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I'm after any good examples of badges people have used to give to their community.

If anyone wants to share examples that would be really helpful.

Thanks.

Hi,

It shouldn't make a difference. Google will crawl either link and follow them (unless instructred otherwise).

The issues start to come if you want to launch multiple versions of your site (ie different country etc) - you could have issues but this has little to do with SEO, more a technical thing.

This probably doesn't help you much sorry.

A suggestion that all major search engines obey. We used it massively and it is 100% listened to by search engines.

If you head down this route it is very important that you don't just take your page and re-make them verbatim with a new folder in front - search engines will consider this duplicate content.

You will need to tailor make your content per area and make it unique, which is sounds like you are going to do.

Re: link building, you could quite easily find out the IP address of the bigger influences in each city and target those as somewhere to star link building, that will give you relevance in the cities you are trying to target.

If you want to boost your organics and social media, you need to look at all the options, not just Twitter.

For Google, use Google+ (I've already +1ed things and seen immediate, short-term results) and for Bing use Facebook and Twitter.

However, it's really important that you don't focus on these things too much, they are short term gainers, whereas link building and getting the site in order from A-Z will be much better in the long term.

Also things like blogger out-reach etc is important - they are still partly a social signal - and their links will last a lot longer than Twitter mentions etc.

Hope this helps.

Hey Nightwing

I think you need to be careful here. A 301 is a re-direct whereas a canonical is telling Google, Bing etc to treat this page as a duplicate and not index it.

To quote Google: "A canonical page is the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content."

See Matt Cutts and all his beauty explain here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

A canonical won't re-direct the page like a 301, the page still exists, it's just that search engines will remove it from SERPs.

As long as the code is all set up right, the only way to check for a canonical is working is to review the code.....and it should also drop out of the SERPs too.

Hope this helps.

Stay warm

Hey,

I agree with Alan - you've set it up correctly from what I looked at.

What else have you done recently to the site? It might just be a natural dip in traffic (have you compared YoY to see if you always get a dip at the same time) or have you done anything to the site?

What do you mean by visits dropping also? Are you talking about a few percent here or 50% drop?

You will naturally get less pages indexed with the canonicals in place - that's the idea.

Here is the info on pushstates - as mentioned above: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/Manipulating_the_browser_history

Again, that is not possible because of the #. You can't redirect a browser side page.

There are some tricky things you can do with modern browsers to push things through via ajax but this is another kettle of fish and even then I am not sure that it is possible to 301.

Sorry!

A

I might be wrong but isn't a # done browser side, so I am not sure this is possible as a search engine can't see the # anyway.

Willing to be proved wrong on this one but think that is the case.......might go and grab one of our techies and check.

Hi,

We use Adwords for our Spanish site -  and get very good data out of it for both SEO and PPC, even down to the long tail. What types of keywords are you looking for - I will have a look and see if I can help you out and find more.

I asked our Spanish PPC expert, she said adwords works really well for her.

A

Is your email being hosted online in HTML form? Google won't crawl an email unless you host it online - there's no way for a rob to crawl something in email form unless you host it online and link to it.

If it is hosted online, then definitely nofollow any links you don't want followed. Hope that helps.

Hi,

First up, good idea but I would be a bit careful about asking bloggers to post 4 links. Bloggers hate being told what to do from my experience. I would just ask them to link through to the resort without putting too much pressure on them.

The idea is very sound but I would be a bit more careful, I have seen bloggers come out and post about "X place" wants us to blog for links and put out a lot of bad press.

However, otherwise I would use opensite explorer to have a look at the blogs you are interested in and rank them against each other, this is what I do and it's quick and easy. Remember your link profile should look nice and natural, so don't try and get too tricky.

Also today's small blog might be the next big thing tomorrow, so there is no harm in getting a smaller blog to link through.

Great idea - just be careful in the execution, bloggers can turn on you very quickly!

A

From my experience HTML sitemaps are generally ignored a lot now by search engines. You could do a basic one for users but otherwise put your efforts into getting a very good XML sitemap, that will help you more than what is generally just a static HTML page, that like most things on footers nowadays, are ignored by the SEs.

A

Hi,

My question is why you would need two mobile sites to start with. One mobile site that renders for any device would be best.

Google will not see them as duplicate content from my experience. You should submit the new site(s) via WMTs. They should be light in code and load a lot faster than your normal site. Google is starting to favour lighter (faster to load) sites on mobile, so this will help them out.

However, until you get a big link profile for the site they probably won't rank higher than your normal blog for some time - I have had a mobile site for over a year and in mobile serps we still have our heavily non-mobile site win in serps.

We do an auto redirect from normal site to mobile when it knows that a person is looking at it on a mobile device.

Hope this helps!

Have you tried nofollowing the links? That might help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

We run one site with all https and there is no problem at all - we link build as usual and see no bad impacts, in fact we are doing very well.

It's not usual practice but for SEO as long as you are playing by the rules it will have no impact whatsoever.

Hi,

We have 4 foreign language sites, one in spanish and just remove the special characters in all and rank very highly, so there is no harm in doing this, it actually makes it harder.

I would stick with all lower cases or at least have the same logic in the URL - as long as it is consistent, then no biggie.

No matter what you do, make sure if you make changes to any of this that you 301 all of the old pages to their new version otherwise you will be starting from scratch!

Hope this helps.

You're welcome

If you want to boost your organics and social media, you need to look at all the options, not just Twitter.

For Google, use Google+ (I've already +1ed things and seen immediate, short-term results) and for Bing use Facebook and Twitter.

However, it's really important that you don't focus on these things too much, they are short term gainers, whereas link building and getting the site in order from A-Z will be much better in the long term.

Also things like blogger out-reach etc is important - they are still partly a social signal - and their links will last a lot longer than Twitter mentions etc.

Hope this helps.