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Hi there. Well, here is my question - how can you be sure that traffic from Bing is related to sitemaps resubmission? How about, simply, rankings? Or one of tons of other reasons?

Thanks Rand. I suspected so. It was a very intriguing experiment you conducted. My take away... there are no more short cuts without getting into trouble with Google... just smart and hard work, keeping your plate clean. Thanks for your response!

Thanks guys. That was what I thought. But, it is always good to get some conformation.

If you want to a free test to crawl use this https://www.deepcrawl.com/forms/free-crawl-report/ Please remember that URIs & URLs are different so your site with 300,000 URLs  might have 600,000 URIs if you want to see how it works for free you can sign up for a free crawl for your first 10,000 pages. I am not affiliated with the company aside from being a very happy customer.

Hello! The standard and medium plans will each have a set limit to crawl up to 50,000 pages. The higher plans have adjustable limits, 10,000, 20,000, etc. Hope this helps

Thank you, Cyrus. Your response is very much appreciated. Since I posted this question, our reports have been showing the links are starting to drop off. I will update this thread if something happens.

Is the bounce rate on the homepage high? Leave the store page and make the homepage more conversion friendly is my recommendation. I understand them wanting to get the user one click closer, but not really the best solution, try to mimic the store page on the home page a bit a keep track of changes and increases or decreases so you can revert if need be. FYI look at the links in your left nav here http://www.iboats.com/aboutus.html  and also your global footer, you are nofollowing internal links, this is throwing away precious page juice.

No.  The expires directive is merely there to tell the browser "this content is at least good until date X", so that the browser doesn't need to fetch it if it's got it cached. So let's say you've got a dynamically-generated page called widgets.php, and it pulls a list of products, latest pricing, availability etc. from the database.  Let's say you style the page with an external stylesheet.css, you've got some awesome wacky UI stuff in Javascript in an external wackystuff.js, and your images for navigation on the site are in /img/nav (but product images, which maybe can change more frequently) are in /img/products. You might NOT set the Expires header on your .php files and folders, as those should be considered to expire the second after the browser fetches them.  You might set the Expires header for the CSS file to a week out; same with the JS and the /img/nav folders, as those only change with a major update to the site.  You might set the Expires header date for the /img/products folder to maybe an hour or two, so that if a person is flipping back and forth between pages, the browser will use the cached product image for a little while before forcing a refetch of it. Make sense?

Well - he's done more than a few so it's easy for one to go MIA.  Like a Cutts video.

That's why you are not sweating the Penguin update... you think and breath like your father.

Thanks Takeshi. I am using Open Site Explorer, and notice a drop there too, but realized different results with the addition or exclusion of "www". I have used the other tools you mentioned. I just wanted to make sure that Google wasn't trying to mask or restrict our access to seeing website's backlinks. That could really hurt our abilities to build backlinks. Thanks for your input.

Thanks Jeepster, that video answered my question. It just seems like Google was showing a lot more links on the link: search than they currently are.

So your algorithm for the On Page Report is the same, or hasn't changed. Is your advice on the report card up to date? I don't have anything that I'm questioning. I just want to make sure that the advice on each one of the checks is best practices to the best of your knowledge. I am sharing this information with clients and co-workers as best SEO practices for on-page optimization. Thanks for your reply!

Are there no opinions on this topic?

Glad to hear you appear to be back on the right track

My traffic and rankings are all normal. So I'm making an assumption that Google is just doing some cleaning up in Webmaster Tools by not showing a lot of of those internal links that are not being given a lot of value anyway. It's been almost two weeks now, and nothing is affected. Thanks for your reply and input. If anyone else has seen this with their internal links, I'd be interested in your outcome.

Yes they are on the same server. These are sister sites that have been live and up for about 7 to 8 years. They get decent traffic, which is directed to our main sites. They were not necessarily set up for link juice. But, until last week, the links were showing up in webmaster tools. I'm assuming that Google is just doing some clean up, since they were not giving them link value anyway. Just wanted to make sure that was it and not something else I should be concerned about. We do outside link building to legitimate sites, and do get good results. Just seeing if anyone is seeing the adjustment from Google from sister sites.

CafePress is right on. Your position may also benefit from links to your page with your target text nearby, so cafepress' suggestion of Boat Covers from [Company] or similarly   [Company] Boat Covers should be on the right track.

Thanks again Alan!