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I agree with your point; however, scanning a competitors keywords tag is, as you said, just a starting point (assuming they didn't dump their entire link building campaign worth of keywords/phrases into the tag).

For example, a keywords tag for a real estate site homepage might be: content="real estate, homes for sale, houses for sale", or something along those lines.  Now, those keywords might be useful for the search engines that still respect the keywords tag, but they're not any help to competition as you probably could have guess, just by looking at the site, that those were keywords they are probably trying to optimize for, anyways.

Just remember, Google's not the only search engine out there.

It'd be foolish to give away any trade secrets within those tags, anyways, so there's not much to worry about in my opinion.

Ya, this is what I was talking about.  Just a standard canonical html tag inserted into the framework.

That will clear everything up for you (might take a wee bit, but Google will recognize it right away).

No need for .htaccess whatsoever since the content is identical.  If the content were different, ie. the ?print page showed a completely different style format, then sure, setup some 301's to get the user's to the right page.  But not needed for your situation.

Always optimize for the user, not for the bots.

What I mean by that is, create titles that are typically phrases that make sense to people as they'll be more willing to click on that result within the SERP's.

The title tag is simply just a one-liner of what the page is about, just in a catchy way.  If it looks/sounds robotic, people will notice, and in turn, crawlers will notice.

To fully answer your question: unique is always better.  Creating custom title tags whenever possible, outside of the template, robotic style, will warrant you better results.

Canonical will suffice as it is basically a 301 anyways.  Cleaner too as there is no actual redirect for the user, or bot, to endure.

You can also set it up in Google Webmaster Tools under 'Site Configuration > URL Parameters' to ignore that parameter; however, using the canonical tag will more than suffice in this case.

These sites don't pass the juice that they may have once passed as it become such an easy way for people to pay to get hundreds, even thousands of backlinks in a matter of a couple days without even having to distribute quality content articles.

I can't confirm what amount of juice they might pass as I just don't know, but I'm confident it's not the full amount that you might get if say BBC News picked you up outside of a sponsored article.

Reason being, in my opinion, is that these sites have just become littered with press releases that are not of much quality (not all, but most).  And Google has recognized this and is dealing with it appropriately.  In all honesty, who actually goes to http://ezinearticles.com/ to read the articles?  Not me.  But people just use it to try and get a million backlinks; meanwhile, Google has completely stripped the site of passing any PR externally.  Same as its done with Craigslist and other classifieds websites.

So, in my opinion, don't exert too much energy on these kinds of releases.  They can help get you a wee bit of recognition as it never hurts to get your name out there one way or another, but you're not going to see any significant increase in traffic, if any at all.

Your best to focus that same energy on creating relationships with companies that compliment your site, and vice versa.

Hope that helps.

• Marc

It will show Images if the sitemap contains references to images and image sitemap syntax tags.

Can you post a snippet of the first 10 lines or so of your sitemap here?  Feel free to mask the domain name (ie. www.website.com instead of your actual domain, if you want), but leave the file extension and all other syntax.

See here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=178636

However, it's believed that there are still smaller search engines out there that do.  It doesn't hurt IMO, so why not include it?

Just don't bloat it with a million keywords.  Keep it short and sweet to what the page content is about; just like adding tags in Wordpress.

I wouldn't worry (easy to say, hard to do), because if their content and such is as garbage as you say, it will catch up with them.

Google (and other search engines) track bounce rates on SERP click-through's.  Meaning, if a user clicks one of your shady competitors in the SERP's, quickly realizes that the site is no good (ie. scraped, useless content; littered with ads, etc), then they will quickly come back to the SERP's and continue trying other sites.  Google tracks this with cookies and uses it to determine whether a site is useful or not, and deserves the spot in the SERP's that they currently have.  I believe there's a 10 or 30 second 'bounce back' window where if the user clicks back to the SERP's within one of those 2 timeframes (if someone can confirm 10 or 30 seconds), then it's promising for you (assuming your bounce rate is low compared to theirs).  However, these things take time to iron out, especially if these sites have a ton of backlinks.

