Hi there,

The special characters on your website URL is changed because URLs are sent over the Internet using the ASCII character-set. That's why the & is converted to %26.

If you're trying to make your site rank, it is better to just simplify or shorten the URL. This is because search engines have problems indexing sites when the URLs contain special characters.

The special characters below are known to be "search-engine-spider-stoppers":

• ampersand (&)
• dollar sign ($)
• equals sign (=)
• percent sign (%)
• question mark (?)

Hope that helps!

BBB is one of those things that most business people have a strong opinion about (either for or against).  From a pure SEO point of view, I consider it a very strong link.  Here's why:

• From a pure SEO link perspective, the directory has a very high DA and MozRank (by far the highest MozRank of any of the directories recommended by SEOmoz)

• the directory is exclusive.  You have to be a business owner to get listed.  This prevents someone from listing 5 or 10 near-spammy sites, which crowd some other directories.

• they are very exclusive about linking out.  It's kind of annoying, but if you don't pay them again next year, you're link will be gone fast!  It ultimately ensures that they are not linking to businesses that are no longer operating.  This increases the overall trust of the directory.

• the average consumer feels warm and fuzzy seeing a BBB banner, and viewing the businesses profile on the BBB website.

I think I paid something like $300 or $400 for it, so maybe the price varies depending on your region and business type?  In any case, I'll continue to renew with the BBB every year.

Well, because they are 'orphans', you probably can't find them using a spider tool!  I'd recommend the following process to find your orphan pages:

1.  get a list of all the pages created by your CMS

2.  get the list of all the pages found by Screaming Frog

3.  add the two url lists into Excel and find the URLs in your CMS that are not in the Screaming Frog list.

You could probably use an Excel trick like this one:

http://superuser.com/questions/289650/how-to-compare-two-columns-and-find-differences-in-excel

I've had the best luck with expired domains by 'rehabbing' them.  More or less building out a high quality site related to the topic of the domain.  This is on a whole a 'gray hat' area, so use any of this advice at your own risk:

1.  be careful about analyzing and verifying the backlinks of domains.  DMOZ seems to remove links as soon as a domain goes past the expiration date, so don't count on getting that link.  Other directories like Yahoo Dir don't seem to care.

2.  often times a link looks great because it has lots of backlinks.  But those backlinks could have been domains all owned by the same person, and all expiring at the same time.

3.  I've rebuilt some domains that had completely dropped (so completely past the auction stage), and found them to have traffic shortly thereafter.  I've also rebuilt names that I thought were good, and had a great backlink profile, and never had them rank for anything.  So on a whole it's hard to understand why some domains perform better than others.

ahh, I see.  I think there can be cases where it's valuable to pull in a feed.  Perhaps an index of relevant headlines around a topic, or maybe headlines from a users blog posts.  I wouldn't use it as the primary basis of an SEO strategy though.

Also, one tip if you're planning on doing something like this.  It's much better to cache the results of a feed on your server, rather than pulling in a live RSS feed every time a user loads a page.  Given the value that Google places on page speed loading, you would probably have a greater negative impact on page load speed by adding RSS feeds to your site, unless you have a cache system in place.

In general, I think it's good to have RSS feeds for a site.  It's a good way of reaching new viewers, who might only come across your content in a reader or a syndicated version.  Also, lots of social platforms have an option for including an RSS feed - so if you interact on the social platform - people you are interacting with would be able to see some of the most recent content from your site.

Google doesn't count RSS feeds as duplicate content, and is generally smart enough to figure out the original source of the content if it was republished in part somewhere.