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Hi Ouji

You asked "Is "link building" or lack of it my main issue?". It certainly sounds like that is the case.

Good search results require that you page is both relevant and authoritative. Making changes on page can only effect how relevant that page is.  Sitewite changes can redirect what authority you have towards key pages, but you need to build authority to rank in competitive areas.

Building authority (largely) means building links. If Google doesn't know whether to trust your site is will never really be able to compete against those that it does trust.

However, having taken a (admittedly rather quick) look through your site I think that your site might be at a disadvantage in that you don't seem to have very much in the way of original content: Most of the section pages seem to recycle the same few snippets and then the detail pages seem to be largely empty.

There are certainly many ways to "punch above your weight" in the results. However the goal of search engines is to serve up the best page for any particular search. If your site is way off that mark you are always going to be swimming upstream.

I'd start by trying to write original text on every page then adding 1 really strong piece of content that other local sites will really want to link to (then make sure they know about it!).

I'm guessing that the idea here is to assess larger numbers of keywords in order to spot potential opportunities.  There's a tool call market samurai that isn't bad for that.  It's one of those tools aimed at the spammy end of the market that like to get you signed up to a mailing list and offer you paid upgrades to do a load of things you don't really need. However the free version will likely do what you are asking.

I always think that there are 2 questions to answer in cases like this:

1. Are the search engines seeing duplicate content?

2. Could the search engines see duplicate content?

The tools are useful for quickly highlighting potential problems, but you really want to roll your sleeves up and look for yourself.  I'll use teh Pneumatic Grippers page as an example:

The title of that page is :"Pneumatic, Grippers, Rotary Actuators, Linear Actuator, Robotics", so I'll do a search for:

intitle:"Pneumatic, Grippers, Rotary Actuators, Linear Actuator, Robotics"

That will bring up everything in google with that page title, just the one result - Good!  With regards to that page at least it seems google is only indexing one URL.

The URL that google has indexed is http://www.agi-automation.com/Pneumatic-grippers.htm - as you say, changing that case doesn't affect what page loads, so if an odd case (say http://www.agi-automation.com/PneuMAtic-grippers.htm ) could cause a problem.

What you need to prevent that is a rel=canonical in the source (I checked, you don't).  That tells the search engine what the correct address is.   Just ensure you have something like the following in your head section

http://www.agi-automation.com/Pneumatic-grippers.htm" />

There is another way to do it, redirecting the "wrong" version of URLs, but rel=canonical looks like the right choice for your site.

What I would say though, is this: If the search engines aren't picking up duplicate copies don't panic too much over this.  It would be good to have it, but it is only a big issue if duplicate pages are actually being indexed. If not it is good insurance.

I hope that helps

It's a good plan, although if the "competing" picture isn't an exact name match then it might not be needed.

If the CEO has their picture of a well linked page on the main site ("about us" usually does the trick) that is a good start. Have the image name match the search term and be sure to use the alt tag as well. Also have the exact term on page.   Links (mentioning the target phrase) are always helpful as well.

Here is a good example of how it is done: Search for "best looking man in the world". You'll probably get some image results including some predictably polished looking gents. However there is also one pasty looking capped Canadian there - a nice chap called Joel.  See what he was up to at bestlookingmanintheworld.com

It's painful, but that is your answer:

Q. Why isn't google ranking these pages better? 
A. Because they are not unique or useful

Google can be annoyingly smart like that.  The cheapest/easiest fix is probably to have a paragraph added to the top of each page.   So your /budapest/jatekbolt page would have a paragraph about the wonderful choice of restaurants available in budapest and it's rich culinary heritage. (queue affordably copywriter to help keep them different).

You could also consider adding a field to your business database for "recommended snippet" which if filled in highlights that listing and gives a more in depth amount of information. You could the have someone look at reviews for the listings in key categories, pick our favourites and write a fresh description to those featured businesses.

The result of that will be a page that has more unique content and is in fact slightly more useful, That puts you in good standing for improved rankings.

It's a good idea.  I think Rand has previously posted somewhere about he has done this himself, blogging topics that have been asked about on Quora and the like.

The biggest danger in terms of spam from posting on forums is if you include you email address in the post. Publish an email address on the internet and it will get spammed (trust me - I've been using the same address for 16 years. It's an issue!). However if you don't actually put the address in the post then you won't have a problem.  Almost no forums allows their members email address to be seen by other users unless they choose to.

