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I have seen this happen when sites new sites initially submit a sitemap for a new site most of the pages are indexed. However over time this drops and is usually down to the perceived value of the pages that are no longer indexed. Are these pages thin on content? Do they have any external links pointing to them? Do you have a good internal link structure between all your pages? A new site is more vulnerable to index fluctuations due to factors such as this and the fact that they are likely to have low domain and page authority. I would suggest you look at the factors mentioned above and also make sure you have all the on-page factors covered; making sure they are unique. If no of the above, the other times I have experienced a sudden drop in pages indexed has been when a new enhancement has caused page load to decrease? What has your  traffic levels been like since this change – up, down or constant?

No mention of any on-page optimisation or strategies and the use of blog post comments I would be very careful if I were you....

Hi Ioan,

If I were you I would concentrate on the location and the fact that it is wedding photography. I worked on SEO for a friend who has a wedding car business and he ranks very well for location and service specific searches using the same technique - we didn't brand the titles as his meta descriptions and web address clearly did this for him in the SERPs.

Using this technique you can cover more specific and gain long tail keyword traffic - you can have titles such a

wedding photography (location)

photos from x's wedding in (location)

Wedding photographs at (location)

There are so many variants and possibilities you can cover...

Hope this helps!

I think you are right about this Adam I should have looked what I wrote I didn't mean just point www.competitor.com to www.yoursite.com and have done I meant do a 301 over a single link from homepage that auto-redirects after 10 secs - you should always redirect at a page by page level as it helps the user find the content they are looking for. I think that redirecting at a blanket level like this can actually hinder rather than help you - see http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects

so thumbs up

Quick note as Cyrus says in the above linked post you won't see much benefit in terms of SEO by doing a blanket redirect to your homepage!! So don't waste your purchase take your time and make your redirects relevant Mike

Oh yeah one more quick thing I would have a glance at this thread on webmasterworld - http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4348449.htm

I have never personally bought a competitor and implemented a 301 redirect - what adam and myself speak of would be best practice for this in terms of pass authority from the site you have bought in terms of its link profile. However this is all done around the pretext of boosting your ranking and Google knows this goes on and isn't daft!

Have you done this in the same situation Adam - buying a rivals site? I would be very interested to hear yours or anyone else's first hand experience on this and I think it will help Mike as well. As you are redirecting between two sites that are well established in Google's index rather than between an established site and a new one or new structure, which I have done and think is more commonly the case for 301 use.

I agree with Rob you would be best to place a nofollow on the links between your country level domains. By doing this you get to keep the links and convenience from a users point of view, but you are flagging to Google that you are not trying to pass authority between your sites by interlinking them. Essentially you are waving a flag that says you are not trying to manipulate your rankings by creating your own link network.

When you create the 301 redirect are you pointing the whole of the old domain at the new one or are you breaking the redirect down, pointing the old pages at new corresponding ones?

If you are going to redirect your second old site I would point the old content at new corresponding content using a 301 redirect, so that your practice is less likely to look manipulative to Google. In the past spammers have tried to take advantage of 301 redirects  from multiple domains, and as such, if I was in your position I would be careful and break it down. I think you could potentially be on to a winner as you say both sites that your are redirecting targeted different keywords, so you can point it to different sections of content (pages).

Obviously a 301 redirect passes link juice from the old domain to the new one and so it will have an impact on your sites ranking, if the old site had a strong link profile. In theory this would then help your sites ranking, bumping it higher depending on your competitions strength (DA and PA).

Well I would create two pages if you think that you can produce good quality unique content in relation to each product term on an individual page. As you have two audiences you could target each for input such as reviews to help make each page unique.

The advantage for each is that you can clearly target the individual term in relations to page title, header, content, url name. Then if you look at ideas to build links to both you will succeed.

I think by not writing unique meta descriptions you are missing an opportunity to help your pages convert better in the SERPs. A good well written meta description can improve your sites click-through rate in the search engines. I have tested out different ones in the past and if you get it right you will see a noticeable improvement in my experience.

Have a quick look at the SeoMoz best practice guide for some more general info -

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/meta-description

HI Mathijs - I had this once before and then went in and manually clicked on the Grade My On-page Optimization button and it fixed it. Have you tried this?

