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Google is not liking the fact that I have numerous synonym pages, where the only difference is Title and Meta variantions, along with a chunk of content in a layer not visible on page load to the user.

I would highlight this issue as a major concern. We know for sure Google does not like duplicate pages, nor hidden content so these are going to be your issues.

What Google wants to see is each page offers unique content, and the content is prominently displayed to users up front. Burying the unique content in the footer, hiding it with java script and any other form of shell game will leave you quite unhappy because sooner or later you will wind up on this Q&A asking what happened to your rankings.

As for the rest, try to keep your linking natural and don't force it.

As you mentioned, it takes time to see any adjustments truly settle into the rankings. Some differences might be obvious the next day. Others may take weeks to appear. Google samples your site, and the web, in pieces. Site owners often make improvements to their site, see something they don't like in SERPs, panic, then make other changes as a result.. Don't panic.

You need the ability to understand SEO at a level where you have confidence in the changes you are making. Make the proper adjustments then just watch. Don't touch your site for 30 days and then check the results. If they are not to your liking, look for other adjustments. The other alternative is to hire a SEO who can do the work for you. If you do hire a SEO, understand we don't have magic wands or buddies at Google. The same rules apply to us as well.

Google's crawler will always attempt to crawl any links it finds. If somewhere on the internet there is a link to an old URL and Google sees that link, it will never stop trying to explore that link. Each time it attempts to crawl the link, it will see the 301 and follow the redirect, but if you ever remove that redirect then the original URL will be seen.

Have you checked the backlinks? The only logical reason I can think of for the index.php versions of the URL to outperform the friendly versions is more sites have linked to them.

I would make every effort to convince the client to use friendly URLs. Users clearly prefer them and technologies change. Even if they are using .php today, in a couple years it may be a dead technology and they will have to redirect their entire site. It's not a logical business move.

With the above noted, if you wish to perform the redirect of all pages except the home page to the index.php form of the URL, it is doable with the proper regex expression. The issues I foresee have already been shared:

• URLs are harder to read by users and are therefore less friendly

• URLs are longer so therefore more difficult to share naturally in tweets (for example) without a URL shortening service

• URLs include "php" so when the site's technology changes the URLs will need to be redirected

• Users may experience confusion related to the inconsistent URL formats of the home page and the rest of the site

• Long URLs are cut off. You mentioned using other languages. If a page's title involves foreign characters, those characters are converted in the URL to ?unicode. It is where you see characters like "%20" replace a single character. With foreign URLs the length can often exceed maximums which is an issue. Keeping index.php is an extra 9 characters added to every URL.

This decision approaches the SEO equivalent of a patient going against their doctor's advice. If it was my client, I would want a very firm acknowledgment this decision was against my advice and industry best practices.

URL shorteners like Bit.ly are actually 301 redirects and work as such. You can enter in the URL then examine the page using the mozbar Page Attributes and see the 301 redirect take place.

Those are both options. The format is not a factor, but their accessibility is the important piece.

You can offer a private blog or Q&A section which is only available to registered members. Neither would be beneficial from a SEO perspective.

Search engines crawl the web. They (normally) do not fill out logins or forms. If you can access a page from a "clean" pc without any cache or saved passwords, then search engines can see the page as well and will have an opportunity to index it.

The only issue with link juice is the normal concern with any 301 redirect. Some link juice will be lost, and it will be amplified if multiple redirects are involved.

Try this link: http://mz.cm/vr5WDE

The above link is to this Q&A. Use your mozbar, examine Page Attributes and scroll to the bottom. Notice the bit.ly url is a 301 redirect to this URL. That's what bit.ly is, a 301 redirect service.

Do not automatically assume all services perform the redirect the same way. Always check before committing to any service.

Think of URLs are formed in the following pattern: AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD

When you see you URL as 100.200.222.050 then your C block is "222".

Each domain company usually is assigned 1 C block for all their servers. So yes, you would need to use a different company for your second site.

Your HTML sitemap is for users. It should present your links in such a manner as to be useful for users who are looking for a page on your site.

An example sitemap for a large site: http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/sitemap.jsp

It does not contain a link to every last page. It is more of a helpful directory. I would suggest you adjust your HTML sitemap in a similar manner. Treat is as a page of links for users.

There are over 200 factors that ultimately determine a page's ranking. A page could choose to not follow many of them and still rank well. In your case it seems Sunset ranks as #1 which is largely due to their very strong DA and PA. Yours is good, there's is better.

With respect to the title, it is given a weighting based on how many words it contains and the position of the words. When you add additional words to your title, your weight is diluted amongst those other words. Your focus is not as strong and you will not rank as well.