[edited - correction, Rand had mentioned doing this on quora]

A few weeks ago Raventools announced that they would no longer be able to provide tools based on the adwords API, then withdrew that.  Rand commented on a thread here discussing that and made similar noises.

Today Raventools made an announcement as SERP tracking with wording that sounded a lot like it had more than a little influence from Google.

Would I be really paranoid to be wondering whether the Rankings tools in seomoz could be at risk?

Out of interest, how many is "too many"?

I've got some pages that match your description that are fairly loaded and seem unaffected. I was wondering how many similarly names products you have on a page around the time it is triggered.

That doesn't sound right at all.  I'd email help@seomoz.org with that one to be honest.

I think I follow.

Looking at it in a vacuum I would say that example2 has a tiny advantage. The net link equity of what is pointing back to the category page is the same in both cases, but there is greater emphasis from the internal anchor text.  In practical terms this will be very small though.

In a real situation there are so many larger issues at play that you'd struggle to measure this. the effects in incoming links, overall domain authority, on page optimisation etc etc etc are going to far out weigh this.

Reading between the lines...

I am guessing that you are really asking "should I structure my site like this, or like that?".  If that is the question then do what makes for the most usable site. Do though factor in whether more category pages could be useful in their own right as landing pages as well.

Picking the most usable site means a site that people are more likely to enjoy using. That means that they stay longer, hopefully make you some money whilst they are there, mention it to friends, tweet it, share it, link to it etc. Those things can bring real,measurable benefits

I hope that is useful.

Making a blind call - without seeing the sites I would say 301.

Is anyone else seeing people's moz levels shown incorrectly?  Spotted this yesterday, but I am getting the same today.  Lots of people showing as Aspirant who shouldn't be.

Nit-picky I reckon.  Yslow is great for diagnosing a problem. I'm not sure it is best used as a strict checklist.

If the script is loading asynchronously then it should interfere with the user experience which is what counts.

I've got a site with something similar in the home page title tag and there are not problems at all getting that site to rank on fairly competitive terms.  Whether it would rank better without that is hard to say.  Ours changes only once or twice a week though, although I don't imagine that makes a difference.

However, it has helped our click through rates - which means more traffic.  Traffic is the aim, so I'm happy with that.

My only concern would be whether it impacts bounce rate.  If the thing being counted is a key part of the decision and people click through and see something different (because the cached version is out of date) that might have an effect.  Pretty easy to measure that though.

I think that your problem is that you have no links pointing to your site.  Literally - None.

Links are one of the main means that search engines like Google use to determine the importance of a website.  The logic goes that a site that has authority sites linking to it must in itself be useful.

Your site is in a competitive niche and needs to demonstrate that it is worthy of appearing above the other sites in that niche.  Having other sites link to you is a vital part of that.

Read this chapter of the seomoz beginners guide http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links  - this explains what you need to do fairly well.  I'd also suggest reading the rest of that guide whilst you are there as it will really help you out.

Good luck.

My advice: be careful!

Link wheels are pretty much a text book definition of 'manipulative link building', which is what Google is trying so hard to penalise. It certainly is possible to build high quality, high authority references for hub sites to support your sites in a high quality way. However link wheels usually mean low quality pushing links to more low quality content that serve as a shield to push PR to your site.

I'm not saying that this can't work. However be aware that you are clearly trying to manipulate results so that does bring risk.  If you are increasing risk then you really want to understand the topic before building links in such a way.

Short version though: If you are building genuine high quality links and resources then why worry? Use your name. If not then definitely cover your bum (and be prepared for possible future backlash).

I'm looking at some recent notification emails, and they all have the link back button for me.  It is a button rather than a text link now though.  I wonder if it isn't rendering correctly in your mail client or something.

Out of interest - what mail client are you using?

Unless you can genuinely and legitimately justify unique content for each I would either canonical them from the start or better still get them on one page.

I know it sounds like an easy long-tail win, but it can go horribly wrong.  I'm currently working on a site that is being heavily penalised as a result of a similar approach and we're having a nightmare getting the thin content out of the index.

If it is genuinely useful to customers and it won't result in you just repeating everything then include it as well.  Try to give your unique content priority though: higher up the page, more obvious.  I've often included manufacturer descriptions in a separate tab labelled as such.

I'm not going mad am I?  Those 2 links you posted are the same.  Hard to see what you are getting at.

However I will say that I would be careful about repeating keywords in URLs.  It could look like keyword stuffing both to the engines and users.