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As long as the search engines can crawl it, I doubt that one format would cause your content to be considered "more unique" than the other - it either is unique or it isn't, and the content itself is the same either way.  Since it seems like the drop-down is a more user-friendly solution, that's what I'd do.

If you're concerned that your content won't be robust enough to rank for a term, I'd consider adding some additional, relevant text that contains the keywords you're targeting rather than trying to tweak the format of the same text - maybe via a blog post?  But if you are finding your content to be unique enough now, in the tables, without adding extra text then I don't think switching it to be in a drop-down is going to wreck that.

Google is probably showing "Jump To" not because it shows up anywhere on the page, but because they understand that that is the function of the anchor links on-page. So you probably won't be able to change the page to get it to say something besides "Jump to" in the SERP - and that's OK, because your section head "is an umbrella company the only option I have?" is showing up in the snippet, and that is more important.

Here's a piece on Search Engine Land about this phenomenon: http://searchengineland.com/google-jump-to-links-within-search-snippets-26603, and Google Webmaster Central on it: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/using-named-anchors-to-identify.html. It looks like Google includes "Jump to" in the snippet to let users know that they will be taken to a point in the middle of the page (through the anchor link) instead of to the top of the page.

I agree that it's probably not a huge problem, but still something to clean up if you can - it would be best if crawlers weren't trying to access these pages.

Hi,

Can I ask what leads you to believe search engines aren't crawling/indexing the site? When I search site:www.bugsanonymousil.com in Google, I'm seeing 62 pages from the site showing up in the index.

One BIG problem with the site, though, is it looks like when someone requests an estimate, a webpage is generated for them - and these pages are being indexed with customers' names, addresses, email, and phone numbers. You should definitely remove those URLs from the index in Google Search Console, and update the site so that those pages aren't crawlable/indexable.

Oh how frustrating!

There are a couple of things that you can do. Updating your robots.txt is a good start since the next time your site is crawled, Google should find that and drop at least some of the offending pages from the index.  I would also go in to every page of your site and add in a rel=canonical tag to the original version of the URL.  That way, even if your ecommerce platform is generating odd versions of the URL, that canonical tag will be on the duplicate versions letting engines know they're not the original page.

For the existing pages, you could just 301 them all back to the original versions, or add the canonical tag pointing back to the original versions.  I would also add the tag to these pages to let Google know not to include them in the index.

With pagination and canonicalization there are a few different approaches, and each has its pros and cons.  Dr. Pete wrote a really great post on canonicalization that just went out, you can read it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/which-page-is-canonical.  I also recommend reading Adam Audette's post on pagination options at Search Engine Land: http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284\. I hope that helps!

Hi Nightwing,

The screenshot you post at http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/ranking-25-may-12copy.jpg appears to be from a tool called Web CEO, which is not an SEOMoz tool.  I can't speak to the accuracy of their tool.

It looks like the screenshot you have from our tool at http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/rank-checker.jpg puts you at ranking number 5.  When I checked "york wedding photographer" just now on Google.co.uk, I saw the same thing that Riplash saw.  There are 3 paid ads at the top of the page (in a yellow box), then 3 organic listings under those.  After those first 3 organic listings, there is a 7-pack of Google Places results with address info - that is where Davidclick.com is currently showing up.

Since Google Places uses an entirely different algorithm than the rest of Google's organic results, rank tracking tools will often not pick up that ranking - that appears to be what's happening the Web CEO tool - again, that is NOT an SEOMoz tool so I can't speak to its accuracy.  As you can see, the SEOMoz rank tracking tool places you at position 5 (because we do pull in Google Places, video, image, etc. rankings where we can) - and that's where I see Davidclick.com in my SERP page.  3 regular organic listings, then 1 Google Places listing, then Davidclick.com as the 2nd Google Places listing, or 5th overall.  Hope that helps!

