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Has anyone any experience with HTML snapshots? We have a recruitment client that has HTML snapshots against all job pages as they are built with AJAX.

The pages naturally die after around four weeks (the job vacancy runs out) and whilst the AJAX version of the page hard 404s, the HTML snapshot version returns a soft 404. How can we get it to mirror the dead page with 404 status?

If you search "venn digital" then the correct meta description is pulled through, but if you search "venndigital" then it pulls through our twitter feed from the bottom of the page.

My only suggestion is that it is doing it because there is no mention of " Venn Digital" in the body of the copy, so it is going to the twitter feed at the bottom of the page where Venn Digital is mentioned to pull this info through.

Thanks guys. I feel quite confident that i have implemented the sitemap correctly (kinda wish i had done it through metas in the head now though as I think it might get indexed quicker this way)!

It a relief that you both say this could take a couple if months the index correctly and yes I will be doing some promotion for it

Hi guys

I have had a UK site that has been indexed in Google for some time. Recently we started targeting Ireland and so I created a folder to do this (domain.com/ireland/)

As well as adding an /irland/ folder I created a hreflang sitemap and in Webmaster Tools I specified that .com/ireland/ targets Ireland and .com targets UK. However this was all two weeks ago and Im still not seeing the Irish pages start ranking in Google.ie and was hoping one of you guys would be able to help me out? How long should it take for these pages to start appearing in the relevant country specific search engine?

Deepcrawl states that the Hreflang is correct as well so Im just a bit worried that Ive missed something glaringly obvious!

Thanks

Still struggling with this one! The article you sent seems to be comparing an old school Google+ Places page with the newer Google+ Local pages? The confusion I am having is over the difference between a Google+ Profile and a Google+ Local Business Page.

Here are examples of what I understand to be the Moz.com G+ Profile, and what seems to be their G+ Local Business Page:
Moz.com G+ Profile: https://plus.google.com/+SEOmoz
Moz.com G+ Local Business Page: https://plus.google.com/101479834534380514124
These pages serve both purposes well, with the Local Business Page appearing in Google Maps, and the Profile getting it's own listing in the SERPs when searching for the Moz brand.

Why then does my clients G+ Local Business Page seem to be an amalgamation of both?
Pareto G+ Local Business Page: https://plus.google.com/+paretolaw
This page appears in Google Maps, but is also listed as their G+ page as a sitelink under their branded search listing. Their local business page has all of the Google Places stuff in it, but also has circles, followers, posts etc.
Can I go ahead and create a seperate G+ Profile for them, or have they somehow combined the 2 already? If they've combined the two then creating another account will be really confusing for people. Which one would they follow?

My client has hundreds of employees and clients, and I want them all to interlink and promote the various social media profiles to help them rank. However, trying to get their G+ local business listing to rank seems futile as Google has just bundled it into their P1 listing as a sitelink, and that isn't going to push the other sites down the rankings.

My client, Pareto Law, have set themselves up with a Google Local Business listing:
https://plus.google.com/+paretolaw, and when searching for the Pareto Law brand this page appears a bit like a site-link under the main search result.

I've noticed that other companies, such as moz.com, have their G+ page ranking seperately on page 1 of the SERPs. This is especially important for my client, as we're trying to push down other sites rankings for our brand. In an ideal world I'd want only their twitter, G+, linkedin, & facebook pages ranking amongst wikipedia entries and the like, as opposed to forums discussing my client.

The question is, are Pareto Law able to set themselves up with a G+ business page as well as the G+ local listing page they presently have. Is that an acceptable setup, or are you supposed to have just one or the other? I'm struggling to differentiate between the 2.

Hey Neenor

We would like to do that in the future but it require development time we dont have at the moment (create a 404 page with a list of similar jobs). Im more concerned about the fact Google sees that we are regularly sending them to 404 pages through 301 redirects when a job listing has expired.

Hi

I have a job board site and the way the site is built means that I cant 404 job pages once they have expired. To combat this Im looking to 301 the pages into a 404 page.Do any of you have any experience with this? Are there any potential pitfalls to doing a 404 this way?

Thanks

We found some negative effects of implementing the above, unfortunately.

Our process was:

1. Implement the holding page and place a 503 HTTP status into the header for the page, along with a come back later date when the site would be live again.
2. 302 every other page to the homepage (holding page).
3. The Robots was removed in this process.
4. Found that the homepage had been de-indexed - reinstated the Robots file with no disallow restrictions.
5. Still couldn't raise the site through branded search terms and returned the homepage back to a 200, indexed the page again in WMT and used social media to boost this process.
6. The homepage is now showing where it was before on the first page for branded terms.

We feel we didn't do anything wrong and wondered if anyone had any ideas if there were any errors in our process?

Cheers,

Matt.

Hi Ruth,

Thanks for the response. The multiple 302 in combination with a 503 seems like the best way to go. I'll check out the yoast post, hadn't thought about adding a 503 to the robots.txt as well.

Matt

Everything after the # is ignored so this will not cause duplicate content issues. Crawlers will only see a single URL, i.e. http://www.mysite.co.uk/services

Here's a good whiteboard Friday from the man himself: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-using-the-hash