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I would say that golf clubs would serve you better than just clubs. Clubs can also mean a gathering place for folks with similar interests where you get clear results for the keyword golf clubc if you mention it in the URL itself.

Hi Laurent,

If its wordpress, I can think of a few plugins to help you there. SEO Smart links is a great plugin to help you in that respect. URL: http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/seo-smart-links

Then there is a popular post plugin which will showcase your popular posts in the sidebar. This is a great way to leverage you old/archived content.

James,

The easiest way is to get rid of the 9999 at the last of the URL. If you can, add a rel=canonical tag for all such pages. That should normally work.

If the problem is rampant, you may want to remove the "show all products" option from pages that do not have more products to showcase. I would also suggest using a mod rewrite on apache to write better URLs for the same. Category33 sounds a bit weird to me. It could be named more SEO friendly.

If you want to get more information on rel=canonical implementation here is a link to help.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

Add a rel=canonical tag for the pages that have multiple URLs.

You can see some resources here.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

If you use the rel= canonical tag you will have to do it for all pages with this issue. If the issue is widespread, you can consider a 301, but that wont be very effective for SEO purposes when compared to rel=canonical tag.

The 1st question I would ask myself as a website owner is: How many pages have duplicate content on them? Maybe try going the manual way and check for yourself. There will be pages you do not know about. Use a tool like Xenu's link sleuth to extract all links on your website(which are reachable from atleast 1 link of your website).

It may happen that google is adjusting its index for all. Worth keeping a track on whether your competitors are losing at the same or slower rate or not.

Every client is different. Never judge a client by their profile or website name or even by the nature of their website.

You must talk to every client and understand what their accurate needs are. Then only, you will be able to understand which provider will be good for the given requirement.

I like the question set that has been posted by Richard here. Some questions to add maybe:

1. How would you deal with a content heavy website which requires URL rewriting?

2. What measurement tool (free) would they use to measure social engagement?

3. What would be a website's most important success and failure metric?

Based on that, you will be able to judge which agency best fits your client's requirements

Ross,

the fun part is that even Google doesnt know if the website hosted on the same set of IPs have the same owner or belong to different owners. Shared webhosts have such issues. Although, it maybe worthwhile to see if the IPs in that range are getting page rank or not.

As Barry said, it wont give you much mileage.

Try these tips too:

-Ask for video testimonials from your client's customers

-Add industry trends, studies and analysis and make sure you email a relevant group of people letting them know that you have this study in place.

-Build twitter/facebook streams and invite your client's customers.

-Do some tight PPC based on exact matches and pin pointed geographical targeting. That will tell you what opprtunities you maybe missing

• Do some more keyword research and also ask your friends for search suggestions by building user scenarios. Explain your client's product/service to them and get from them what they might be typing on Google/search engines. Do a research on whether your same set of competitors appear on that set and its related set of keywords or not.

• Update your client's user base with newsletters which are actually useful to them.

Based on the version you have on your server, these documents would be helpful:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html

Please note: this is not something you would like to do unless you know Apache confuration yourself and you know the codes and its logic.

Subdomains do not pass on good link juice to your domain. As Alan rightly pointed out the value is undermined due to the fact that Google sees them as separate domains.

Have you tried apache based redirection and URL rewriting?

Its tmart.com

I think that Rand posted an article sometime back on this.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

Lindsay followed it up last year with this:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not

You can read through them and have a good understanding of the best practices involved.

What i dont understand is why have you implemented rel=canonical to both pages. Its not required on your target page, that is, http://www.autopartstomorrow.com/parts/6052317-r-econ-semi-met-brake-pads-

You just require it on your other page.

Hope that helps.

If you are using Google webmaster tools, it maybe a good thing to check the option "fetch as Googlebot". Its under the labs menu on the left navigation sidebar. That should give you a better insight of what Google is seeing. I think that you should have the capibility to insert some text (if possible) on the homepage in plain HTML so that Google doesnt only come across javascripts but also comes across meaningful content. I dont see much of a problem with your website as of now, but fetch as Googlebot would definitely help.

Sam,

A few questions before I answer your question.

How many other websites would be listed on that page?

Do they openly offer such deals of buying links?

Will you be getting a HTML textlink with nofollow?

Is the page hosting your link followed and indexed?

Shwan,

I have noticed that when you have a long URL structure with multiple folders, Google tends to lose "interest" in your deep pages.

Let me give you an example: If you have a domain called www.website.com and you have a category called gemstones. In gemstones, you have diamond as a subcategory and a solitaire as a page.

If you consider your homepage to have an importance of 1, you would not have a category page which also has an importance of greater than or equal to 1. So, your category page gets a page weight value...lets say 0.9. Now, your subcategory page is treated that same way and you give it a page weight of say 0.8. Now, your solitaire page gets a value less than 0.8. Now, if you cut out one or more levels in your URL, you have a better chance of assigning of a higher value to your page.

Now, coming to your question. Breadcrumbs are essentially meant to help your users navigate better. So, your website hiearchy (the folders, sub folders or categories, sub categories) should reflect in your breadcrumb.

So, keep your URLs short, but keep your breadcrumbs like your website flow.

If you are competing in the local space, you might consider enrolling into local directories, Google places and ask people to write reviews on them. Company directories like hotfrog could be beneficial to you as well.

Sadly, domain age is still a factor in ranking and age old websites tend to rank better due to ranking history in Google.

Construction agencies have mocks, build ups and all kinds of work models which they can showcase. That is something you can identify and do well on.

Also, construction niche is a very less explored niche where you do not find local blogs catering specifically to that niche. It would be a good idea to start a blog giving advice, tips and all.

At the end of the day its all about engagement and I am sure that one day, you will be able to make it through to the top.

Posterous and platforms like tumblr, blogger do not necessarily count as legitimate backlinks, but they are good for SEO. If you have mentions of these on blogger, tumblr and posterous, you may have a better visibility on SERPs based on Google's algorithm's QDF factor.

Therefore, it maybe a good idea to post on these websites in legitimate ways to get leverage.

I think that 100 links is just a guideline rather than a hard rule. I believe that your most relevant links, your sitemap index and other indispensible links should be only placed on the homepage. The idea of the homepage is to have links leading to the most important links to your next level of links (category links). If you have a page with more than 100 links means that you have a bad hiearchy in terms of Google. I wouldnt advocate it.

David,

I do not see the benefit of paid directories for SEO. I would rather invest that amount towards testing out the efficacy of my target keywords through PPC.

1st of all, make an image sitemap and submit to Google. Here are the guidelines to do so.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=178636

Then, do some default tag and category definition. As Barry pointed out, it makes a lot of sense to categorize. That would add relevance to your website in searches.

Then, at the backend, assign default tags for the categories. Like for cars, the default tag could be automobiles, for scenery it could be nature so on and so forth. That would help in your optimization.