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Name.
Address.
Phone Number.

Just make sure that your website is matching your Google Places page and any other business directories you list in. The consistency helps ensure that you are the specified business.

Makes sense?

Mike

Whoa! Information overload!!!

1. I don't know of anything that shows you a graphical representation of your site's linking structure; however, I do know of a program that will list out all of the linking pages on your site and the number of in and out links, including anchor text, etc. The number of in links can be an indicator of structurally how your site is organized.

2. 404 errors or not bad as long as they are known. If you no longer have a page and you decide not to redirect from the old page to a new one, that is fine. Google is just giving you a heads up that your site or someone else's is linking to a non existent page. If you do nothing to fix these 404 errors, the page will eventually be removed from Google's index and not be a problem.

3. /document_security.htm looks like it is being linked to from /services_storage_fast_retrieval.htm and  /services_archive_storage.htm

I would recommend downloading and installing Screaming Frog that is the program I was referencing in my response to #1 and that is how I found the issue in #3.

Seer Interactive also wrote a great blog on all of the things this tool can do.

Hope this helps.

Mike

You could try a couple of different things.

ubersuggest.org can give you some keyword ideas; however, it would only be phrases that have to do with shoes.

You can use Google AdWords Keyword Tool, and elect the different options under Apparel > Footwear > Athletic Shoes > Cleats, Running Shoes, Tennis Shoes, etc. or if you selected Boots instead of Athletic Shoes it would display > cowboy boots, fashion and dress boots, work boots, etc.

I use both of those tools when developing a keyword strategy.

Hope this helps you.

Mike

My recommendation would be to remove the tag altogether if possible OR leave the tag blank if that is not possible.

The other "problem" a keyword tag can pose if you are utilizing it correctly is that competitors can EASILY see what keywords/phrases you are targeting.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi Chad,

I think you are asking if it is problematic for all of the pages on your website to be using the same meta keywords and meta description tags.

These tags look like this:

The "content" of these tags, and actually your title tags as well, is duplicated across all of the pages on your website (I am referring to the website listed in your profile - Auben Realty).

The title tag is extremely important and provides search engines with a quick glimpse of what a page is about prior to even viewing the page. These should be unique to each page on your website as they are a page ranking factor.

The meta description tag is not important for search engines, but it is for visitors. This is the description visitors will see when your web pages appear in a search engine's results page. Although this tag is not part of a ranking factor, it is good marketing to have these descriptions be unique to each page.

The meta keywords tag can be removed from all of your website's pages. This tag is not used in any way with Google. I have read that Bing uses this tag to look for basic keyword stuffing. And while other search engines may use the keywords tag for some ranking factor - more than likely you are not getting traffic from those search engines, because they are not used nearly as much.

If you check out the SEOmoz Guide to SEO, you will find additional information on these tags and a bunch of general SEO tips.

Hope this helps.

Mike

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

Will provide you with their backlinks, anchor text, top pages, and more.

http://www.majesticseo.com/

Is another option that has a lot of the same functionality.

Hope this helps.

mike

If you are using IIS, then you would want to configure these fixes in your web.config file.

I think you'd want something like this:

<configuration><system.webserver><rewrite><rewritemaps><rewritemap name="Redirect"><add key="/index.asp" value="/"></add></rewritemap></rewritemaps>
            <rules><rule name="CanonicalHostNameRule" enabled="true"><match url="(.*)"><conditions logicalgrouping="MatchAll" trackallcaptures="false"><add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^www.lucid8.com$" negate="true"></add></conditions>
                    <action type="Redirect" url="http://www.lucid8.com/{R:1}"></action></match></rule></rules></rewrite></system.webserver></configuration>

If that does not work, I would recommend breaking it into sections - for example, try doing the redirect code first, then the canonical code second, or vise versa. I always look up examples of web.config configurations on stackoverflow.com.

Hope this helps Troy.

Mike

Are you creating both websites under one company name or two?

The only reason I ask is that from a usability standpoint people may find it confusing.

Let's say a user visits your upmarket site, but does not contact you during that visit. Then they perform a Google search again looking for your company name and the stumble upon the cheaper market and don't find the same solution and the website now looks completely different... that might be confusing, unless you are using two different company names... and if that's the case, I would hope that the companies would actually be "legit" or it may seem deceptive.

That said... I don't think you would get penalized for creating two sites in the manner you are suggesting.

I do think it may become confusing if you rank for both pages on the same page of Google, because having different URLs, different designs, but the same company name may seem deceptive to users.

Just my thoughts.

Mike

That is a change you will make on your server.

Depending on the backend software you use, the code or setting to implement this type of change will be different.

What software do you use?

Mike

Hmmm... I have never seen that guide before.

It looks like the contents of the guide are VERY similar to the help page I sent you above.

You could try viewing it with Google Translate here - I know that sometimes the translation can be way off... but it might help.

Mike

Hi Mirco,

Have you checked out: http://www.seomoz.org/help ?

