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I would suggest making indexable pages for courses, the rest of the parameters are rather user orientated and - I think - not usefull for SEO. This means separating the search script with browse pages.

This means making find-a-recipe.php, which looks like the search engine, forbidden to robots. Instead, you should have a category browser, using only the course (I suppose no recipe have multiple courses ?). You would have url like :

/recipes/ => all recipes, paginated

/recipes/start/ => all starter recipes, paginated

/recipes/starter/fry/ => fried starter recipes, but you should check the search volume of those expression, like "fried starter recipes". If you have a very small volume of recipes, wait until every subpages of /recipes/starter/ have at least 5 recipes.

The goal here is to make your recipe pages easy to index, with a strong focus on the course type. Although the course may not be the best root category for recipe, this should be a good way to may your site seo friendly.

Hi Candida,

The link juice of the homepage is splitted between the 200 links of the page, SEOMoz recommends about 100 links per page. This may not be the cause of the ranking difference, but you should consider removing the links to the less important pages.

If you wish to make a more important change to your linking architecture, you should follow a pyramidal architecture as described in several seomoz articles :

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/internal-link

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/diagrams-for-solving-crawl-priority-indexation-issues

Toddy,

For every product of your site, you should identify its main category (the one that will be indexed). When seeing a product with a different category url, use the rel=canonical tag to give google the good url. This works well with e-commerce site.

You may also apply this logic between categories, as some listing between two categories are sometimes very similar.

For more information about the rel=canonical tag, see these resources :

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

To be clear about the different roles of the files in my solution, the .htaccess file will redirect every old url (whatever the id is) to a redirect script written in php.

This script will get the old url Id, load the article (to get the article name) and then redirect 301 to the new url. Only in php can you access the database.

Damien gave another solution, only based on htaccess. You have to write (or generate with code / software) 800 redirect directive for the htaccess file.

1 - A tool that may give a hint : http://builtwith.com/

2 - Being a coder will help but it may take time to understand the old database. Software solution may exist but are probably not free.

3 - You can use opensiteexplorer's top pages, but if you have a developer to make the database migration, he will be able to create a redirect script to have ALL pages redirected to the new url

This is impossible to know, it depends on the site. Different types of site on different themes may have completely different stats. E.g. a blog can get most of his traffic from blog articles and a webservice can have most of his user visits the homepage.

I usually put on the home page a lot of links when I don't want to rank the homepage for specific keyword (or when it's too hard to rank). My homepage has to give it's juice the best way, so :

• First the top pages of my site (selected manually, or the most popular ones), so you may put the articles you want to rank the most

• Then the pages recently created to index them faster in Google and give content freshness to the domain

• Finally the pages with recent activity (update, comments, etc.), this usually allow old pages to get some fresh internal link

I would not recommend doing so, google will index you pages but he won't be able to find them anywhere on the internet, event on your website. They won't rank.

You should make, at least, a way for users and google to access theses pages without the buttons.

For the code / content / style issue, you should really stop putting all together - it's been 10 years since people started to separate content and style

I think you are asking if Google / Bing would consider this out of the guidelines. If you publish the exact same content on blogging platform, you will get not much from these. If you create a LOT of those fake blogs, you may even be penalised.

This may work if performed in a smart manner - different content, no systematic backlink and much more to create a credible blog. This is hard though, if your client is not publishing his content on blog aggregators, I would recommend doing so - just be aware of the risk of being ranked after the aggregator if the client's site has weak mRank.

I would suggest keeping the 301, Google is well aware of these type of problem so you should keep it simple, just 301 home.aspx to / once your able to do it.

If you have pages on your site without any internal link to them (I mean pages reachable by Google Bot when he visits your site), they won't rank well, and your site won't be ranking well too.

That's because your pages will only be visible to Google through the sitemap. The Google Bot will think "Hey these pages are not accessible to the user through the site links? I should not rank them then."

You will penalize your whole domain too because you will be losing additional pages in the site. Especially if those pages have good content (I suppose this the case anyway).

BUT, given your example, Google Bot should be able to access them with you strange link. Question is, what is the anchor text ? Is the anchor a generic text or a good keyword for each page? If you have bad anchor text, I would make a specific section on the site which allows the user and GBot to access theses pages with good anchor text.

Maybe a HTML sitemap, as you may see one on rotten tomatoes :

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/sitemap/movies

Hi mozllo,

You won't be able to create a .htaccess for such urls, because the original url only has the ID of the article and you want the name of the article in the new url. This requires database access to know the new url.

