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  • Could you tell me whether the "canonical fix" is still a relevant and valuable SEO method? I'm talking about the .htaccess (or ISAPI for Microsoft) level fix to make all of the non-www page URLs on a website redirect to the www. version - so that SEO "value" isn't split between the two. I'm NOT talking about the newer <rel= canonical="" http:="" ...="">tag that goes in the HEAD section on an HTML page - as a fix for some duplicate content issues (I guess).  </rel=> I still hear about the latter, but less about the former.  But the former is different than the latter right - it doesn't replace it? And I'm not sure if the canonical fix is relevant to a WordPress-based website - are you? Also I can never find any page or article on the Web, etc. that explains clearly how to implement the canonical fix for Apache and Microsoft servers. Could you please point me to one? Thanks in advance!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DenisL
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  • i type is a clients site and BOOM...it suddenly ends with "index2.php"  who will link to that? I can't seem to make it not appear...according the template creator... Is this "index2.php" affecting my link juice?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEObleu.com
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  • Can someone please tell me the 100% correct way to set this up.  Would I be right to set up a site this way... type in the browser..."example.com" and it re directs to "www.example.com. or, if i type in "example.com" it goes to example.com. or if I type in "www.example.com" it goes to "example.com"? or, type in "www.example.com" and it goes to "example.com" wouldn't most site link to a "www" version? PS whay isn;t the correct way set up by our HOST.? They should know what is most beneficial? Thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEObleu.com
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  • If you search for the site "ixl.com" in Alexa, for some reason, it's showing the site as "302 Found" instead of showing the website name, IXL.  If you drill into that, it shows the site as ixl.com, but underneath that, it says "302 Found" again.  Every other site I search for seems to show the site's name properly.  I have no idea where it's getting this "302 Found" from.  Does anyone know how to fix this? Here's a link directly to the search results page: http://www.alexa.com/search?q=ixl.com

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | john4math
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  • I was thinking of using 301 redirects for trailing slahes to no trailing slashes for my urls. EG: www.url.com/page1/ 301 redirect to www.url.com/page1 Already got a redirect for non-www to www already. Just wondering in my case would it be best to continue using htacces for the trailing slash redirect or just go with Canonical URLs?

    Technical SEO | | upick-162391
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  • Hi 🙂 I've just discovered that my client, who has a medical practice, has created a series of micro sites about their doctors (around 10 or so). The problem is that they're on a shared host with the same C-class, providing no real link benefit at all. Would it be best to: A) Look for seperate C class hosts for each site & migrate B) Recreate the pages on the main site & 301 all doctor micro sites to new pages C) Leave as is and pursue other link building activites? Has anyone run into a similar issue before? Thanks a bunch! Woj

    Technical SEO | | wojkwasi
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  • I'm getting spammy trackbacks/pingbacks on my Wordpress site. Should I bother deleting these or do these count as backlinks?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 10JQKAs
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  • Hello, Can anyone show me some authority info on wheher links are better with or without a .html ending? Thanks is advance

    Technical SEO | | sesertin
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  • Say for instance you are in the business of "lawn mower repair," and you are ranking for that keyword. If you were doing an AdWord campaign on that keyword, would that also affect your organic rankings in the SERPs for that keyword?

    Paid Search Marketing | | Bill4Time
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  • Is there a benefit to having Youtube videos on your site from other company's Youtube channels or should they come from your own Youtube channel because you can control links and tags?

    Link Building | | lwnickens
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  • The home page PageRank is 5 but every single internal page is PR 0. Things I know I need to address each page has 300 links (Menu problem). Each article has 2-3 duplicates caused from the CMS working on this now. Has anyone else had this problem before? What things should I look out for to fix this issue. All internal linking is follow there is no page rank sculpting happening on the pages.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOBrent
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  • We are trying to build up article content on our website, and are looking at soliciting fresh articles from authors on various subjects, and in turn give them an author link back to their website or blog in exchange for writing the article. Our website has massive traffic so this would be a good thing for the author. My question is this: If I put a couple of anchor text links into the article, having them pointed at various pages on my site, and then allow the author to link back to his site, will I lose the link love in the anchor text? Or does it depend on the number of anchor links I have? Like 3 to 1 type ratio.

    Link Building | | tdawson09
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  • I have a question about keyword variations. To be specific, let's say "blue upside down cars" has low competition but fairly low traffic. However, the shortened variation "upside down cars" has low competition but extremely high traffic. Can I double my bet by going ahead and using "blue upside down cars" whereby in some instances Google would refer traffic based on the entire keyword, but it would also refer traffic based on the the last part of the keyword which has the higher traffic ("upside down cars"). In this case, we would optimize around "blue upside down cars" with hopes of getting traffic for both keywords (the long tail and longer tail). Is there any reason not to pursue this strategy? I hope I made sense!

