The basic question (correct me if I'm wrong) is how to rank better for Image searches.
The answer, has little to do with the options you listed.

The best way to achieve this

• Name the image appropriately (example Red-Ford-Mustang-Convertiable-2014.jpg not rfmc2014.jpg)
• Use appropriate image alt text (example "Car's Side View 2014 Mustang Convertible")
• Place images on appropriate pages, meaning you wouldn't want to show a red ford mustang on a page about staplers (the content of the page helps the image

Hope this helps

Hi James,

For page load, network, speed test I have used Pingdom.com in the past. They recently went more pay to use but it is a nice set of tools for basic test. There is still some free stuff you can use at tools.pingdom.com

For a quick SEO pass. Man I love ScreamingFrog! You can quickly identify header errors, long titles, descriptions, lack of h1 tags and so much more. When I do general quick audits for trouble shooting problems posted on this board, its my go to.

Hope this helps,

Don

Hi Malika,

Blocking image directories or images themselves in robots.txt only prevents the image from being added to "image" search results. You will still get the full benefit of the alt text on the page, the image just won't appear in the image results.

How this actually works is the crawler will crawl the site and index all the text and weight (h1, h2, alt etc..) then when the crawler moves to add the image to the search cache it finds it can't access it due to robots.txt and simply ignores it and goes on.This leaves your original text as what is indexed as a search result, and nothing for image results.

If you are using Apache you may want to not use robots.txt as the method of blocking images. I would recommend using the .htaccess file with a code like this...

<filesmatch ".(bmp|gif|jpg|png|tif)$"="">Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex"</filesmatch>

This is a blanket declaration and would prevent indexing of any images with the noted extensions on your site. This is particularly useful if you have multiple image directories. Further more if there are a few images you want indexed you could pick a particular extension like .jpeg for example (note jpeg not jpg), then just convert those few images and know they will be indexed as they are not in the exclusion list.

Another benefit of handling it this way is if you already have images that are indexed, using the noindex tag will get them out out of the image directory much faster than blocking them. The reason is you are giving Google a new directive which is "noindex", otherwise they will just treat them as inaccessible and move on, leaving any cached version to appear in the directory for some time.

Hope that makes sense and helps,

Don

A dash is considered a word separator. Similar topics can be found here in regards to dashes vs apostrophes, though this mostly references is in regards to a URL.

The problem you're up against is one that I've personally dealt with on my site o-ring vs o ring vs oring vs o'ring.

Do you use them all? Do you target just one? How does Google treat each one?

Well there is NO good answer I have seen. If you target more then one variant and they are treated as the same keyword then you maybe hit for spamming, but if you don't you may lose potential traffic / sales.

The only thing I can offer is more of a suggestion then anything. Go to Google and plug in the phrases in the keyword analysis tool found in the adwords account tools. In my case I found that three of the 4 of my keywords had the exact same monthly searches. This told me that those 3 words at least are being treated the same. So we picked the correct US English spelling and targeted that word.

In your case, I would assume AK-47 and AK 47 are the same so really are left with targeting just the 2 you have been AK-47 and AK47.

Great response Egol.

I'm always impressed with people who can think outside the box. Our company was recently purchased by a much larger corporation and instead of trying to roll us together they recognized that separately with their additional resources we are more valuable.

My personal experience has been up to six months.

May not be the best of news for you, but I certainly wouldn't change it back. That could further complicate things.

For now I would continual link building where you can and give it some more time.

Hope this helps,

Don