Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Since there are no stupid questions, here's mine.

I have been answering a lot of questions for people today, but after a certain point, my MozPoints stopped increasing. Is there a daily cap? I'm providing valuable responses, not just saying anything  to get more points.

What's even worse than that is paying a lot and getting something that will actually hurt you, which is what usually happens with those kinds of services.

If you're referring to search engine ranking, it usually takes about a month, give or take.

If you provided the web firm with a complete list of the old URLs and the URLs you want them redirected to, it should only take them about 10 minutes for them to update your .htaccess file.

I used a very similar service that promised 25 edu backlinks for 25 dollars. It was a huge mistake, as all they did was place spam comments on dofollow edu blogs. We actually saw our ranking drop a couple of spaces because of this. I learned my lesson and will never do anything like this again. Hence, I do not recommend this. Any company that charges to get you links usually only acquires poor quality links.

There's an add-on for Firefox that I use called Rank Checker.

http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/

Yeah, you know, I just looked at my campaign, and it has us ranked number 17 for a keyword when we're actually 11. So, maybe someone else can answer this! Now I'd like to know!

I do know that Google has different servers it uses in different parts of the country and depending on which one they are using at any given time, the SERPs can be different. But the fluctuation is usually only a couple of spaces--nothing like what we're experiencing.

If I correctly understand what you are saying, this seems like a bad idea all the way around. You shouldn't have two different domains linking back and forth looking like the same site. If you wanted to maintain good rankings, you'd have to be doing SEO work for two separate sites. And whatever SEO benefit you think you'll be getting by having a shorter domain will be lost with all the back and forth you'll have going on there. And if your main objective is to make the domain shorter for the customers' benefit, it seems like this would also cause confusion as they're navigating your site and see two separate domains in the address bar.

Yes, it would most likely affect your current ranking. However, ranking changes due to URL changes are usually only temporary if you set up a 301 redirect. This tells both the browser and the search engine that the page has permanently been moved and it usually passes on the same ranking with a month.

Google is probably giving you personalized results. Make sure you are not logged in. Also, even if you're not, you may still be getting personalized results based on location and other factors. The only way to avoid this that I know of is in Firefox, go to Tools > Start Private Browsing and then do your search. Just make sure to go back and exit private browsing when you're done.

Thanks for the input. The reason I'm worried about duplicate pages is because what i temporarily switched everything to category/postname, I could access pages many different ways.

category1/postname/page

category2/postname/page

anothercategory/postname/page

Were all the same page. Duplicate content?

Mostly everyone seems to agree that /%category%/%postname%/ is the best blog structure.

I'm thinking of changing my structure to that because now it's structured by date which is bad. But almost all of my posts are assigned to more than one category. Won't this create duplicate pages?

That is really strange. It's annoying how Google will index something like the sitemap itself, put then only index 41 or 43 files from that sitemap!

Yeah, you would think! No one seems to care! I think getting more Facebook and Twitter followers is the hardest and most frustrating part of my job!

We have a Pintrest account. Why I haven't put a link to it on the homepage, I don't know. Thanks for the reminder!

Something similar happened to us. It was because Google decided to try to crawl the site at the exact time it was down--wouldn't you know it! Our home page got completely removed from the index. Then, about a week or two later, when the next crawl occurred, it was right back in it's original position, which happens to be #1. My advice is not to start panicking unless it doesn't go back after the next crawl.

Thanks. I guess I could have done that myself--doh! i just didn't think of it.

Thanks for the advice. Having a quote form directly on the home page has increased conversion by MASSIVE amounts, so I don't see that going anywhere any time soon.

And thanks I'm trying not to panic too much!

Thank you for taking the time. I think everything you said is excellent advice.

Since I've already done the KW research and know the most popular types of patches, I'm one step ahead. I can see how making users more engaged can actually help ranking, since I've been hearing a lot lately about how Google takes into account things like bounce rate and time on site to gauge relevancy. I think I am going to do exactly what you said about including an image and a link for the most popular types of patches.

As far as the animation goes, I hate it too and think it's distracting. I also want to get rid of it because Flash seems to be on the outs. The owner is in love with it, and I don't see it going anywhere anytime soon.

I apologize if this question's answer is glaringly obvious, but I was using Google to view all the pages it has indexed of our site--by searching for our company and then clicking the link that says to display more results for the site.

On page three, it has the sitemap indexed as if it wee just another page of our site.

<cite>www.stadriemblems.com/sitemap.xml</cite>

Is this supposed to happen?