    Keyword Research | | amandahx2
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  • Hi Everyone, I have a question about trying to get location information into title tags without having it look spammy. What I've been trying is something like this: h1 {  font-size:18px; } .h1_sub { font-size:10px; } Why Choose My Company Minnesota Website Design | Minneapolis Web Development I'm not sure if that is a good thing to do or not as everything is inside the h1 tag and visible to the engines however it makes it less prominent on the page and gives a better layout. You can see it at www.mltgroup.com/company.php Thanks

    Web Design | | MLTGroup
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  • ok, I have been optimizing a sit for a while and decided to drop the flash site build an HTML site instead for obvious reasons.  But, as I was building the new site, BANG! a big jump in Google rank? How can this be, I thought out loud.  Must be all my anchor text kicking in...So, I am left with this question...Or did google pick up on my new site as I was building it.  I build it on a new DNS, then revert back to the main DNS... Drop the HTML site and continue my link getting with the main site? Or chalk it up under something else and roll with new site. I hope that was not to confusing

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEObleu.com
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  • So about a month ago, we finally ported our site over to a content management system called Umbraco.  Overall, it's okay, and certainly better than what we had before (i.e. nothing - just static pages).  However, I did discover a problem with the URL management within the system. We had a number of pages that existed as follows: sparkenergy.com/state/name However, they exist now within certain folders, like so: sparkenergy.com/about-us/service-map/name So we had an aliasing system set up whereby you could call the URL basically whatever you want, so that allowed us to retain the old URL structure.  However, we have found that the alias does not override, but just adds another option to finding a page.  Which means the same pages can open under at least two different URLs, such as http://www.sparkenergy.com/state/texas and http://www.sparkenergy.com/about-us/service-map/texas.  I've tried pointing to the aliased URL in other parts of the site with the rel canonical tag, without success.  How much of a problem is this with respect to duplicate content?  Should we bite the bullet, remove the aliased URLs and do 301s to the new folder structure?

    Technical SEO | | ufmedia
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  • Hi all. Should we be using File Compression software on our website files for SEO benefit? If so, do you like Deflate or gzip? Thank you for your help! Jay

    Web Design | | theideapeople
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  • If we change our site's server location to a new IP, will this affect anything involving SEO?  The site name and links will not be changing.

    Technical SEO | | 9Studios
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  • Do the SEOmoz keyword rankings display results for exact match or broad match?

    Moz Pro | | ClaytonKendall
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  • I'm building up my personal website. When I moved from my old domain to my current one a few years ago, I  had moved a folder with all my old blog posts (from an old blogger.com account) to an archives called /blog/. It's bad enough the entries just text and nearly all the images aren't there but because of the way I moved over the posts, I have 200+ duplicate page titles with no meta descriptions. Is it worth saving these posts ? (putting them into an archives.mysite.com sub-domain?) I already have the folder disallowed in my robotos.txt file and there's nothing really incredible content-wise in the archives, though they are some of the oldest pages on my current (3 years old) domain. There's no real SEO thought in them as this was just a fun personal blog at the time. Thoughts?

    Content Development | | JamesDziezynski
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  • This page says "...'partial match' means that at least one word from the query matches the anchor text.". Does this mean that at least one word from the query matches at least one word from the anchor text, or that at least one word from the query matches the entire anchor text?

    Competitive Research | | TheEspresseo
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  • Here is what Google says about the InAnchor operator. I am curious to know if this will show results with exact match or partial match anchor text. Does anybody know?

