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Thanks Anthony,

I'm glad you like the site

I think I'm going to simply display login form directly on the checkout page if user is not logged and use canonical url to inform the crawlers that it is serving login page. We don't have access restriction to the basket so we shouldn't have a problem with it and out registration and login forms are on the separate pages - so again, these could be easily indexed by search engines.

Thanks for the advice - much appreciated!

Thanks Alan - although I'm not sure what your suggestion to the problem is here.

We do have the redirect after login to point back to the checkout, but this isn't really the problem.

The fact that checkout is redirecting to the login is what the problem is referring to.

I'm not bothered whether search engines will drop the juice to the checkout page as it's behind the login anyway - I just want to make sure that the Warning is gone saying that there's a temporary redirect.

From what I can see the only way to do it is to serve the login page if they are not logged in under the checkout url and use canonical url to indicate that it is in fact the url of the login page.

It is a shame though that there isn't an option to inform search engines that the page they are trying to access is login protected.

Thanks Anthony,

The system is custom built so I can modify it the way I really need, however I cannot  allow guest checkout as each purchase is associated with the account and in order to access goods (which in this case are video tutorials) user has to have an account so it wouldn't work that well in this situation.

An option perhaps would be to display login on the checkout page if user is not logged in, however in this case I will have a problem with duplicate content, unless I use the canonical url to indicate that checkout page is actually serving the login page.

We don't provide the after login access to the crawlers so that shouldn't be a big problem I guess.

Do you think this scenario would work?

Ok - anyone knows what to do with the temporary redirect to the login page?

In our e-commerce system we have a checkout page, which requires user to be logged in - if they are not, we redirect them to the login page using simple php header("Locaiton: url"). This however has been found as a Warning as it's a temporary redirect. I can't really put there permanent redirect for obvious reasons so if someone could give me some clue on this situation that would be much appreciated.

Domain length extends your urls, and long urls are seeing as a negative factor. My recommendation would be to forget about hyphens - as these are also additional characters and are more difficult to type together with the rest of the alphanumerical characters on the keyboard.

As to the length - keep it short and do not try to put all of the words from your phrase in the domain - try to use the most important ones and no more than 3 combined together. For instance I would convert your domain : whatisgoingoninfrancerightnow.com to something like : francerightnow.com or even francenow.com

The reason behind it is that words such as: what, is, right etc. do not really give you any keyword value. Your main keyword would be France and then something to indicate that you want to relate to the current time - like 'now'.

The rest of the keywords could be easily included in the page names and that should give you a perfect structure to drive your SEO.

What you could do - and I agree with most of the comments here about the lack of the buy button - is to group your products under categories / sub-categories / .... etc. - and display these as the dropdown menus. I can see you're using Magento so this should be easily done.

Having sub navigation, visitors can quickly navigate to the product section they are interested in and are not forced to click through a number of pages in order to get the option to buy.

Also - in the Analytics you could set up the goal for a final product page and see how many people actually got to the page where they can see 'Add to basket' button - this will give you a clear indication whether this actually is causing the problem.

Try to use the original Facebook Like button - it uses javascript - this way it won't index any urls - you can generate it here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/

You will only have to change the data-href attribute value for each page to provide its own url.

I hope this helps.

I agree with Nakul - your best bet here is the name of the product right after the domain name - clean, short and straight to the point.

I find the canonical urls especially useful when you need the parameters in the url in order to provide some functionality such as highlight the link in the navigation etc., but it doesn't really have much impact on the way the product is displayed - in this case I always use the shortest possible version of the url as the canonical.

Later, when you create your sitemap, make sure that you also use the shortest versions to be included in it - so that you stay consistent with your decision and make it clear to the search engines what version should be indexed.

Hi Matthew,

What I would do is to still have it accessible through a direct link, but not through a list of jobs displayed on the main site. I would also include the note at the top of the page saying something like 'This job offer has already expired'.

This way you still have a page, which is unique, does not show on the main jobs list and indicates that it is expired.

I'm not sure how much of the programming knowledge you have and what technology is the site built in, but a simple IF condition in your SQL statement to add specific flag to each record indicating whether it is expired or not would be something like this (this specific one is based on the MySQL syntax):

IF (
    CURDATE() BETWEEN date_from AND date_to,
    0,
    1
) AS expired

Then, when you call specific job you simply check whether the 'expired' field is equal 1 - and if so - display the message above the job.

I hope this helps.

