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Hello!  Great question; I've worked with Magento quite a bit and layered navigation can definitely be a bit tricky from an SEO perspective.

The most important thing to opening up some or all of these pages to Google for consideration, is having unique content on the page.  This is not something Magento themes typically include by default but will be 100% necessary to get most if not all of these pages to rank well.

Most typically we add a static block to the top or bottom of the page to add uniqueness.  Without it, all of the content on these types of pages are almost always 100% non-unique and from my experience Google ignores.

If your layered nav pages also use pagination, you'll need to make sure you follow best practices for using canonical and/or rel prev/next/view all to make sure Google isn't looking at your paginated pages as extra duplicated content.

And as a final reply, I think it can be a great idea with limited consequences as long as you follow the above advice regarding unique content and pagination.  Additionally there's no worry regarding Pagerank or destroying the world.  

Good day!  Have you read over Google's guide to Quality Score?  It is pretty useful in understanding how they're calculating it and where you may be falling short-

https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2454010?hl=en

Scroll down to "How we calculate Quality Score".  Good luck!

I believe it should be-

RewriteRule ^category/latest-news/(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/latest-news/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

Try that and see if it doesn't fix it for you.  (Replace 'yourdomain.com' with your real domain of course.)

I can confirm what you've said and mentioned in your comment.

My first thought is perhaps Google is choosing not to index it because it finds it too similar to these other sites-

• http://www.k12.com/ohva
• http://ohva.k12start.com/

Those sites are ranking for the phrase "ohio virtual academy" but not the one that is the subject of this question (at least on the first few pages).

Additionally, you don't have many quality links to the domain which is another signal Google may be using in its decision.

Is your .htaccess file writeable by the server?  If not your permalink (and plugin) settings won't work.

Good day!  That can be a really frustrating experience, particularly when you've worked hard to write your titles.  Alan Bleiweiss gave a good answer on here in the past and it's still relevant - http://moz.com/community/q/why-is-google-changing-my-title-tags

Hello!

I wouldn't consider it to be very serious, however if you wanted to nip it in the bud, the best way would be to block /Account/* in your robots.txt and also add a meta noindex to all of your /Account pages.

The robots.txt directive asks compliant bots to not crawl the page(s) while the noindex requests search engines to not index those pages.

I don't know that that would be the cause in your rankings drop but it isn't helping you in my opinion.  You could try removing it.  Have you fully investigated whether the rank loss could be related to Panda or Penguin updates?

The biggest concern in my mind would be possibly having duplicate content issues and a non-desired version of the page(s) indexed versus what you want.

I think if you have a lot of links to the non-SSL version and are using your SSL version as preferred (or vice versa) you're living a lot of link equity / juice on the table and that when you fix this issue you may see a nice jump in overall trust/ranking once you fix the issue and correctly 301 the non-preferred to preferred.

Hello!  This shouldn't be a problem.  Assuming you are using the #anchor as an in-page link (ie: jump to certain content/section) Google mostly ignores the in-page #anchor except in some limited cases where you can get a link like it in the search result.  If you're manipulating your content using the anchor or some other thing then my answer might change.

Good day!

I don't think adding the canonical to your hyperlinks is going to accomplish what you want.  All of the direction Google gives is to add it as a in the of your page ( https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en & http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions ).

From a technical web development perspective, when a rel attribute is present on a hyperlink, it "...describes the relationship from the current document to the anchor specified by the href attribute..." ( http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#adef-rel ).  That being the case, a canonical would only make sense in this relationship where the link actually appears on the canonical versions.

Hope that helps!

Yes you are 100% right in my opinion.  The whole reason I believe for the shift in brand preference is a play on generating more ad spend via Adwords.  The search results are so unhelpful for so many searches nowadays.

For example, search for "Trademark Registration" on Google.  That SERP used to be full of attorneys and websites offering that service.  Now it's mostly government websites forcing the attorneys to buy ads for this highly searched term.

You're most welcome, glad you found it useful!

If the content is irrelevant I wouldn't redirect it to specific pages on your site.  If it is generally still relevant to the business as a whole, you could 301 redirect it to the root URL.  If not, at the very least, if some referring visitors might become customers, you could change your 404 page to offer up calls to action or shopping options for the folks who see it.

My 2 cents.  

I wouldn't worry thought about removing the links unless they're very poor quality and their percentage is high compared to your "good" links.

If you're wanting to check to make sure it exists on a page as a sort of audit, the Screaming Frog SEO Spider has custom filters you can use to check for code on a page and then sort by those that are missing it.

I would suggest removing it as that page sends several signals that could be interpreted as negative by Google, et al-

• http://5startemplates.com/link-exchange.html - having a page that endorses link exchanges on a site is most likely a strong signal that you don't want
• The links on the URL you show are not closely related to each other semantically and have nothing to do with the business of the website which is another signal that you probably don't want
• A quick check of the source domain's link neighborhood doesn't reveal too much juice flowing in from trusted sources
• And finally the content around the links and the business of this website likely don't relate much to your client's content which again is another signal that could be interpreted negatively.

All of the above independently are not probably a deciding factor, but if you combine them all it paints a picture that isn't positive for your client.

I'll give you my opinion but it isn't a definitive answer.

I believe what you're seeing is a Google SERP test and they are pulling that from the content on the manufacturer's page but I agree there is no rich markup on the page like Schema to point Google to use it.

A quick search of lacrosse monkey shows me no Google ads on the page which is a pretty sure signal Google recognizes this manufacturer as a brand entity.  That in and of itself would suggest Google might also understand the products as entities and be pulling content from the product page and testing it in the Knowledgegraph to see how searchers interact with it.

Unfortunately I don't think there's much you can do about it.

The file name isn't as important for SEO as it used to be.  It can provide a useful signal as to the nature of the image's content and the text content around it.  It shouldn't cause any "issues" or penalties with your SEO, however, you may lose the side benefit of some/all traffic from image searches.

The biggest concern I would have is if the manufacturer decided to move, delete or rename images.

Hi Nick,

Unfortunately at this time there isn't a way to specify a shorter meta description.  The only way to achieve what you're looking for would be to shorten all meta descriptions for sub-pages but that means you'd lose a lot of real estate if it showed up in a normal SERP.

Darn!

Another alternative would be to use Screaming Frog to get a full list of URLs from each site, then use a scraping tool like Mozenda to scrape that list from each site, pull the content area and it will create the data structure you want and make it available for export.  Then you can basically do what I had said in the previous email, compare the two spreadsheets.