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Awesome post! I'm also thinking of launching a scholarship program for business management and marketing students. Not sure how to approach colleges and universities. Were you able to get any .EDU links from yours?

Header tags can use all the separators you mentioned. The reason pipe is adopted in meta tags is because it gives clear visual separation in the organic search results section.

I prefer the Rank Tracker tool by Link-Assistant.com. You can go as deep as 1000 search results, narrow your serps by countries and search engine, and use Search Safety features that such as Human Emulation to avoid IP blocking. The standard license is $99.75, and its worth every penny!

I'm guessing you are using the ?* stuff as a tracking string or site-wide search querying so the original page should have the rel=canonical attribute added. This will tell Google which page has the original content and will help your website avoid the penalty.

Absolutely!

What gets me wondering is that only two pages have been removed from the index and do not appear in 1-1000 search results, others just dropped in rankings. Maybe, the two "most optimized" pages with most content and links got most "attention" from Google and got removed first.

Thanks for the link!

It says that canonical CAN be a relative path, and that Google will relate the path the the base URL _(section:"Can I use a relative path to specify the canonical, such as ?"). _

I will be posting my results here. Let's see if pages get re-indexed and recovered in SERPs. Hope this helps someone who is have a similar issue.

As I mentioned, right after the implementation, some of the landing pages I optimized disappeared from the index completely, some began dropping.

Hi, John.

How long has it been since you started optimizing your website?

Adding unique, informative content to your website, combined with link building should be enough to compete in local markets. Try to see your competitor's metrics by analyzing their URLs with OpenSiteExplorer.

Adding your company's phone number to meta description will display it in search results. You can also add your location to the Google Places platform.

Best of luck, and let us know how it goes!

Aloha,

This is probably a noob question, but here we go:

I got a CMS e-commerce, which does not allow static "rel=canonical" declaration in the header and can only work with third-party modules (xml packages) that append "rel=canonical" to all pages dynamic pages within the URL. As a result, I have pages I'm declaring incomplete rel="canonical" as such:

Instead of:

rel="canonical" src="www.domainname.com/category.aspx"

I get:

rel="canonical" src="/category.aspx"

Coincidentally (or not), after the implementation of the canonical tag, pages that were continuously increasing in rankings started dropping, and, within a week, disappeared from the index completely.

Could the drop be a result of my canonical links pointing to incomplete URLs? If so, by fixing this issue, do I stand a chance of recovering my pages' SERPs?

Hi Carson,

Thanks for your reply!

Are links from the category page to the product page forced to use the same text?

Yes, product links from category pages are using the same keyword.

**Must the anchor text include the category name? **

The category name matches numerous product titles featured on the same page. We tried discussing the possibility of removing the matching keyword from product titles. Client refuses to do so to avoid losses of traffic from e-commerce engines.

How do you know that keyword stuffing is the problem?

From the SEOMOZ on-page analysis report

**Google tends to be a forgiving with repetitive product names on e-commerce sites. **

Thanks for the info! Despite of our link building and on-page content development efforts, the PR for our landing pages has dropped. I was under the impression that this was caused by adding  more unique content (i.e. category description) to the category page and, thus, increasing the amount of keyword usage.

Hi, John.

How long has it been since you started optimizing your website?

Adding unique, informative content to your website, combined with link building should be enough to compete in local markets. Try to see your competitor's metrics by analyzing their URLs with OpenSiteExplorer.

Adding your company's phone number to meta description will display it in search results. You can also add your location to the Google Places platform.

Best of luck, and let us know how it goes!

Header tags can use all the separators you mentioned. The reason pipe is adopted in meta tags is because it gives clear visual separation in the organic search results section.

I prefer the Rank Tracker tool by Link-Assistant.com. You can go as deep as 1000 search results, narrow your serps by countries and search engine, and use Search Safety features that such as Human Emulation to avoid IP blocking. The standard license is $99.75, and its worth every penny!