who enjoy a freebie would be very useful i that sort of link building.

Higher up the foodchain of keywords I think you need to look at your category pages quite a bit more if you want them to attract traffic. Likewise there doesn't seem to be much in place that looks at head terms yet.

Ignore rankings for a moment, I'd also be looking at the more important metrics of traffic and ultimately sales.  I'd imagine those products would play very well socially. I'd be looking at how best to get them shared/pinned/whatevered as well.

*Not a phrase I ever thought I would type.

4/5 with a bit of 7

What you need to do is return the correct response code (I'm guessing that is either 404 or 410) then let google reindex those URLs. That way Google knows that those urls are no longer valid. However, if those URLs have links or get traffic then you might want to 301 them.

Let's look at a couple the other options though - it is interesting.

1. This will stop google re-visiting those URLs,Therefore it will always think they are there.

2. No index confirms they are there, but tells google not to return them in results.  Again this isn't correct and they will continue to return to and re-check those URLs

3. Unless the content is very close, this is unlikely to work. It is also wrong (because presumably they are not the same thing)

4. If they URLs have a common (and exclusive) directory it may be an option to submit that. It might though not be a good idea to submit lots individually - Matt Cutts has suggested this in the past.

Google's preferred approach is to have a single site that is responsive to the screen of users - ie it resizes, re-positions and shows/hides different blocks for different resolutions.  They prefer this to a separate mobile site - which isn't a big surprise if you consider how much resource they use crawling websites!

Whether this is the best result for users can be dependent both on how well thought out the approach is, as well as what users are actually looking for.

Here is a useful post from Kristina Kledzik at Distilled weighing up the benefits of each: http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/choosing-responsive-or-separate-mobile-site-platform/ (includes handy flow chart)

What else am I missing?

I am quite a heavy user of mobile web.  I'd much rather use a well designed desktop site than a badly designed mobile one.  My biggest (personal) frustrations are:

• Slow. I use the web on the move - I want sites to load quickly
• Dictatorial. If a mobile website sucks I want to use the full version. Don't stop me doing that (as an android user I have an advantage here  - it is very hard to stop me! It is common on the ipad though)
• Too little info. Only really an issue when coupled with the above, but if information is cut back for mobile users then a "view desktop version" becomes even more important
• Small menus/links : Touch screen + fat hands. I want to be able to click stuff
• Not tested on mobile. THIS DRIVES ME NUTS. So many people have mobile or responsive sites then don't test them.  It's surprisingly common to find someone's expensive mobile site totally unusable because of an interstatial ad that you can't remove, or a menu that can't be clicked.
• Speed... I mentioned speed right ??