The issue with using Rel=Canonical in this situation is that Google treats that directive as a 301.  If you canonical a whole site to another you will end up devaluing one of the sites.

Hello there,

My Uncle Dan would be upset if I did not correct you in stating that FTO for Fair Trade Organic is actually an acronym and not an abbreviation.  Uncle Dan also got mad when I used to talk about my GPS system, but that is another story.

There is an acronym HTML tag http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_acronym.asp but I am unaware that Google actively uses it.  I would answer your question as follows.

1. Is there search volume for the acronym and when you search for that acronym, what type of pages does Google show?  In other words are people searching for it and does Google know what it means.  When I search FTO https://www.google.com/search?q=FTO I get a pages related to the FTO gene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTO_gene that is related to obesity and also Fresh Touring Origination a sports coupe from Mitsubishi

I tried "FTO vegetables" but I got instructions on how to make lacto fermented vegetables - I could not find FTO on the page with the instructions though.  Results 5 and 6 looked to have to do with fair trade vegetables.  I Googled "FTO food" and got sites for "Fresh to Order Food" and "Food Truck Outfitters Atlanta"

My point is, if most people don't use FTO to represent Fair Trade Organic, then Google probably will not, but it still may understand it in the context of use with other words.  It may be that FTO is searched a bunch, but it may not be the searches you want.

2. Based on my 30 second assessment above, you may want to consider using the acronym in combination with the words Fair Trade Organic and that would work.  You need some variety of the words on the page.  That goes without saying.  I would not though, use it as the primary words in place like your title tag, h1 etc.  Makes more sense in the body of the text on the page.

Specifically, "would it provide a weaker result" ? It depends.  I would say for FTO searches, you would probably not show up as Google potentially does not associate FTO with Free Trade Organic.  For "Free Trade Organic" (full keyword) related searches, I would use it, but not as much as other keywords that are probably searched more often and are more relevant in the results as you need to vary up your keywords anyway.

Hope this helps!

Check with the IT folks or hosting service for your client.  I think this is an outside chance, but if you have been running spiders from your home computer to check the site, you may have been hitting it too hard and slowed the site down and the server may be blocking your IP as you are seen as a spammer.   That is why you change ISPs you are golden as you are seen as a different "user".

I took down one of our sites once with a spidering tool.  They were pushing new code right when I hit the site.  Also, the number of requests a second I thought were ok, well, it was during peak traffic time. (DOH!)

I adjusted my crawl rate down and everything was ok.   Again, this is just a guess, but worth checking considering your symptoms.

Good luck!

I think you have it correct there.  I always like to end in a slash for index pages

http://inlinear.com/ - this is your home index page

http://inlinear.com/products/ - this is your index page for the /products/ folder/group

http://inlinear.com/products/page.php - this is a page within the /products/folder/group.

Hardly anyone ever sets up index web pages like index.php or index.htm anymore, they are really not needed as they just make the URL longer. End in the slash and make sure that you are consistent with ending with that slash (vs dropping it off) when you link to your index pages.

You would need to test the script you mention that rewrites the URL.  It looks like it is making sure that the index page ends in a slash, but I could be wrong.

Side story -  I have had a CMS that uses  http://inlinear.com/products as the index page for  http://inlinear.com/products/ and this creates all kinds of issues

1. Most people are used to not having an index page and the URL simply ending in a slash.  So even if you had a non slashed version as your index page, people would link to the slash and then you have to setup 301s to fix that.  Otherwise you end up with all kinds of duplicate page issues.

2. I know Google Analytics looks at the slashes to group your content into reports.

So the example index page of  http://inlinear.com/products

would NOT be included in reports with all the pages in the /products/ group

e.g. http://inlinear.com/products/page.php

http://inlinear.com/products/anotherpage.php

as /products is not "within" /products/  You then have a report on /products/ that leaves out the index page and this is normally your most important page!

Good luck!

Thanks for the post Keri.

Yep, the OCR option would still make the image option for hiding "moo"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLwYpSCrlHU

Well that is how to exclude them from an alert that they setup, but I think they are talking about anyone who would setup an alert that might find the PDFs.

One other idea I had, that I think may help.  If you setup the PDFs as images vs text then it would be harder for Google to "read" the PDFs and therefore not catalog them properly for the alert, but then this would have the same net effect of not having the PDFs in the index at all.

Danielle, my other question would be - why do they give a crap about Google Alerts specifically.  There has been all kinds of issues with the service and if someone is really interested in finding out info on the company, there are other ways to monitor a website than Google Alerts.  I used to use services that simply monitor a page (say the news release page) and lets me know when it is updated, this was often faster than Google Alerts and I would find stuff on a page before others who did only use Google Alerts.  I think they are being kind of myopic about the whole approach and that blocking for Google Alerts may not help them as much as they think.  Way more people simply search on Google vs using Alerts.

Robots.txt and exclude those files.  Note that this takes them out of the web index in general so they will not show up in searches.

You need to ask your client why they are putting things on the web if they do not want them to be found.  If they do not want them found, dont put them up on the web.

The 410 is supposed to be more definitive

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

404 is "not found" vs 410 is "gone

10.4.5 404 Not Found

The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent. The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address. This status code is commonly used when the server does not wish to reveal exactly why the request has been refused, or when no other response is applicable.

10.4.11 410 Gone

The requested resource is no longer available at the server and no forwarding address is known. This condition is expected to be considered permanent. Clients with link editing capabilities SHOULD delete references to the Request-URI after user approval. If the server does not know, or has no facility to determine, whether or not the condition is permanent, the status code 404 (Not Found) SHOULD be used instead. This response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise.

The 410 response is primarily intended to assist the task of web maintenance by notifying the recipient that the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the server owners desire that remote links to that resource be removed. Such an event is common for limited-time, promotional services and for resources belonging to individuals no longer working at the server's site. It is not necessary to mark all permanently unavailable resources as "gone" or to keep the mark for any length of time -- that is left to the discretion of the server owner.

That said, I had a similar issue on a site with a couple thousand pages and went with the 410, not sure it really made things disappear any faster than the 404 (that I noticed).

I just found a post from John Mueller from Google

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/qv49s4mTwNM/discussion

"In the meantime, we do treat 410s slightly differently than 404s. In particular, when we see a 404 HTTP result code, we'll want to confirm that before dropping the URL out of our search results. Using a 410 HTTP result code can help to speed that up. In practice, the time difference is just a matter of a few days, so it's not critical to return a 410 HTTP result code for URLs that are permanently removed from your website, returning a 404 is fine for that. "

So, use the 410 as a matter of a few days you may see a difference with 30k pages.

All of that said, are you sure with a site that big you would not need to 301 some of those pages.  If you have a bunch of old news items or blog posts, would you not want to redirect them to the new URLs for those same assets?  Seems like you should be able to recover some of them - at least your top traffic pages etc.

Cheers

Appreciate the positive comment EGOL!

Just some advice, I would not search for backdoor link on urban dictionary.  Nuff said.  Yosepr, read the link that SEO 5 Team posted and it explains it all.

Basically, you link to page on a site that then links to a page on the site you are "back door" linking to.  It is an indirect way to link to the other site as you link to a page that links to them (and then vice versa).

Thank you - please mark my response as Good Answer if it helps.

Cheers!