A WordPress developer should be able to help you get your blog looking more like the rest of your site, yes. I would definitely recommend having your blog at sininlinen.com/blog rather than at blog.sininlinen.com - if your blog is a subdomain, Google will have a harder time telling that it's part of your overall site and not its own, separate site.

Usually a page is omitted because it's very similar to another page on your site, and Google has determined that the other page is more important. Since the category page is probably higher up in your site architecture, it would make since that Google would rank the other page. Now that you've put the effort into making your landing page more unique, I would give that a chance to rank. One thing you can do is find additional places on your site to point some internal links to your landing page, and try to build some links from other sites to that page as well. That will help you tell Google "hey, this page is important." Good luck!

Since (I assume this is what is happening) your ecommerce platform is duplicating the entire page, code and all, and putting it at these new URLs, having the canonical tag of the original page URL in the code for the right/real page will mean that, when it gets duplicated, the canonical tag will get duplicated as well and point back to the original URL.  Make sense?

Can you talk to your ecommerce platform provider?  This can't be an intended feature!

50 redirects is a lot of redirects for one week! Sometimes when that much change has happened on a site it can longer than a few days for the site to be fully re-crawled/indexed and your rankings to normalize.  Have you updated your sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools?

I always like to put a self-canonical tag in where it makes sense, just because there are a lot of URL parameters (session IDs, tracking code, etc) that can cause duplicate URLs and it's nice to have the stripped-down plain URL be the canonical version.

Can you clarify what you mean by "the old pages are still visible to Google's bot"?  Do you mean they're still showing up in the index after the redirect is in place? If so it could just be that your site hasn't been re-crawled yet.  Some other things to check: Have you updated your internal links that pointed to the old pages so that they point to the new page?  Have you done a link building push to try to get some external link love to the new page?  Basically I would say don't rely on the redirects alone to help the bot find the new page.

Kristinn's suggestion would be another way to go: don't redirect the other pages, instead post a link at the top saying "for updated info go over here" and then canonical the old pages to the new page.  Over time though a 301 is going to be the best long-term solution. If the URL is redirecting you shouldn't need to keep the content up on the page.

Hi! So my first question would be: Are other websites in the same SERP displaying rich product snippets? If not, it may be that Google has decided that other forms of rich content are a better fit for those queries.

One frustrating thing about the structured data testing tool is that it doesn't get updated nearly as often as the algorithm itself does, so occasionally something will validate just fine in the tool but be running up against stricter requirements in the algo itself. The tool was updated pretty recently so I don't know for sure that that's the case but it is a thing that can happen.

If you'd feel comfortable sharing a URL or two (or want to PM them to me), I can take a look.

"Wine tasting" is a very broad topic. Do a Google search for "wine tasting" in an incognito or private window, and you will see that Google serves up local results for places to go wine tasting in your area, meaning that Google understands the term to have local intent - people who search "wine tasting" are looking for places nearby to go wine tasting.

For a term with local intent, you want to make sure that your Local SEO is strong - that your website clearly says your name, address, and phone number; and that your local listings are claimed using a tool like Moz Local. By targeting the term "wine tasting in Bordeaux," you are effectively targeting the term "wine tasting" for the people you care about. You wouldn't want to rank for "wine tasting Chicago" since people from Chicago won't come to you for wine tasting.

For a very broad term, it's always best to narrow it down to a related keyword. You can certainly look at "wine tasting bordeaux" in the keyword tool and see what comes up. The volume for the keywords will be smaller, but it will be much easier to rank for that term and you will know that people who search for it are the people you want to reach.

If you are targeting a more specific term like "wine tasting cellars," you will also be adding the term "wine tasting" to your page a lot - since you can't say "wine tasting cellars" without saying "wine tasting"! Focus less on using the exact keyword phrase every time, and more on using natural variations of the term. This will make your content look more natural to both users and search engines. If you were writing a page targeting "wine tasting in bordeaux" and "wine tasting cellars," and were just writing about the topic without thinking much about keyword use, you would find yourself using variations of the terms, like "bordeaux wine," "wine cellars, "wine tasting," "wine tasting in southern France," etc. That is an OK thing to do, and even a good thing to do! Google expects to see these types of related term on the page. You just want to make sure you're using your target keywords in prominent places on the page such as your title, heading tags, and in the first few paragraphs, and that you're creating great content on the topic you've chosen.