They have a TON of information on all of the tools and videos on how to set things up.

They also include PRO tips for research, optimization, and fixing issues.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi Jesse,

To me, it sounds like a message about manual action. Per SEL...

"Manual Actions

With a manual action, some human being at Google has reviewed a site and decided to issue a penalty against it (usually manual actions are indeed penalties). The review might be triggered by a spam report from an outsider or just Google’s regular policing.

Removing manual penalties often involve the targeted site filing a reconsideration request along with showing a good faith effort to correct a problem. For example, last year, JC Penney was hit with a 90 day penalty for paid links. It made an effort to clean up those links, submitted a reconsideration request and the penalty was eventually removed, deemed “tough and the appropriate length,” as Cutts said last year.

How do you know if you have a manual action? This should be reported to you through Google Webmaster Central, if you’ve verified your site there."

From your original post, it sounds like you have a handle on which links were purchased/unnatural. And as Marie and I are saying, you need to document your efforts. You will want to send those emails of requests for money to remove your links and your other emails that are not responded to... this will show a good faith effort on your part.

Marie is correct, "It's not about the percentage of links removed.  Really, what Google wants to see is that you understand which links are manipulative and that you've worked to get rid of those and that you're not going to continue in this matter." - Google isn't going to require you get webmasters to remove all or a certain percentage of these links. They simply want you to try to get them removed 1) to clean up the web and 2) to make sure you learned your lesson ; )

From your original post, it sounds like you are on the right track. Look over the links I sent you and as Marie suggested, search SEOmoz for additional blogs regarding other peoples' experience with getting an unnatural link penalty removed. Some people it takes a month, others 6... my suggestion is to arm yourself with as much research as you can (KNOWLEDGE IS POWER), provide Google with emails, spreadsheets, whatever - showing you are really trying to get these spammy links removed, and submit a request for reconsideration.

Good luck and let us know how things turn out! Document it all and make a blog post out of it!

Mike

PS Hi Marie! Funny running into you here ; )

That's a bummer Jesse.

I would not take any action until you read through the following articles below.

First READ THIS from Google.

From what I have read, you should make you sure you are documenting your attempt to get the links removed. Matt Cutts states that using the disavow tool without requesting link removal first

Duke Tanson wrote a great article on how he used the disavow tool to removal an unnatural link profile warning.

That should be all of the information you need.

Good luck.

Mike

Hi Troy,

The issue with /index.asp is coming up because of your Home link in your footer. Instead of resolving to home "/" it is being pointed to "/index.asp".

And the reason it is also showing the www-version is because when the crawler is on lucid8.com and it crawls the link to the right of customer/partner login "customers", the crawler is brought to www.lucid8.com/downloadplus/Resource_login.asp Then, from here, if you click on any of the hyperlinks, you are brought to the www-version of the page instead of the non-www you specified as your preferred.

Jesse is correct in saying you need to choose either a www or non-www version; however, you also need to fix the /index.asp issue.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Do a scan with Screaming Frog. It can point out exact pages where you are having broken links.

They have a free trial and a paid version.

This program is great for diagnosing many different website related issues.

Hope this helps.

Mike

I believe it really comes down to personal preference.

Generally, when you see sub.domain.com, you usually see the non-www version; however, it really does come down to personal preference.

You are not going to be penalized or anything for using the www version.

It is slightly less work for the user to not have to type www.sub.domain.com vs just sub.domain.com - but I don't think 4 extra keystrokes is going to be that big of deal.

Mike

Well played Matt

The main reason I am saying 100% confident is that you can mess up your website VERY easily using this tool. So you need to be very cautious in choosing to use it.

This is a great article: 6 Things To Think About Before Disavowing Links from Search Engine Land. It states, "If you haven’t actually been penalized and you start disavowing your links, you’re essentially outing yourself to Google that you manipulated the system. Make sure that you equivocally know you were penalized and it’s not just some random fluctuation in rankings, a sitemap or indexing problem, or an accidentally no-indexed page."

Just sayin' be careful.

Good luck!

Mike

Are they all from different domains or the same domain?

And regarding the Disavow links tool, Google specifically states, "We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you." - I would not recommend using the tool unless you have been warned by Google or you have thousands of spammy footer links or something and you are 100% confident they are causing issues with your site.

Mike

I am no htaccess expert, but I think you want to change it to:

Redirect 301 / http://whitbypark.co.uk/

Give that a whirl.

Mike

Here is how I am understanding your situation and how I would either fix it or not worry about the 404s. Please correct me if I mistook what you are saying:

randomsite.com has a link pointing to yoursite.com/randomarticle.

yoursite.com/randomarticle no longer exists, so when Google or a visitor clicks on the link on randomsite.com they receive a 404 error (saying that page does not exist).

you can set up a 301 redirect on your server so when someone clicks on the link to yoursite.com/randomarticle from randomsite.com they are redirected to an applicable page (for instance, yoursite.com/newarticle) instead of getting the 404 error.

Mike