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I agree ! A long time ago, before I knew much about SEO, I had a website redesigned and the traffic tanked big time.   After that, even though I am not a "designer," almost all elements of our websites are built in-house.  Not only do you have control over the SEO, but you also don't have to pull teeth and get into arguments to get things done the way you want. We keep 'em simple and they look OK.

Thank you for all your help, this answers my questions.

it does make sense: my point is that bycicletrip.com/france is a good Landing Page url.

It let your image be found for Google or other Search Engines. If not remove that line, none images will be show on serps. I don't know why Joomla gives robots.txt as this, but you need to change it.

We may be able to give a more complete answer if you had a link to the site in question.

Hi, Do you mean the patent that Google published years ago? They've done a bit of updating to the algo since then. What makes sense for your users for linking categories? Don't forget that they are an important part of your site.

Why don't you private message me your URL and I will take a look for you

This should be obvious from your navigation. If it isn't then that could be an area that needs attention.  However it is also dependent on the structure of your site.  It is perfectly possible to build a site without a level based hierarchy.  It might just be confusing to use unless it was predominately used with an on site search. However it should be pretty obvious.

Hi, My advice to you would be to link to the separate top level categories if it is useful to the website user. Build the website for the user, not for search engines, and the rankings will come. E.g on the green widgets page you could have a clear funnel to each type of green widget and then some text such as "Prefer red widgets? We've got a great range of red widgets available for purchase." Again, I would only use this if it was useful to the website user. Another example might be if green widget 2 is exactly the same as red widget 2 except for the colour. You'd obviously want to link these 2 as they are related items and the user might want to visit the other colour widget. Thanks

This is a HUGE question, and honestly you should probably get some SEO consultation from someone who is familiar with ecommerce URL architecture. Having said that, you can look at some other sites that are doing a good job. Take a look at REI and Zappos. Keep in mind that you should design for humans first and search engines second. If having a site-wide navigation link for your categories is going to help you sell more shoes, and help your customers find what they are looking for than you should do it. It's easier to make a website that was built for UX more SEO friendly.

Site-Wide links are absolutely valid and best practice implementation when they are pointing to a page on your site that is high value.  Think of it like this - your main site-wide navigation should point to your highest level product or services page, your "about" page, your "contact" page, and so forth.  This is based on user experience.  Users should be able to effortlessly get directly to those most important pages.  The home page is NOT the only very important page on the site, so why would you hide links to those others? At the same time, it's NOT best practices to attempt to artificially increase the "perceived importance" of a page that should not be considered that important from a user perspective. This concept is also about a bigger concern I have with your understanding.  If you do not properly set up site architecture to help users, your home page will not get it's maximum value anyhow.  And your home page should not, by itself, automatically rank higher for all your primary phrases than those other high level pages should.

I also include my sitemap in the robots.txt ref: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_txt sitemap: [absoluteURL]

Not quite clear on what you're asking, but a few comments: Breadcrumbs are a good thing on almost all websites. I can't think of a situation where I wouldn't recommend them. Breadcrumbs are links on the page - not sure what you mean by "static" but Google will count them as links. Don't worry about funneling link value to your homepage. That's going to happen inevitably since it's linked to from every page of your site. You're better off interlinking those internal pages on your site.

Again, yes and no to having to wait. I wrote an article that was 1st page (and still is) within just 4 hours. That was down to Google+ With so many factors, it is hard to try and judge what has made a difference. Also be aware that sometimes a site can get a false bump for a shirt period of time after a major change, only to settle back again once Google has analysed it all again - just be sure it wasn't something like this as in 12 years, I have never seen just a change of structure make a dramatic change. Hope you get everything sorted

What you have there is just blocking rootdomain.com/javascript:void(0).  Googlebot can execute and index JavaScript; you should not block it without a good reason.  I'd let it read the JavaScript and see the submenus.

Agree with John's response, but to add two points: 1. You can also set redirects manually via a .htaccess file if using Joomla.  The format is very simple: redirect 301 /oldpage.html /newpage.html It takes some time, but I'm generally of the opinion that it's worth it when these appear in GWMT. 2.  There's a feature in Webmaster Tools now to mark the errors as 'resolved'.  That can help clean things up for you.  If the errors aren't really resolved, Google states in the help documentation that they will eventually reappear for you to find again.

If you set up the http://example.com to http://www.example.com for the entire domain, then you don't have to worry about the other pages. You can do this by putting the following code in your .htaccess file: RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Imagine that one of the keywords your homepage ranks for is your brand name. If you look for some of your services (subpage) and you make a search using a keyword containing a branded keyword within, probably your first result is your homepage. Your homepage would be ranking for this branded keyword very well. Moreover, if your homepage has a lot of backlinks using your branded keyword as anchor text, then, making a search for finding a subpage using your branded keyword is a bad idea, as your homepage is ranking better than any other subpage in your site. Hope to be helpful.