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Sounds like you should be in a position to know fairly quickly then. Give it a week or two and see what happens.

Yes, maybe I was a little blunt there, sorry about that, it wasn't how I intended it.

Nothing wrong with a sales page as the front page if your clients are mostly direct and you expect that to remain the case.

With that said if they have gone to the trouble of typing in your URL, they are expressing quite a lot of interest already, so it's unlikely that they'll begrudge clicking through to a sales page if you make it an obvious and desirable option.

Initial error on my part it wasn't inviting as I expected, but they have all now gone.

Sorry for the delay.

That makes sense and it sounds like you're going about things the right way, but do you really need to noindex the items?

Could you not add the canonical URL to all of the pages? So add http://www.mystoreexample.com/brand/product1.html to any page that features the content? That way you preserve your links and keep your site more open to the spiders?

That would be my only suggestion.

Links are what you want in SEO, they are probably the strongest ranking factor (at least for the time being), but the easiest way to get those is to visible create content that people want to create links around. This is the reason that content is so important.

If you are doing all your linkbuilding manually, by yourself, you have a long road ahead of you.

Google has indexed your page, so it's been crawled but it only has the one link pointing at it and as I said that's not providing any particular context.

I don't think that anyone is going to disagree with the concept that knowing more about SEO is an advantage, but it's not a game winner.

Your situation will all be solved by sorting out that slider and getting some more links with the right anchor text pointing at KennethLewis, specifically at the page we're discussing.

The microsites are a nice idea and could work well in the long run, but you'd be fragmenting your efforts, so your main domain would probably suffer due to diminished updates and attention.

I'd stick with the single domain and as long as the niches are related continue to build on that.

I work on a set of sites that were split from a whole and they are a lot more work than if they were just one site together.

Tom

Happy to reply, it might be sad but I quite enjoy it.

If it was a smaller site I would say pick your best performing page and use that, but given how many pages I imagine you have that's going to be pretty much impossible. I would go with domain/brand/product (provided that the brand is a keyword and the total isn't too long) that way if people link using just the URL you get another keyword into the mix.

If appliance type makes better sense go with that, just don't make it too long.

EDIT: and yes if you provide a canonical link to the page you want credited you won't have to worry about the noindexing (sorry forgot that bit).

How established is your site, how long have you been working on it?

If it's fairly established and older I wouldn't expect a huge amount of change if you were to cut your content somewhat (500-700 is still a lot of words on the page), you might experience a bit of a wobble as google gets used to things, but it shouldn't make a huge difference.

Worst case scenario you can put the old text back and pretend that nothing ever happened.

If you change things and it does make a significant difference it would be interesting to hear about it.

You might want to experiment with your new text first using some sort of A\B testing. That way you'll preserve your current rankings, and test your new text to see if it's going to improve your situation. It's worthwhile testing first before making the switch.

At the most basic end of the spectrum how you have Google website optimizer:

http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer

but there are some great paid for options out there that do an excellent job.

No, and I have to admit I'm curious as to why you would want to. Are you competing with other pages for results or are you just trying to make search as easy as possible.

I would imagine it's going to be very unlikely that you'll experience a knock then, make the change then sit back and wait for a little to see what happens. Expect a wobble, and don't panic if there is a slight drop at first.

In the unlikely event that the text does make a big difference, it's the easiest thing in the world to just put the old stuff back and your ranking should return with equal speed.

1500 words is a lot to have on the homepage, so you might even find it does your position some good to thin it out a little.

In the long run there really is only one way to find out unfortunately.

It's also worth pointing out that www.mountain-solutions.net and mountain-solutions.net also resolve separately so may also be seen as duplicates (this is often referred to as a canonical error).

The process is exactly the same as Cocarcea Ion mentioned, just use a 301 redirection in your .htaccess file if you have access to it.

This site may well help: http://www.websitetodos.com/list/websitetodos/webserver/canonicalnameredirect/canonicalredirect-apache

Maybe it's time for some old fashioned shmoozing? Make some contacts with people that might blog about your articles, or refer to them, or simply tweet about them?

The ablemag twitter account is very dry, so maybe inject some personality into it and build some helpful relationships?

I also think it might be interesting to widen your net somewhat, so your target market is people seeking disability news, that's fine, but there are other people who may well blog about some of the things you write even if they aren't your demographic.

It's an odd subject but people interested in body modification or transhumanism may well be interested in some of the things you write. Both of the following articles would serve as a starting point for some linkbait for that demographic:

http://ablemagazine.co.uk/artificial-pancreas-in-pregnancy-promises-fewer-diabetes-deaths-and-abnormalities/

http://ablemagazine.co.uk/pistorius-eyes-2012-with-new-pb/

PS I PM'd you a few ideas, let me know if you didn't get it.

This is the second one of these that I have seen when a uk.com domain was mentioned, and I think it's an error like you say.

Here's the one I saw before:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/designed-new-website-with-new-domain-has-for-than-24-million-links-over-night-on-seomoz-how-has-this-happend

Ooops and found another:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/incorrect-domain-authority-result-on-seo-tool-bar-and-ose

It's a tricky problem because the domain uk.com is valid as a domain (this has since proven not to be the case) as well as a suffix.

EDIT: Ooops on my part, see Sarah Bird's answer, she is entirely correct.

Whilst I do agree with Daniel Deceuster, subfolders are historically much nicer than subdomains. You're not going to get in trouble for having one on a different IP address. We use a subdomain for our members section (decision was made before my time), customers like that mental partition, and it's not done us any harm.

I realise the main blame fell on the newspapers for what was essentially cash for links, but a separate part of the PR push was sending flowers to bloggers who then blogged about it.

I can see that this could be construed by Google to be a breach of their t&cs, but equally it could be a legitimate action by the blogger if they are giving an honest viewpoint.

Is the Google Chrome "satchel" ad being unintentionally misleading?

If it's all down to the intention that's a worryingly grey area to be stuck in, what do you think?

If it's as explicit as "if I send you something I require a link back" I can see that it completely breaches guidelines, but if it's sent out without that requirement, for genuine review I think you're in much murkier territory.

Should they be denied the option of linking because they received the product?

I'm just interested in the discussion, I know there are plenty of product review bloggers out there (across the whole white\grey\black spectrum) who are now wondering where they stand. From what limited contact I've had with them, many of the more hobbiest bloggers had little or no idea about nofollow anyway.

Much of the PC games industry is fuelled by review copies, and there are some truly sinful strongarm tactics going on for positive reviews over and above any links. Is cracking down on stuff like this even enforcable?

I thought it was a nice public slap on the wrist without severely damaging a brand that probably should be on page one. It got the message out loud and clear and I would imagine that the papers are going to be much more careful.

You're right with regard to the error, but it's not the first time that the Chrome marketing team may have made an error with how they went about their business. To someone with a traditional marketing background I'm sure it seemed very innocuous, which was largely the problem with interflora anyway I suppose.