"on page optimization is superb"

Care to share your site and let others help be the judge of that?  Second and third opinions can never hurt (usually

Only if you want.

• Marc

What kind of "crawl warnings" are we talking about here?  Duplicate content?  Do the URL's resolve properly when the additional parameters are appending to the SEO-friendly URL's?

"I should note that all pages generated by these parameters use the element to point back to the SEO-friendly URL We have also set up Google's Webmaster Tools to handle these parameters."

Keep in mind, using canonical tags is like setting up 301 redirects on all those pages.  Some people don't now that, so I thought I'd just throw it out there.  So, if any of those additional pages with the host of parameters contain unique/different content than the seo-friendly versions, using canonical tags is not a good move as they will get no attention from search engines that respect the canonical tag.

For example, do not use a canonical tag on a 'Page 2' to point back to page 1.  Each page will contain different information/products/whatever, and you want search engines (SE) to see and index those pages, regardless of what the URL looks like (as long as it works and your Title/META/H1-H6 tags are all in order to reflect the different content on each page.

I'm not sure I'm following your concern 100% percent, so I hope I was on the right path with what I said.  Can you please be more specific as to what you concern is with the "overly-dynamic and long ULR warnings" please, and I'll be happy to help you out some more.

• Marc

Agreed.  Search engines geo-locations tools are based off IP address, so if your work, for example, has a server located in another country, that could throw off your results.  Take my server at work, it's based in the US while I'm in Canada.

I usually check things like that on my Blackberry to get a non-biased result (usually).

Another thing to keep in mind is if you're logged into a Google account your results could also differ as Google will try and serve you biased results based on your browsing preferences.  You can also append &pws=0 to any given Google search results URL to disable personalized results, ie. http://www.google.ca/search?aq=f&gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=property+in+spain&pws=0

So, logout and append the &pws=0 as shown above to ensure you are getting the most unbiased results possible (of course, you're still going to be geo-targeted by Google, but unless you have several proxy's, there's nothing you can do).

The way you have to look at it is...

Best-case scenario: write completely original content for every one of your pages, and receive the highest ranking from search engines.

• OR -

Use existing content provided by manufacturers and not receive full potential in the SERP's.  That's just the way it is.

I know exactly what you're saying though, don't get me wrong... writing unique content for 1,000's of pages can be a pain, especially if you're adding new ones on a regular basis.  I just gave you the Pro/Con of your situation.

If you could ever find the time to write unique write-ups for every product, and get that out of the way, and then you're at a point where you're only adding a new product every week or so (even daily isn't that bad in terms of maintaining a website, really), then you'd be laughing and you'll see a massive difference in the SERP's as your content would be 100% unique and people would start scraping your site for theirs.

Very interesting.  I never knew that.

And wow, that's the oldschool Yahoo design.  Haven't seen that look since viewing Yahoo.com in the WayBack machine..

"Maybe a premature panic then. Maybe a local issue?"

Combination of both We've all been there.

I see you mid-second page on google.co.uk

Doing a site:masainternational.com shows that you are still indexed.

All looks good to me unless I'm misunderstanding.

Big question: are you changing folder/url structure for aesthetics or functionality?  Often times it's not worth making such a large change in hopes of getting some SEO-friendly URL's, as the weight on SEO-friendly URL's isn't what it once was.  And the headache involved, as well as the inevitable loss in traffic, is quite often not worth it at all.

With that said, refresh your entire sitemap with the new URL's once they are made.  Remove all old urls.

IMPORTANT: setup 301 redirects, either using .htaccess or PHP (or whatever language your site uses), to redirect all old urls to the respective new urls.  You will lose a fair chunk of PR during this change, but if you feel your site will benefit greatly from a structure change, then you will be willing to take the hit.

Don't leave any redirect un-turned.  Then, you'll just have to wait it out while Google re-indexes your entire site trying to figure out your new url structure.  Could take a week, could take months.  All depends on what Google has valued your site as.  For example, if CNN changed their entire URL structure, they probably would miss a beat.  Smaller websites tend to take much larger hits in the SERP's.