    Competitive Research | | TheEspresseo
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  • I am working on a blog http://www.possessionista.com which is a very popular fashion blog. It is very well established with a 100% natural link profile and zero spammy stuff. The blog ranks #1 for random fashion terms like "kourtney kardashian cat eye sunglasses" and "emily maynard boots". The problem I am experiencing is that none of the actual titles of her posts or any of the content in the post results in her blog showing up if searched. EX: http://www.possessionista.com/2011/10/pippa-middletons-zip-jacket.html When you search "Pippa Middleton's Zip Jacket" on google her blog is nowhere to be found. Try searching allintitle:"Pippa Middleton's Zip Jacket" and she's nowhere to be found either. Even search "The other day, I met with my friend Kiran for our monthly mutual admiration society" on google and she's nowhere to be found even thoguh this is a unique snippet from her post. This post is already indexed and cached with the above mentioned details. i've also tested dozens of older posts as well. Same issue. You can actually do this to see a more clear picture: Do a google search for: allintitle:Bachelorette Fashion: Episode 2 - Ashley Hebert Brown site:possessionista.com That will bring up her blog which means google recognizes that the phrase is in her META title. Now do a google search for: allintitle:Bachelorette Fashion: Episode 2 - Ashley Hebert Brown without the site: included. She does not pop up but other people do. I did find that she had a duplicate title tag for a few weeks, but I've fixed that. Her posts used to pop up #1 when you search the title, but now obviously not. I am kind of at a loss and have tried a bunch of options with no success. Oh, one other thing is that some people do scrape her content, but only a few like maybe 10 and they've always been doing it even when she used to rank for her own post titles. Have you guys experienced this issue? Do you have any ideas of how to fix it?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | modparent
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  • Hi y'all. Hoping you can help give some definition here to organic results as I've inadvertantly started an argument in a forum when I was suggesting to some soul in need of advice that he needed to concentrate on the two types of SEO, those being Organic AND Local search results. So the argument started that Local search IS Organic, and results are classed as either Organic or Paid. Though to me, the term 'organic results' represents the search results derived from googles main website indexing algorithm,  Not Paid, and not any of the Verticals (Local/News/Images/Video etc.) So would love to hear what others views are...  if I'm totally wrong I'll go back and graciously accept my education 🙂

    Industry News | | davebrown1975
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  • My question is with the new Google SERP.  I posted a pic of it at http://www.hortonwebdesign.com/images/new-google-page.gif. If you mouse over the arrows to the right of a result on the SERP, it pops up a preview of the page. On some results it also highlights a section of the page with a red box. What does this represent? Does it represent a key area that they are looking at in determining the positioning? I have some clients that are asking me and it doesn't make a lot of sense. In my example above I searched for "seo expert in georgia" and on my result (I'm #2), it shows a preview, but the part it has chosen to highlight with a red box is just, um, ...useless. It's highlighting a Recent Post sidebar on the right halfway down the page. Surely this can't be what they're looking at as what they view as "useful" to that search.  This simply can't be what they're using to determine positioning. Or is it? Just please explain what I'm seeing here. new-google-page.gif.

    Web Design | | GeorgiaSEOServices
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  • Client wishes to drop the .php extension on all their pages (they've got around 2k pages). I assured them that wasn't necessary. However, in the event that I do end up doing this what's the best practices way (and easiest way) to do this? This is also a WordPress site. Thanks.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digisavvy
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  • I want to bring my categories down to about 8 or so and the tags... They're just a mess and I'd really like to bring that figure down significantly and setup a standard for usage. My thought was to remove the un-needed tags and categories and setup 301 redirects for the ones that I'm removing. Is that even necessary? Are there tools that can assist with this? What are the "gotchas" I should be aware of? Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | digisavvy
    1

  • I'm optimizing a website for a dentist and I'm looking for the best approach to incorporating the location into the keyword terms. For example if a dental practice in Boston has a page on Cosmetic Dentistry what would be the best approach for optimizing for "Boston Cosmetic Dentist", "Boston Teeth Whitening" and "Cosmetic Dentist in Boston"? How should I handle the repetition of the location name? Will I get the best results by using the full keyword terms several times on the page "example a" or will "example b" provide similar results? Title Tag: a) Boston Cosmetic Dentist | Boston Teeth Whitening | Cosmetic Dentist in Boston
    b) Boston Cosmetic Dentist | Teeth Whitening H1
    a) Boston Cosmetic Dentist | Boston Teeth Whitening | Cosmetic Dentist in Boston
    b) Boston Cosmetic Dentist | Teeth Whitening keywords to sprinkle through content
    a) Boston Cosmetic Dentist, Boston Teeth Whitening, Cosmetic Dentist in Boston
    b) Boston Cosmetic Dentist, Teeth Whitening etc... It's important to rank for all 3 keywords but the pages would be flooded with the words Dentist and Boston if I use each phrase exactly. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance,
    Jason

    On-Page Optimization | | OptioPublishing
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  • I have a wordpress site. When SeoMoz runs the crawl, my report shows 0 errors, but a lot of warnings in two areas: Missing Meta Description and Title Element Too Short. The only thing is, the URL's it shows under both of these categories look like this: http://www.millerhypnosisatlanta.com/author/Michael/page/4/ http://www.millerhypnosisatlanta.com/category/anxiety-panic/ http://www.millerhypnosisatlanta.com/tag/goals/ These are tags, categories, and author pages. How do I hide these from being seen by SeoMoz and Google? I mean I should do that right? Because there is no way I can add a description to these pages, or extend the title - right? Thanks in advance for your help!

