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Webmaster Tools gives a retrospective indication of ranking and is not fresh.  You could use a tool such as CuteRank or there is Firefox extension you can track with.

Regarding your ranking, if the page is new you might find the ranking bounces around quite a bit.

Google will look for the first character.  So unless there is some hidden character in the form of an entity (which I don't think is possible anyway) spaces are no problem whatsoever.

also there is a small overhead with the initial https handshake which can impact time to first byte and page load speed.  Therefore session length and caching play an important part in determining the cost of using https.

yes agree - set as no-follow.

Thanks Jen, i'll take a look at that.  ScreamingFrog have also told me this is on the radar.

Maybe there are multiple URL variations created.  For example, URL parameters, which will create multiple URLs to be indexed in Google.

Thanks.  No I know they exist, I want to audit the links and image URLs- make sure they are correct, not 404 or 301/2.

Does anyone know of a tool to check open graph data, especially og:url and og:image?

I use the og object debugger in FB, but wanted to know if there is a tool to load all URLs or crawl the site in one go?

Possibly.  This is on DNN which seems to be like a big old clunky dinosaur.

What i'm not happy about is that the module running on javascript loses all content if javascript is not enabled in the browser.  I was under the impression it is not a good idea to work like that and if js not running all text should be visible.  Is that right?

Does anyone have any quantifiable evidence regarding text that is collapsed - when clicked the section expands and presents the text, against just having the text on view in the page.

That is, instead of having a FAQ with question followed by answer, there is a question which you click to expose/expand the answer.

Could the collapsed text be potentially detrimental to ranking?

Yes I know what you mean - the external links are not directly explained, but there are signals on the site to keep visitors shall we say relaxed. I don't like it but i'm not in the position to advise on that site at the moment.

It's possibly something on-site going on - same server for both as it's IIS (DNN).  If I overlay the GA organic results  for both sites they are identical (good and bad) apart from the second site being far more accentuated.

At least if we separate link wise then that will remove that possibility.

I'm looking for a bit of advice regarding links coming into main site from another site in the client portfolio.

The main site we are working on has been going great, organic traffic has grown considerably.  The past few weeks there has been a subtle decline including ranking for a few keywords down a little.

What I have noticed is that there is another site in the portfolio (that I am not working on) has had a steady tailspin in organic traffic since Jan and i've been informed it is a dying site in terms of the products offered.  This has some links in the main menu going directly to the main site. My gut feeling is to isolate the secondary site from the main (no-follow or remove links), but the impact on slightly dropped rankings on the main site is not directly related to those linked pages.  Would you go for it and isolate anyway?

Agree with Lesley - a sub-domain is a separate site and equal effort will have to go into optimizing and ranking both sites.

In reality although Google treats the sites as separate the subdomain aspect gives it away, along with a whois lookup - the link value isn't going to massive at all to leverage from.  In other words I would only use the sub-domain for a strong business purpose or for technical reasons, not as a mechanism to gain anything SEO wise. A stronger, well structured and growing central domain will always win.

I think I understand your process and reference to "paid", but even so that word always makes me feel a bit nervous.  So as a side note make sure you no-follow anything that can be "construed" as paid for.

From a cleansing point of view we have to take your word that all relevant links have been removed or disavowed, just having a couple of "dodgy" ones can hold the site back.  When removing links have you manually checked the remaining links - a tool is not really adequate in many cases?

This is an interesting issue that happened to someone - http://moz.com/community/q/disavow-links-leading-to-404

Also,are you sure your disavow file is accumulative and contains ALL URLs?

I don't know about the courses, but here is profile info for the man - http://searchenginewatch.com/author/1785/bill-hunt

If the server keeps going down I would also look at and consider page load speed - http://www.webpagetest.org/ because if it is that flaky I would guess performance is poor all round.

I would get to a stable server as quick as possible.

If I understand you correctly and you want to stop a particular URL from being indexed you would be best using the no-index meta tag within the head section of that page:

You probably want the search engines to follow the links on the page even if the page should not be indexed, so add the 'follow'.

Billy and Dan are spot on. Not only is it feasible to have a new section on the site, you are doing what Google loves and introducing new informative content, growing your site and raising its overall value/authority. Google will have absolutely no issue with tightly relating any kind of surfing/board activity. Only consider if the new content is way off track - cake decoration classes or something.

I would just ensure the structure of your site is such that you have something like -

www.islesurfboards. com/paddle-boards/

rather than

www.islesurfboards. com/blah/blah/paddle-boards/

Another way of looking at this - if you have a successful site then where better to test the market, rather than investing time and money in a new site.

Just ensure you update robots.txt with the new address.  Re-submit the new sitemap to the search engines. Should be as simple as that.  Your URLs have not changed.

Your sitemap does not determine the indexing of all URLs but gives the search engines a good idea what to crawl, on top of being able to crawl from URL to URL on the site.  It mainly is to help you see what has been indexed in comparison to what you have submitted.  Unfortunately Webmaster Tools is not fully to speed anyway so may not show the same results as site:some-domain.com.