Reed - You should be fine to use the "hide" function in Magento to not have the duplicate

tags show up on the site.  If you want to jump into the code a bit more, you can likely change the way that the titles are displayed, but this might be a deeper dive into the design layer of Magento.

Hope this helps!

-- Jeff

Taysir-

Partial URLs are often formed when you have illegal characters in the URL (such as an & symbol or a space) or you have name-value pairs (?id=1&location=54).

In some cases, the URLs that are generated in a site map may not be URL encoded properly, and then you get an error when submitting the site map.

The reasons this can happen:

• You have a static page on your site with a space in the file name (i.e. /about us.html) You could fix this with a %20 where the space is (i.e. /about%20us.html)

• You have a content management system (i.e. WordPress) and the URL is based on the page name. Usually this can be fixed by changing the URL key and removing special characters and spaces.
  Here's a Google forum discussion on the topic:
  http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/oa0dbGvdP7c

• It's possible that you are using a relative URL in your CSS file, and that's throwing an error. More details here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/940451/using-relative-url-in-css-file-what-location-is-it-relative-to

Hope this helps!
-- Jeff

SHTML is an old-school way to use SSI (server side includes) in what is otherwise a static HTML page.
Stack Overflow talks about this in more detail here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/519619/what-is-shtml

Web servers know that if the page is .shtml, then it's okay to run inline php code, for example.

My guess is that your .shtml files are older remnants of SSI files.

I'm not a big fan of changing URLs just to clean up things, because if you change links you will need to use a 301 redirect, and that will keep about 85% of the SEO value of the original link.

If you do want to use inline php code on .html pages, I agree with Travis, above. You can modify your .htaccess file with:

addhandler x-httpd-php5-cgi .htm
addhandler x-httpd-php5-cgi .html

(This will allow you to run php in static HTML files, without having to change the file extension to .php)

Hope this helps!

• Jeff

Jim-

I'm not a big fan of articles that are broken up onto many pages.

The thinking in the past has been:

• Break up the pages, and you get more page views.  (Great if you are serving advertising.)
• The page will (possibly) load more quickly because you have less content on each page.
• Many marketing agencies want everything above the fold, so shorter pages "look better."

The reality, I think:

• Users hate having to go to the bottom of a page, then to click on the "more" option, and then wait 3-6 seconds for the page to load.  Especially on a mobile device.
• It is more complex to have duplicate page titles.  I'd recommend the rel=next / rel=previous tags, that could help in this case.

My $0.02 is that you should go with the single, long page articles.  I have found that search engines love, love, love pages that have a lot of content (as long as it's well written).  A page with 12,000 words of content will often outrank something with 250 words of marketing fluff.

If in doubt, though, test it out, and convert one or two over and test out how they're ranked.

Thanks!

• Jeff

That's going to be more of a hosting question than anything else.

If your website's hosting will allow you to recognize the .org, .info and .net domains, you can have them show up.

However, what you want to be careful of is that you're not serving pages with www.mydomain.info/about/ that is the same duplicate content that is on the www.mydomain.com/about/ page.

My recommendation would be to go up a level to your domain registrar, and simply have these sites forward (not URL mask), but forward to the main one.

So if someone types in www.mydomain.net, the system will automatically redirect to the proper domain.  This is what we have done for the www.CustomerParadigm.org domain --> it just goes to the www.CustomerParadigm.com as a domain forward.

Godaddy has an easy way of doing this; other registrars make it more difficult.

You can also handle this on the site with 301 redirects for the other domains, but again, this is going to be something to work on with your web hosting platform.

Hope this helps!
-- Jeff

This has been a burning question, and there are plenty of studies that show increases and decreases in conversions with trust badges.

The reason to add badges:
*** Increase trust and confidence that the site is secure.**

The reason NOT to add badges:
*** People who weren't worried about security are now more freaked out by it when they see the "hacker safe" or other logos.**

From what I have read:

• Trust / security badges that a user has to click on can decrease shopping conversions.
• Joann.com saw a sales increase of 5% whenthey added a trust badge to their site: http://www.internetretailer.com/2007/09/27/sales-increase-5-5-after-joann-com-adopts-shopping-trust-mark
• Orientalfurniture.com increased conversions by 7.6% when they added a security seal to the site:
  http://www.internetretailer.com/2011/01/05/orientalfurniturecom-drives-conversion-76-security
• Another site saw a 1.6% decrease in conversions site wide when after they added a McAfee security badge persistently on the shopping cart
• Twitter user Eric J. Hansen (@ericjhansen) posted the results of a test:  
  Multivariate testing surprise: removing HackerSafe logo lifts “add to cart” by 3.5% (95% conf). Moral=don’t assume, test!

According to Shana Rusonis of the Otpimizely blog:
http://blog.optimizely.com/2013/12/08/ab-test-assumption-security-badges-increase-conversions/

Don't assume.  Test it out.