    Technical SEO | | DallasBonsai
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  • Is there a way to check the percentage of clicks on specific websites based on searches that people do?  For example, say I searched "sneakers", what percentage of viewers clicked on a particular site.

    Algorithm Updates | | Mariannag7282
    0

  • We've tried multiple management systems, with the last one being Raven Tools (I think this is the most popular).  We've also done our own manual tracking in excel and that gets very very tedious and sometimes hard to  keep track of.  What are some other ones that people have found that have been easy to use and made their work much more efficient (link building/tracking, reporting, competitive research, social, etc.)?

    Search Behavior | | MichaelWeisbaum
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  • Hello, I'm planning a blog contest. I have the project plan outlined and the one missing factor is where to promote the blog contest to get the most people involved in the contest possible. What do you recommend in regards to publicizing the contest to bloggers?

    Social Media | | AllergyBuyersClub
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  • Hi, My developers are currently revamping our site. My developer is putting the data via javascript in the . However, there's something that is bothering me. Does the JS data in the affects SEO? 27102011112735pm.png

    Technical SEO | | ahming777
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  • We are up almost a six month already, google indexed 46,900 pages. We have decent traffic and a lot of real external links to us. No single page has been indexed by bing or yahoo. I have submitted sitemap to bing's webmaster tool two weeks ago and still it is in Pending stage. here is our address: www.showme.com and here is site map: http://www.showme.com/sitemapxml.php What can be the reason of that? Thanks for your help. Karen Bdoyan

    Algorithm Updates | | showme
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  • So I'm working on a law firm site and looking at the links for pages in OSE. For practice areas, the links to each practice area are in the left hand menu on every page of the site. Can anyone help me with this question: Example: http://www.comitzlaw.com/personal-injury/car-accidents.html When I plug this URL into OSE, it only shows one linking page, www.comitzlaw.com/practice-areas.html, yet there is a link to this on every other page in the site. When I plug in a random competitors page, www.lesagelblaw.com/Personal-Injury-Overview/Car-Accidents.shtml, it does show all the internal pages linking to it. Since I'm not using a flash menu or javascript, any ideas as to why no internal links are showing up in OSE? Even when I plug in the main URL for the home page, it only shows 4 other internal pages linking to it, yet there is a link on every page. What am I doing wrong?

    Moz Pro | | c2g
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  • Please follow the link for a visual. Any help would be appreciated. The query I used was "phoenix plastic surgeons". I have never seen a large national site like PlasticSurgery.org Rank in local for a specific Dr.    Thoughts? Thanks! 7O1oK

    Search Behavior | | Red_Spot_Interactive
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  • Hi everyone First off for local seraches I rank very well pretty much all on first page and high up too. I am also attempting to rank well for the search term 'independent mortgage advice' I currently rank third on page 2 for the above search term. I am happy with this progress as the site is only 3 months old. I am UK based, have a .co.uk domain and although my site server is located in Germany (1and1) I have changed the geographical location in webmaster tools. My competitive domain analysis gives me the follwing results: Domain Authority: 14 Domain MozRank: 2.44 Total Links: 110 Ext. Followed Links: 19 Linking root Domains: 13 Followed Linking Root Domains:9 Linking C-Blocks: 8 Compared to my competitors around me these figures are terrible so why am I doing relatively well and how can I increase some of these figures such as Domain Authority & Domain Mozrank? The page I'm referring to is http://www.keystonemortgages.co.uk I am a novice so please don't mind calling me a numpty if it appears obvious to you Jason PS is it frowned upon to post links with title keywords here?

    Algorithm Updates | | JasonHegarty
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  • Hi All Which strategy from below would be best for the purchase of an exact match domain... 1) www.shiny-blue-widgets.com 2) wwwshinybluewidgetsshop.com Wondered if there was much difference in either as I know both have plus and minus points.

    On-Page Optimization | | PerchDigital
    0

  • OK, before anyone says anything, I know this isn't the right way to do things properly and that if I want to build a genuine and interested following base, I need to create some great content, tweet great things of interest and build a genuine and engaged follower base.... BUT ....Has anyone got any actual experience of using paid for twitter followers and if so would you recommend it or recommend any particular company who does it in the UK? I know there's companies who do it by getting reciprocal followers and others who just use bots to give you lots of 'useless' followers. I essentially want to know if it can work at all on any level and get you some degree of useful followers (i.e. people who may actually read your tweets as opposed to fake accounts).

