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So our question is should we handle page redirection/rewriting in php or in .htaccess (with a specific problem we are running into outlined below). We have an ecommerce store in a subfolder of our site (example.com/store/).  In the next folder down we have a group of widgets(www.example.com/store/widget-group1).  Recently we put a .htaccess redirect in the top level folder (example.com/store/.htaccess), in order to re-write some URL’s and also 301 a page to another page.  This seems to be negatively affecting our /widgets-group1/ subfolder however (organic traffic to example.com/store/widget-group1) took a nose dive 3 days after putting the .htaccess redirect in place on the /store/ folder and it has not recovered 8 days later). *Nothing appears outwardly wrong with the current setup to the eye when viewing the pages or requesting as googlebot (the only issue being the nose dive in organic traffic lol) *both subfolders are setup in apache config file to allow local overrides of .htaccess as follows: <directory store="" widget-group1="">Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all</directory> <directory store="">Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all</directory>

How is this site: http://inhabitat.com/ hoarding all of their pagrank on their homepage?

http://searchengineland.com/download-the-latest-google-search-quality-rating-guidelines-97391 Google has been on a conquest taking them down online but I would really like to take a look at it if you have a copy! [moderator note - please use the PM system and exchange email addresses there. We've removed emails from this thread before it gets indexed and exposed to the world]

We are getting ready to launch a site that has great navigation for users, but it is not so great for search engines. As long as we are ethical about it, does anyone see a downside to detecting a bot user agent and displaying different nav to it? I suppose some could consider it cloaking, but I noticed amazon uses this strategy and they don't seem to be getting a big penalty lol. We are not going to do anything shady with it, just offer the bot a different way to access our content. Any thoughts?