My $0.02: spend the $2,000 on marketing for the site, or increasing the page load time.  I think it's money that's better spent.

Andie -

We work on a lot of eCommerce sites with similar left-hand navigation filters.

I think that the thing to keep in mind is that these pages are often like search results pages, and require a human to choose options to create those URLs.  As a result, they shouldn't be pages that a typical crawl bot would find.

That said, each eCommerce system acts differently, and it's possible that permanent links are created that are added to a site map. Or, it's possible that Google's bots are starting to check boxes on eCommerce filters to better mimic human behavior.  After all, Google has created self-driving cars.

The data driven approach: I would check to see if any of these pages are showing up in Google Webmaster tools to see if it is, indeed, an issue, before trying to go crazy about duplicate content.

Hope this helps,
-- Jeff

Yes, Bradley's method will allow you to redirect everything in the folder.  I thought you were just needing to re-index one file.

Yes, you will want to create a 301 redirect from the older location to the newer location.

Steps to take:

1. Change the folder on your server from /old foldr/ --> /newfolder/

2. Add this line in your .htaccess file:

redirect 301 /old%20foldr/page.html http://www.mysite.com/newfolder/page.html

**3. Make sure this is working properly. ** I like to use this 301 redirect checker tool:

http://httpstatus.io/

Jen - I agree with Eli.  It's best not to use the TM symbol in a URL string  - it will confuse the end user when it's URL encoded and scrambled.  Rather, put the mark on your pages and in images.

If you have gone through the registration process with the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office), you should be using the  symbol next to your mark, and not the TM symbol.

According to the Trademark FAQs on the USPTO site: http://www.uspto.gov/faq/trademarks.jsp#_Toc275426682

Do federal regulations govern the use of the designations "TM" or "SM" or the symbol?

If you claim rights to use a mark, you may use the "TM" (trademark) or "SM" (service mark) designation to alert the public to your claim of a “common-law” mark.  No registration is necessary to use a "TM" or "SM" symbol and you may continue to use these symbols even if the USPTO refuses to register your mark.  Those symbols put people on notice that you claim rights in the mark, although common law doesn't give you all the rights and benefits of federal registration.

You may only use the federal registration symbol "" after the USPTO actually registers a mark, not while an application is pending.  And it may only be used on or in connection with the goods/services listed in the federal trademark registration and while the registration is still alive (you may not continue to use it if you don’t maintain the registration or it expires).  Although there are no specific requirements on where the symbol should be placed relative to the mark, most businesses use the symbol in the upper right corner of the mark.  Note: Because several foreign countries use “” to indicate that a mark is registered in that country, use of the symbol by the holder of a foreign registration may be proper.

From another section_:  There are no specific requirements on where the “” symbol should be placed relative to the mark, but most businesses use the symbol in the upper right corner of the mark._

Hope this helps!
-- Jeff

Samuele-

Sorry to hear that the server was down for five days.  That's not a lot of fun to deal with.

Here's a great link to an interview by Matt Cutts about Website downtime and how it affects Google rankings:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2281151/Matt-Cutts-Short-Website-Downtime-Wont-Hurt-Your-Search-Rankings

Basically, if the server is down for a day, you're fine.  More downtime than that, though, and Google sees this as a signal that the user experience might not be amazing.

My recommendations to prevent this from happening again:

1. Back up each site to at least two locations.  In the case that a server like this goes down, you can migrate the sites to a different host quickly.  Make sure you have the database + the site contents backed up.  I recommend backing up locally to a hard drive, as well as another cloud-based site, too.  For a critical site, it may be worth having a "hot" backup site that can be pushed live via DNS quickly and easily.  For a site with 100+ sites on it, make sure you have a list of all of the sites on the server, and order them in importance of what is most critical to work on first.

2. Make sure that the DNS doesn't route through the server with 100+ sites on it.  Use the DNS controls at your domain name registrar, instead.  That way you can quickly re-route the DNS to go to a new hosting platform, and not have to wait for the server to come back up.

3. Consider moving to a different hosting platform that has more uptime / reliability.  100+ sites on a server is a lot of eggs in a basket.  (Note: I've done something similar in the past, and it's not worth it to have all of those sites sitting together on a shared server.  Better to break them up and put them on several different servers if possible.)

Finally, once the site is back up, I'd try to bolster the importance of the site with additional relevant content, inbound links, social media, etc.  I might suggest a permission-based email campaign to past customers to bring them back, and let them know about the site outage.

Hope this helps...

-- Jeff

If there are just two locations, I'd probably list them both on the footer, and indicate if one is the headquarters.

That said, I would probably also designate the main location using RDFa / microtagging technology, so that's machine readable.

Here's how we use this on our site:

Customer Paradigm

5353 Manhattan Circle

Suite 103

Boulder CO, 80303

303.473.4400
888.772.0777

Hope this helps!
-- Jeff