    Branding | | PeterAlexLeigh
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  • Hi, We have a new client who has built a brand in the UK on a xyz.com domain. The "xyz.com" is now a brand and features on all marketing. Lots of SEO work has taken place and the UK site has good rankings and traffic. They have now expanded to the US and with offline marketing leading the way, xyz.com is the brand being pushed in the US. So with the launch of the offline marketing US IP's are now redirected to a US version of the site (subfolder) with relevant pricing and messaging. This is great for users, but with Googlebot being on a US IP it is also being redirected and the UK pages have now dropped out of the index. The solution we need would ideally have both UK and US users searching for xyz.com, but would see them land on respective static pages with correct prices. Ideally no link authority would be moved via redirection of users. We have considered the following solutions Move UK site to subfolder /uk and redirect UK ips to this subfolder (and so not googlebot) downside of this is it will massively impact the UK rankings which are the core driver of the business - also would this be deemed as illegal cloaking? natural links will always be to the xyz.com page and so longer term the US homepage will gain authority and UK homepage will be more reliant on artificial linkbuilding. Use a overlay that detects IP address and requests users to select relevant country (and cookies to redirect on second visit) this has been rejected by ecommerce team as will increase bounce rate% & we dont want users to be able to see other countries due to prduct and price differences. Use a homepage with country selection (and cookies to redirect on second visit) this has been rejected by ecommerce team as will increase bounce rate% & we dont want users to be able to see other countries due to prduct and price differences. Is there an easy solution to this problem that we're overlooking? Is there another way of legal cloaking we could use here? Many thanks in advance for any help here

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Red_Mud_Rookie
    0

  • Hi, My first question in SEOMoz :). I have just finished doing citations and optimisations for a local business. I now want to know how often Google Places update their database to look for citations etc to improve rankings? Many Thanks

    Technical SEO | | TheReachers
    0

  • Hi Mozzers I have launched www.carbodypanels4u.co.uk 3 weeks ago, It's a website that sells aftermarket car body panels. I want this website to rank on the first page for "Body Panels"           Postion 91 on google UK "Car Body Panels"    Position 33 Google UK The above are the two main keywords for the home page and I'm pleased with the progress we have made in 3 weeks, however I want to ensure I havent missed anything? Apart from Link Building, can anyone suggest anything else I can do on the website to improve my rankings. I was thinking of making all the makes on the home page to Header 2 tags? shivun

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seohive-222720
    0

  • Hey there Mozzers! One of our customers wants to seperate one Google Analytics account into multiple accounts. The website is divided in three parts: Main: www.website.nl Sub1: www.website.nl/sub1 Sub2: http://www.website.nl/sub2 And they would like 4 different reports under one account. R1: Total count R2: Website.nl (without Sub 1 & Sub2) R3: Sub1 R4: Sub2 I know multiple counters will get in conflict with each other, so I have to implement some filters. E.g: We can configure a filter for R3 on "astmakids" in URL. My question is: is there a safe way to implement multiple Analytics filters on one website? And how will R3 see visitors that come from the root domain astmafonds.nl? Are they referrals? Thanks a lot in advance!! Partouter

    Reporting & Analytics | | Partouter
    0

  • Hello all, We have 4 language domains for our website, and a number of our Spanish landing pages are written using Spanish characters - most notably: ñ and ó. We have done our research around the web and realised that many of the top competitors for keywords such as Diseño Web (web design) and Aplicaión iPhone (iphone application) DO NOT use these special chacracters in their URL structure. Here is an example of our URL's EX:  http://www.twago.es/expert/Diseño-Web/Diseño-Web However when I simply copy paste a URL that contains a special character it is automatically translated and encoded. EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone (When written out long had it appears: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone My first question is, seeing how the overwhelming majority of website URL's DO NOT contain special characters (and even for Spanish/German characters these are simply written using the standard English latin alphabet) is there a negative effect on our SEO rankings/efforts because we are using special characters? When we write anchor text for backlinks to these pages we USE the special characteristics in the anchor text (so does most other competitors). Does the anchor text have to exactly I know most webbrowsers can understand the special characters, especially when returning search results to users that either type the special characters within their search query (or not). But we seem to think that if we were doing the right thing, then why does everyone else do it differently? My second question is the same, but focusing on the use of Capital letters in our URL structure. NOTE: When we do a broken link check with some link tools (such as xenu) the URL's that contain the special characters in Spanish are marked as "broken". Is this a related issue? Any help anyone could give us would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, David from twago

    Web Design | | wdziedzic
    0

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