I would suggest to put in your htaccess file :

RewriteRule ^home/newscotnent.asp?id=([0-9]+) redirect.php?id=$1 [L]

Edit : see good rule below

The redirect.php file will load the article (or category as I understood) and do a 301 to the new url.

The duplicate item pages will not be indexed but visited the google bot. He will consider this page to be the one linked in the canonical tag.

I hope you won't have to set the urls manually !

From my experience, adding fresh content on a regular basis, even when the pages are rather empty, will make Google crawl more and more your website. As crawl budget gets bigger, deeper pages will be crawled.

Although I never worked on a similar case to yours, I would suggest adding fresh content on a regular basis and link those new pages on the homepage to get them crawled ASAP. Put internal links to the pages you want to be crawled in those new pages if they are revelant.

As you have only 800 urls, I agree with Damien, you should generate an associative array in pure php, associating every ID with the new url.

The redirect script will only test if the ID is an array key, if it is you 301 to the new url. Otherwise, display a 404 page.

Hi gregster,

Your trailing slash does matter although this is not a major problem. To keep things clean, you should choose one format and redirect the other one with a 301.

You will find more informations about it :

http://www.ragepank.com/articles/68/that-trailing-slash-does-matter/

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

HiMEldridge,

Stopwords can be removed from the title but it's always necessary. For the case you gave, I would dig into search volume of product base name, or brand name, with your additional features : black frame and anti-fog lens.

You get a more clean title with the focus on the main article (DeWalt Dual Comfort Safety Glasses) and you can put the additional properties in the page, close to the page title. You may also use your lengthy title on the H1/H2 of the site and use the smaller one for the head title, giving your page more variations on the product name.

Of course if the search volume for product + property exists, I would only remove the stop words.

Barry is right, I would suggest to wait before puttin tag pages online (or making them indexable), this can lead to huge amount of very similar pages.

Apart from asking user to put a description (or any other UGC like comments, tags, etc.), you compute some data from the images if you have the technical capacity : compute the colors of the wallpapers to have 2 or 3 main colors, size of the wallpaper, file format, etc. This will allow you to display "raw" data or even generate text patterns to fill the blanks.

I would recommend keeping the old page forever, if possible, with the 301 to the new site.

For the products which were not redirected, I would add the 301 over time or put a link to the site with appropriate text in the top of the content. These pages need to be kept forever if possible.

Google can keep the pages in the index for months or even years if they have backlinks, so you should keep the 301.

Example for the NYTimes :

Q: A 301 REDIRECT QUESTION! How long do you leave up the redirect?

Forever.

Marshall managing 301s forever isn't easy but necessary. We've moved entire parts of NYT movies and understand we have to manage 8 million redirects for ever. If tech doesn't understand don't move forward

source : http://www.seroundtable.com/smxw11-seo-tech-13054.html

Diversity is a sign of quality and will be a positive flag for GoogleBot. Having same head title, h1 title and h2 can't be a good sign nowadays.

I recommend you make a SEO / CTR optimized HEAD title and a more verbal and more informative H1 title. At least make it slightly different. This won't make a huge difference although

Depends on the price, if it is affordable you should buy it and work on it to get the reputation back, even if it takes time.

If you want to make visits ASAP, I wouldn't recommend to buy a banned domain.

Google can detect same images used with different names on a site. But this not penalized by Google, this would create way too much change in the SERP results!

Of course, you should try to have great, unique images for every complex, user loves this.

Hi Jason,

With infos from the latest slideshare of Ian Howells, http://slideshare.net/ianhowells/life-after-penguin, I think some of these links are devaluated, and some are penalizing the site. You may remove them and confess to Google, or start on a new domain, or maybe use a new URL for every page, including the homepage.

This is a though question, penguin recovery is still an unknown process and nothing is guaranteed.

About content re-use, Howells did put the same content on another page, without 301 and it worked. Maybe you can put 404 or remove the content and put it on a fresh domain.

Hi Rolf,

Making 2 - 5 whitelabel shops target to the exact same market is a bad idea. You should at least target different niches or users.

Anyway if you plan on doing replicas of the site, you will have to change every texts on the different sites. I recommend to change the HTML and everything that could link the different sites.

This is a difficult task however, SERP domination is extremely hard.

Partial duplicate content can be OK if you provide your own product description. The main problem is writing a product description containing useful, unique content that is not already in the manufacturer's description.

If you have the budget to make these useful descriptions, do it and remove the manufacturer content.

Thanks for your answers, I think the first has more importance for Google, as it is for the user. Too bad the study can't be found anymore !