Think about people who are searching for those terms. What kind of information would they want to see? This might be things like: What time is the tasting room open? What sort of wines can they taste there? Is there a tasting fee? Where is the winery located? What is the best way to get there? Including this sort of information provides a complete answer to their query, which is what Google is looking for.

I hope that is helpful!

I would leave keyword density out of it - go ahead and do press releases, but your goal should be media coverage, not link building/SEO.

Oh that's a bummer!  Unfortunately since you don't own the domain right now there's not a ton to be done.  Fortunately, 48 hours isn't SO bad.  Google will re-crawl you when you re-launch (keep a close eye to make sure they do so correctly and all your pages get indexed), and you'll probably see a bit of a dip in traffic/rankings for a bit, but you should recover within a month or two.

I'd spend this time thinking up some ways to quickly earn some new links - maybe a new piece of content, or building some new relationships? That will mitigate the effects from this.  Good luck!

The first thing that stands out to me on these pages is that you have all of the other products that the page links to under "Related Items" marked up as well. So there are multiple values for Product and for Offer on the page. The first thing I would test would be removing this markup for the Related items, so that all the Product markup on the page applies only to the product that page is about. I suspect that Google may have gotten stricter about requirements for this, or otherwise changed the way they generate price/review snippets. So that's what I would test first. It can work to have multiple Product schemas on a category page, but on a page that is specifically about one product I would try to have all of the Product markup on that page be about that product.

The other thing you may want to update is your height and width properties. It looks like you're currently using the type "Intangible" for these, when their expected types would be either QuantitativeValue or Distance, so I would update those too.

You may also find this blog post useful: https://moz.com/blog/search-marketers-guide-to-itemref-itemid

Good luck!

Wistia's sharing buttons still share the URL where the video is embedded, not the individual video - just like the buttons we have implemented.  We just don't want to have redundant sharing buttons all over the page, so we skip Wistia's sharing buttons in favor of the buttons already in our blog template.

Your site should not be affected by other sites hosted by the same provider.  Think about huge nationwide hosting sites like GoDaddy - if sharing hosting with websites with questionable content was a problem, a LOT of websites would have a problem!

The good news is you're not crazy - I've tested a few sites I know for sure have rel=publisher implemented correctly and it's not showing the publisher markup in the tool. I imagine it's a bug in the tool (it's a notoriously buggy tool). The bad news is there's not much to be done but wait for the tool to be updated. In the meantime, you can spot-check your markup by googling your brand regularly - sooner or later you should see the publisher markup be added to your brand SERP. You can also check your Google+ page to make sure you get the little check mark that says "verified site." Sorry I don't have a better answer for you, but I don't think there is one!

The competitor should have no way to disavow links to your client's site. Even if they had somehow managed to disavow the links, the links themselves would still be in place. Have you checked the linking pages? Do they still exist? Can you tell why the links were removed? Do you have a good enough relationship with the owners of any of the linking sites to be able to reach out to them and see if you can get the links put back, or at least see why they were removed?

I agree with Miriam. The only thing I would add here - consider making changes to your lead conversion form to reinforce the "we only work in California" aspect. This could be like a check box up front that says "Are you located in California?" If they select "No," the rest of the form disappears and they get a message that says "At this time, we're only able to serve the California area. Thank you for your interest!" or something. You could keep your lead form as-is and if people select a state other than California when entering their location information, send them to a different thank you page that delivers a similar message.

Basically, I would recommend changing your lead process so that a.) it's really clear to users that you don't operate outside of California, and b.) the information about whether or not a lead is from California is easy to see up-front in your lead management system. You'll probably still get some irrelevant leads (everyone does), but you'll be able to deal with them quicker.