As I look at your site I see other opportunities for improvement. Some of your alt text may be seen as inappropriate such as "Build your own raised garden bed with anchor and stacking joints". The ALT tag is supposed to offer you an opportunity to describe the picture in a few words.

Your site also has 9400+ bold characters on the page. That is definitely too much. You can use CSS or other means to make the text appear darker. Bold should be used for words which need to stand out on the page. If you use bold for the entire page, a search engine will most likely view it negatively and at best disregard the weight and at worst penalize you for abuse.

There is a huge amount of sites which do not use alt text. Also an address or anything which might change would be better shared in text. Lastly, opinions vary but it is logical for search engines to offer more weight to actual text which visitors can read then for ALT text which can easily be manipulated and most visitors never see.

Until search engines begin using OCR for indexing I would recommend not placing any text in images. Place the text as a transparent overlay on top of an image is one possible alternative. There are many ways to present the text.

I have experienced this same issue with Google.

I just began a test by making a change on my site to one of the URLs. I am bookmarking this Q&A and will try to remember to update it if I see a change. It can take Google some time to check any individual link so it could take weeks.

In case you are curious, I have added a 410 status code for one of the pages involved. 410 means the resource is gone, while 404 is simply not found. Perhaps the 410 header code will send the right message to Google.

The only way to find out is to shoot them an e-mail. Either way you will discover the answer

The best option would be to take the pages on a case-by-base basis.

Each page should ideally cover a specific focus. For example if an article discusses "the grapefruit diet" you can redirect the URL to another page on your site that discusses dieting. If you understand what users want from the page and have similar content, help your users make the connection they seek rather then 404'ing the page or dumping them on your home page.

If you do not have any similar content, check the page's backlinks. If there are none then I would let the page 404. This would be a good time to ensure your site's 404 page is helpful. A navigation bar and search option would be good to show on the page.

If the page has valuable backlinks and there is no related content on your site, perhaps the page still has value even though the author is gone. If you still wish to remove the page you should redirect the traffic to your home page or main directory as you suggested.

Perhaps this video would be more helpful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRzMhlFZz9I

The URL is a ranking factor, but it should not be focused to this level of detail. It is one of over 200 ranking factors, most of the weight goes to the domain name and the keywords deeper in the URL have very very very little effect on ranking. Where it matters more is for users to be able to read the URL prior to clicking through. If you make your URL too long, then it will get cut off and the most important terms at the end wont be viewed.

If you feel "Oakwood estates" is not helpful and you also feel the town name is very important, then you could make your URLs homebuilder.com/town/floor-plans.

The effect of keywords in your URLs comes more into play when sites link to you using the URL. If sites do not link to you, it's not really going to matter. If sites do link to you but use anchor text, it wont matter either. Even if sites link to you using a keyword stuffed URL, there will be so many terms in it the weight given to each term will be so low it wont make any meaningful difference.

Jay, you are asking a great question and the answer is yes, links that are offered from URL shortener services build DA.

Think of those links as 301s. When you use http://bit.ly/xyz that URL is 301'd to the actual web address. As with all 301s, you do lose a bit of link juice due to the 301, but 90%+ of the value will remain.

You originally shared "Monday morning, I realized that my website, which had been showing up at the bottom of page 2 for a specific result, had now been demoted to the bottom of page 6 (roughly a 40 spot demotion). No other keyword searches were affected."

What is the URL of the specific web page which was affected? What is the keyword phrase which experienced the drop?

Do not request for Google to remove the URL. It would mean the page would be de-indexed for 90 days.

The cleanup will depend on the root cause. If there is an issue on the site right now then you cannot resolve the problem until it is fixed. Report the issue to your host and ask they run a security scan. Meanwhile run your own scans and upgrade the site to 1.7. Change all passwords then check the site again.

For facebook, if you use the proper open graph meta data your Likes will be consolidated.

With respect to Google +1, I can share my viewpoint and best guess. You are presently choosing to canonicalize these pages, but they are in fact separate web pages. You can choose to remove the canonical tag at any time so the data needs to be tracked separately.

I have never encountered a developer who resisted using a redirect for the non-www URLs to the www form. If you have access to the server, the change should be able to be made.

If you decide not to use a 301,use a canonical tag to identify the correct version of the page. I would also use both Google and Bing Webmaster Tools to indicate which URL format you wish to use.

SH404SEF and AceSEF seem to be the two most favored SEO extensions for Joomla.

SH404SEF is a pure SEO extension. It focuses on core SEO and the author is a SEOmoz reader.

AceSEF offers a lot of extra functionality outside of the core SEO. The extra functionality is useful such as internal linking, site maps, etc. but those features can also be obtained from other extensions.