Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Jesse, you have some great responses below. So great question to begin with. I also like the 4 example scenarios you posted. What I'd like to ask is, what percentage of their business is driven directly/indirectly from their websites ?

Once you know how much money a business generates from a website, you can then put some sort of an ROI and budget you are willing to spend to expand on to that. Now, the question is, would you list your business in BBB if there was no SEO value ? Let's say we go back in 1996 when Google does not exist. You have Altavsita, Dogpile, Excite.com and so on. They don't look at the BBB listings. They only look at the Meta Data. Would you still list yourself ? If you'd say yes then, I'd say yes today. If it was no then, let it be a no today.

However, if you are also struggling with some rankings and looking for some brand citations etc, you might get listed and move on. It's not really going to move the dial. Don't expect that you list today and in X amount of time, your rankings improve.

I don't know if I helped you or confused you further. Just my 2c, for whatever it's worth

I think some people/client's over react. It's also easier for me to say, because I am not the client in this case. Maybe the client got penalized in the SERPS and their SEO said the bulk of links coming from your directory are causing the problem. I think this is the nature of the web and it's a natural link profile to have all kinds of links and I don't think this should/would affect the client's site. Again, I am not the client or their SEO. And the problem is SEO does not have a standard recipe or published guidelines. And if your client's site is penalized, he/she is probably going through all sorts of SEO On-page and Off-page audit. I think your nofollow is a good solution and if possible I would actually give the control to the users in their profile whether or not they want their links to be followed or nofollowed. That might be a good idea. But either way, follow or nofollow, industry links from niche directories are always good links. And they help a lot towards Local SEO. Even if it was not a link, it would still help as being a citation. An actual dofollow link is always better, but others help as well (presuming the directory is very strong which it sounds like it is).

Go to Google.co.uk and do a site:yoursiteurl.com to see if you are indexed in Google UK. You can also check the cache using cache:yoursiteurl.com

If I were you, that's what I do. You can use the Crawl Test Tool - http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test but that is more of a crawlability check, not whether you are indexed or not.

Yup. In that case, I'd go with a BBB listing for the Massage business as well as the Law Firm.

I agree with Toshi one hundred percent. It's strongly recommended to change it. I'd say it's crucial you do it. There's absolutely no reason to not do it.

I have been attending Pubcon in Las Vegas every year since 2003. I have only missed 1 or 2. Also, Pubcon is the only conference I have attended.

What I'd say about Pubcon is that I look forward to it every year, year after year. It's a busy 3-4 days conference. Usually 6-10 sessions running concurrently and the topics vary from On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, Paid Search, Affiliate, Conversion Optimization, Social Media and so on. There are usually around 100+ sessions in total to choose from.

Overall a great event to attend.

What will you learn ? Well, that's a tough one to answer. Usually I don't go to conferences and expect something to learn other then meet a lot of nice people in different industries. Sometimes you talk to people, hear out speakers and see them talk about specific strategies they use or specially the tools. I love the tools part. There's always something new to learn in the SEO Tools area. Other then that, talking with people and attending sessions kind of gives you a very broad/but in-depth overview of where the industry is moving, whats going on in the world of search.

I also have Mozcon/Distilled/SMX Advanced/SES to the list of conferences I would consider attending based on timing and budget.

I hope this helps.

Please see answers in Bold.

1. is the bottom content ok? please scroll down all the way. --- **The content is good. It should help your homepage rank for a lot of long tail keywords, provided it's optimized for them. **

2)  We used semantic keywords for 5-6 anchor interlinks to the same page to promote core products from the home page.  Is this too much? - Anchor Texts to the same page won't help. If I were you, I would rather send 5-6 important links to the most important (different pages). Multiple links to the same page from your homepage won't help IMO.

3)  We repeated footer path the same as the header fly window (same link, same word), is this over-optimized?  If not, does it serve any SEO? -- I don't understand this part of your question.

I haven't used this tool but it looks like it should do what you are trying to do:

http://www.transabacus.com/ TransAbacus gets a website address or URL and returns the list of pages on the site, with the number of words for each one. Optionally, the user can also get the number of words in title, alt text and meta-tags (whose translation is as important as the body translation because several search engines use them to accurately index the web page, but unfortunatly they are generally not considered at estimation time). Additionally, TransAbacus counts the words in text files linked by the URL (the current version of TransAbacus counts the words for .pdf, .txt and .rtf files).

P.S. The only downside is that this is a software tool installed on your machine rather then an online service.

Another one that looks interesting is:

http://www.inspyder.com/products/InSite/Website-Word-Count.aspx Use Inspyder InSite to quickly get the word counts of virtually any website. No more "copy and pasting" page after page into Microsoft Word. Now you can word count an entire website with a few clicks of your mouse!