I run a web development business in the UK and we have several domain variations such as .co.uk, .com, .net, .eu, but we are using .co.uk as the main one and do the 301 redirect on all the other ones so if someone types in .com variation in the url they will be redirected straight to .co.uk one.

Since you're using canonical link, which indicates that the source of the page content is actually from the different page I would simply use the same meta tags as the original page. The canonical option is telling search engines that the page which you're actually viewing is the same as the canonical so it gives the credit to the one specified in the canonical url.

Here's an interesting point found at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

"Is it okay if the canonical is not an exact duplicate of the content?
We allow slight differences, e.g., in the sort order of a table of products. We also recognize that we may crawl the canonical and the duplicate pages at different points in time, so we may occasionally see different versions of your content. All of that is okay with us."

This would indicate that it won't make much of a difference if you have different meta tags, but it is usually a better idea to have it as identical as possible.

I hope this helps.

Absolutely - Content - that's what the whole idea of having the site should be in the first place - you have something that attracts others.

If it's the E-commerce site - articles about specific products, if it's a Blog - you know already what you want it to contain. Links generated this way will last longer and will be constantly expanding - meaning every so often someone will place a link to your article somewhere else. Have a look at how many links you can find in the threads posted in this forum - most of them to the Google resources, but still - if it was a forum about something else you'd find a different ones.

I've never spent a penny on links and I do have really good results by just posting new articles of interest and tutorials.

What you could also do is to create the RSS feed for all these articles and submit them to the RSS directories - that is if you want to generate some links. Every time the RSS feed is updated (either dynamically from the database or manually) the RSS directory displays the new link automatically.

I hope this helps.

You should always (by always I mean whenever possible) use the keywords in the link to your site, regardless of whether they are coming from the external or internal source.

There is a very good example of how much it might help with your SEO campaign.
If you type in Google 'click here' you will find that top of the list is Adobe Reader download page.

The reason why it ranks so well for this, rather unusual keyword is because many websites, which offer PDF download also put the sentence saying something along these lines:

"...click here if you haven't got it already installed on your computer...'

where 'click here' is the text of the link to the Adobe's page with the Reader download.

Now - when you put a link on page A to page B - you give the keyword credit to page B, but also page A, because the keywords actually appears within the content of page A as well as points to the other one. I might be a bit confusing, but at the end of the day you are building a keyword rich website.

I don't think you will as all this data is pulled out from your Analytics account so once re-connected it should get your data back on display - that's what happened when I did it.

Most of the submissions will give you a link with attribute rel set to nofollow - and these don't really give you any SEO benefit, so it is quite important to first check the other listings and see whether they have this attribute and value assigned to the anchor - if so, then the only benefit you will get is the visit if someone actually clicks on the link in the listing and gets to your site.

If you know how to program you could use Facebook Graph API in order to populate this information directly from their server and display in the control panel of your system, but this requires some programming skills - so it's certainly not the easiest option.

Also - with this number of products perhaps you should populate this information in the background (if decided programming the module) using Cron or any other method as getting these information every time you refresh the page might be quite resource heavy.

From my experience the best links you can get and the visitors who are actually going to stay on your site is by having the content that attracts it naturally.

Publish articles of interest, tutorials etc. and you'll see that the time you've spent on link exchanging was actually the time you could spend on producing the content for your site, which will last longer and give you much better results than any paid or free link back obtained through the link exchange research.

I think you're right - if we can't find a reason for using them, best to ignore / remove it altogether.

The cross linking sites - absolutely - they refer to the same industry so that's great.

With regards to all these other things I wouldn't be worry that much.

Try to think of it as if you bought a website template from some template library - chances are, many other sites are using the same template. You can even take under consideration frameworks and complete systems like for instance Wordpress - the same scenario.

Company name is definitely not going to be of a problem either - neither will telephone number.

We have a few websites promoting our business - some point towards local traffic and some worldwide.
Our business name on all (including the content) is the same and so are telephone numbers.

I think you're pretty safe as long as you've got the content re-written and meta tags at least a bit different between the sites.

That's correct - if you stick to it you won't have the situation where one page is linking to '/' and the other to /index.html - eliminating the duplicate content.

Francisco has suggested 301 redirection which you should do in case someone links directly to /index.html. If there will be no signs of a link pointing to /index.html then it wouldn't be indexed and problem solved, but someone from the external resource might use it even though it's not found on your site - therefore you might be better using the redirection either way.

You could additionally use canonical tag to indicate that the /index.html is to serve the page at '/' location.