So, just be sure it's a necessary action, trust me.  And don't ever remove those 301's from your .htaccess as you never know what Google still has in their index for your site.

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.*)$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

Put that in your .htaccess within your root web directory (typically public_html), and you should be good.

Make sure you save your .htaccess file properly (save as "All files" and not "as text file" so the .txt doesn't get appended to it.

You must look at ranking in the SERP's as a popularity contest, so-to-speak.  Backlinks by way of websites and social mediums are votes and can/will determine your placement in the search results.

Your chosen keywords/phrases might be extremely competitive, as well.  When starting out with a site, it's best to select some niche, lower volume keywords, which are often more long-tail than the aggresive, highly-competitive 1-3 word keyphrases.  Trust me, going for the gusto right off the bat will only leave you more and more frustrated as the years go on.  You can always adjust your keywords down the road once you've established a good roll of backlinks and visitors to continue being more competitive.

And as I mentioned in an earlier post today, don't just focus on Google.  There are other search engines out there as well, and you'd be making a large mistake in focusing solely on Google for SERP's as Bing/Yahoo holds a decent market share, too.

Keep trucking.  SEO is an art-form.  It's not something just anybody can do on a whim and expect to get to #1 overnight.  It might be wise to invest in an SEO team to help get you pointed in the right direction.

• Marc

To handle this you need to setup a permanent redirect from mydomain.tld to www.mydomain.tld (or vice versa).

If your site is running Apache you can use a .htaccess file do handle this.

Simply create a file called .htaccess (make sure when you save the file you are not saving it as .txt as that with append the .txt to the file like so: .htaccess.txt which you do not want; save as 'All Files' or whatever), and save it to your public_html directory, or whatever your web root is.

Add the following:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.mydomain.tld$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.tld/$1 [L,R=301]

That should now effectively keep your site from being broken into 2.

Google also recommends you create two(2) Profiles within Google Webmaster Tools, one for the www. and one for the non www. where you can then specify under "Site Configuration > Settings > Preferred Domain" which method you have chosen as per your .htaccess file.

Hope that answers your question.

A large difference I've noticed with Bing vs Google in the years has been that Google is more inclined to index and place a site within the SERP's much quicker, basically giving a new site 'the benefit of the doubt'; however, that site must maintain a good standing throughout the course of the 'sandbox' period to ensure they don't drop off the map after  a year or two.

Bing seems to show preference towards domains that are aged.  Their search index, at least at one point; I'm sure they're working to update, or might have even done so already, doesn't seem to be as fresh as Google's, which has its advantages as well.

With Google, you'll often find many new sites at the top of the SERP's for any given search on a non-highly-competitive search term.  Just Google's way of getting more information to the masses whether it's a scraped site of not (unfortunately, I'm still finding scraped sites in the index).  Where Bing seems to have sites that are tried and true.

Just my observations over the years.  However, it's been a while since I've really paid a whole lot of attention to this.

Well, to begin, Yahoo search is now run off the Bing algorithm (algo).  So while there may still be a "Yahoo Slurp" crawler out there, it's based on a different algo than once before.  Bing now completely runs Yahoo search.

Search engines have their own algorithms.  There is no specific algo that they all must adhere to.  So while rankings for your site might go up in one engine, they might very well go down in another (or not move at all).

And I can assume Bing watches for black-hat SEO tactics, although I don't have any physical data to back that up.  But it's safe to say they do.

Huge mistake website owners make is to optimize their sites for Google only.  Google only makes up 65% (?) of the search market, so by optimizing for Google, and Google alone, you're cutting off a potential 35% of traffic.

There is a ton of forums, documentation, webmaster tools for Bing, just as there is Google, so you need to put in that extra effort to see what makes a site rank well in Bing.

As long as you stick to the fundamentals, ie. proper internal link structure, attain solid/safe, relevant backlinks to your site, use your Webmaster tools (and SEOmoz ;)) to make sure site errors and such are taken care of, and get your HTML error free with proper H1-H6 tags (where applicable)/title tags, meta tags, etc., then, and only then, should you start tweaking your site for direct optimization for each engine.