I would start by signing up to Bing webmaster central in there under Crawl Control you can set what rate and time of day your site is crawled, bearing in mind that if it is left on standard it will take a long time to crawl and index your site - if you have a large e-commerce site this will definitely cause an issue - I would look at turning this up "full volume" as it shouldn't have any negative effects. Though keep an eye on the impact this has on the load of your server - most reasonable setups will handle this fine. Another very good indicator of any issues your site might have with being indexed by Bing, in the Bing Webmaster Central, is the fetch as Bingbot tool which will allow you to drop a URL in from your site and it will show you what comes back from Bings point of view. If there was something that was hindering it such as a robots.txt it would inform you.

Join Bing Webmaster Central now and see what information it provides you with your site if you haven't already done this.

Also be aware of the Queries per second limit allowed on your server as this has been known to hinder/stop Bing indexing a site when they haven't been able to access the content sufficiently when preforming a crawl especially on larger sites which are constantly being refreshed and updated.

Meta descriptions don't affect your rankings in search engines - they just help entice people to click on your results in the search engines - have a look here for further peace of mind - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/meta-description

So you can change them at anytime and it won't affect your rankings.

I completely agree with Marisa - I have an e-commerce site that recently went through a re-design and it now has drop down navigation for the sub-categories which makes the site more user friendly, but it also increased the links on the page significantly and SEOMoz issued this warning. However rankings are better than ever and this was a logical step in good user interface design, making it as easy as possible to get to the information the visitor is looking for in the fewest clicks.

Hi Brett - have a look at this - http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/css-sprites/

Hi Adam,

Try this:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^everything-after-the-question-mark$ RewriteRule ^shop-online$ http://www.new.com/new-page? [L,R=301]

so above would be

Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage_images.tpl&product_id=69164&category_id=303$ RewriteRule ^shop-online$ http://www.new.com/new-page? [L,R=301]

I think this will help with your question - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-wont-google-use-my-meta-description

You are right not all sites indexed with breadcrumbs show breadcrumbs in the SERPs - here is Matt Cutts take on this which might be useful for you

- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmOjX5DlN2A

I would put together an example of a few top preforming sites that are leading the way in e-commerce that have breadcrumbs in order to support your argument. It is hard to comment on whether your site looks good. Your client must remember that a good looking design is important but not at the sacrifice of usability else your customers will soon go else were as you will find it is all about how quickly and easily they can access the information they are looking for. If any parts of your design hinder this you will soon know about it...

Is the site not likely to preform as well in the SERPs - well Google has integrated them for a reason - improving their search results. On a very basic level you will have more information against your listing - including extra links so this is likely to aid the user and encourage them to click on your result.

Breadcrumbs are essentially a form of rich snippet and they add value to your listing -

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=185417&topic=1088474&ctx=topic

Also one other thing is that breadcrumbs don't have to be in a massive bright font from a design point of view. A smaller grey font in a white space above the product(s) can work just as well and get listed. If you do a search for products you will see some well known sites use this tact..

Doing this will lead to keyword cannibalization, so I would recommend you have a read of this post from Rand in regards to the issue for a greater understanding

- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization

If I were you I would aim to make each of the title tags different...

Hi Ron,

I think that it doesn't really serve any benefit to the user and in my opinion it does look at little spammy - another way of trying to get "titanium rings" mentioned on your page again. I would personally consider removing it. I would also consider adding some more content on your pages where possible - maybe some more crossover with your blog, as you mention "titanium rings" a lot of times in a small amount of text. I know this is the product you sell, but from my experience increasing the content on page with relevant valuable information will help with your optimisation.

On a side note I would recommend you run your site through a tool such as screaming frog - http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ if you haven't already as this will give you a good insight into how your site is optimised.

Hope this helps

I agree with Dirk - the names you have suggested would work fine and there is a clear difference between each. Obviously the more descriptive you can be with each file the better - but often easier said than done on eCommerce sites.

Hi Wes - so I take you are asking if you can 301 redirect your old domain that you had a penalty on from dodgy links? Can you clarify what you did and what you think has hurt your old domain? Sudden ranking/traffic drop? Manual action in Google Webmaster Tools?

At the end of the day if you have had a penalty on your old site i wouldn't recommend using a 301 redirect to try and pass authority of your old penalized domain as it is known that the penalty will flow. However if you have done work to clear up the issue and have removed links and done a disavow if required then you should be fine.

As with anything in the wonderful world of SEO if it sounds to good to be true it usually is and I would go with your gut - "it would seem a little sketchy to me and I would prefer not to get slapped and penalized "again" for doing something dodgy..."

I hope this helps!