InSite provides a variety of word count information, including total words on site, total words per page, total unique words and totals for each individual word. InSite allow you to save your word counts to PDF or Excel.

Well, I think I have a different opinion here. Think from a user's perspective as well as the Search Engine perspective, here's the way I am thinking.

Let's consider I own a small company called ABC offering XYZ services. Now SEOMOZ acquires that ABC and all the services are now offered via Microsoft. There are tons of citations from Wikipedia and other new etc kind of sources mentioning XYZ. They are all linking to XYZ services page on ABC.com

Now when we redirect ABC.com to SEOMOZ.org, its all good. So till this point, we are all good, but if we have lots of deep links to ABC.com from around the web, won't it make sense to have specific redirects in place, redirecting ABC.com/XYZ to SEOMOZ.org/Products/XYZ etc provided there's a page about XYZ on SEOMOZ.

Does that make sense ? This way if I click on to a link about XYZ from somewhere on the web, I reach the desired URL, not just the homepage of a big company or corporation, where I will have to further drill down trying to find the information I am looking for.

How widespread is your "products" appearing in multiple categories ? ARe you talking about 8 out of 10 products in the category duplicate / very similar to the same collection appearing in the other category ? It really depends how many categories you have, how many products, how deep this is compared to what other unique data you have on the page combined with your domain authority etc.

As for Show All, do you also have page 1, page 2 and a show all ? Do they have unique page titles and descriptions ? What do you want to appear in the SERPS for the users ? So if I search on Google for Red Widgets, what's a good experience for me. Is it to land on Page 1 or the View-All page ? Based on what you want to do, I suggest you look at:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html

I hope this helps.

Would you essentially have the same set of products with exact same product categories, product names, product descriptions ? If yes, this could lead to duplicate content issues. Also, since your "microsites" will be powered by the shopping cart on the main site, I am guessing all these microsites will have to be hosted on the same server ? In my opinion, there's definitely "some" value in trying to do this with this approach. It just depends on how big scale are we talking. I mean are you talking about 5 microsites or 50 ? It would be worth if you could build a wedding or a baseball related niche site with lots of good, unique content that is only on the microsite along with the products from the main site but having a different unique description that is different then your main-site. I would also start thinking about how would you build the domain authority / links to the microsites ? IMO this is a bigger discussion that you need to spend some time on.

EGOL is right on. I would also think about what %age of your blog posts have search engine traffic ? Look at last 30/60/90 days maybe ? Is there any seasonal content ? Factor all those things and then decide. In a lot of cases, it makes sense to update them. Sometimes delete them and redirect them to an updated/newer article. It might also sometimes make sense to merge multiple similar topic articles.

Think from a user's perspective and not SE perspective and you'll be good as long as you are thinking about SEO best-practices, which it sounds like you are.

Was this a Wordpress blog and did you install a plugin to do these changes ?

It sounds like it's been a while since you demoted those pages. I think this sounds more like a bug that it's not happening. You could go to the Google Webmaster Forum and submit a request there or if it's urgent and the following solution is doable, you could try blocking those 3 pages via a noindex tag or via robots.txt and see if they get removed that way. Once the pages have been removed using that technique, you could remove the noindex tags or disallows in robots.txt unless you would prefer to keep it that way and you don't want those 3 pages to show up anywhere...period. I hope that helps.

Go to http://pro.moz.com/campaigns and click on** Archived Campaigns**. That should show you what's available inside your account. If you see an archived campaign and you have open slots, you should be able to activate it.

I would work with your developer/coder/cms/IT guys to make your homepage the real-homepage URL. That refresh is definitely not helping you.

Do you want both the pages to show up in the SERPS ? If yes, no, this would hurt you. The only way to do this if you only want to do it for the users / user experience is to have a canonical tag pointing to the one that you don't want to rank in the search engines.

Does your site have the ability to choose number of products to display per page on the Search Result Pages ? Do you also have a View-All page ? Do you have canonical tags on these Paginated pages ? I am trying to understand whether you also have Duplicate content issues along with the Duplicate Page title issue...

I would strongly suggest doing the rel=canonical tag on all pages to the original/correct URLs. So in your CMS, the canonical tag is added, all those variations of the pages will point to the same URL just in case Google Bots find those pages.

You are on the right track about doing a canonical.

I think the shirts having variations like:

FUNKTION Mens Short Sleeve Red Golf Shirt 
FUNKTION Short Sleeve Black Golf Shirt for Men

Might work. This would give you good rankings in Google Products (Google Shopping) and as far as the listing for your category page is concerned, that's the page that should be ranking for Golf Shirts or Golf Shirts for Men or Men's Golf Shirts.

What do you mean when you say "link on google gets removed."

Do you see drop in rankings ? Where does it rank now and does it disappear from the 1000 results or just gets dropped ? Because the rank/shift could be for a variety of reasons.