Hi Dee,

My understanding of 1&1 WebsiteBuilder is that it is extremely limited on the amount of control you enjoy in altering things like title tags, meta data, etc.

Theoretically, you could use robots.txt to block Google from crawling the sitemap, then submit an URL removal request, but in reality this is probably unnecessary.

The same goes for the two main URLs, one with the trailing slash "/" and one without. Although technically these are different URLs, in reality Google will almost always treat them the same, and not ding you for duplicate content/title tags.

So my best advice would be not worry too much about it. Glad to see you're learning some SEO and building websites. When you're up for it, you should graduate to a more advanced website platform, like Wordpress, where you can exercise a greater degree of control.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi Karen,

SEOclient12 had some really good points, so let me just add my own 2 cents.

To boil down the question to it's fundamentals, you're asking if a keyword rich domain is better for PPC campaigns is more effective than directing the ads towards a non-keyword rich domain.

The easy solution is simply to amend the Display URL to include keywords. If you have the space, you can generally put whatever keywords here you want, including Dynamic Keyword Insertion. This has the usual effect of increasing your CTR, which in turn raises your quality score and lowers your cost per click.

(if you aren't familiar with Keyword Insertion, it's a great technique worth checking out)

This is the preferred solution and generally a lot easier than setting up unique domains for each ad. That's not to say that a unique, keyword rich domain won't help your conversion rate, but my suspicion is the benefit, if any, may not be worth the trouble.

Also, if you do set up multiple domains, be careful about linking them together (or make sure to keep them out of Google's index) as too many linking domains may be interpreted as a network.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Most of the time you don't need to specify a base URL. The browser already knows this location. In some situations defining a base is helpful, such as mirrored sites when the URL used is not the same URL that is needed to resolve files.

Is your clients using a universal base tag that is the same across the entire site? I can't tell from the question, but this is a common situation that could potentially cause problems.

There's nothing inherently wrong with using a base tag. Most of the time, if you use it, you simply want to set it to the URL of the current page.That said, to avoid complications, the only time you really want to use the Base tag is when relative URLs wouldn't work without it.

You might want to test how the links on your site resolve and see if removing or modifying the base tag helps clear up your broken links.

Interesting question - I've had this discussion a couple of times with different SEOs. Here's my best understanding: There are actually 2 different answers - one if you are talking about Google, and one for every other search engine.

For most search engines, the "Allow" should come first. This is because the first matching pattern always wins, for the reasons Geoff stated.

But Google is different. They state:

"At a group-member level, in particular for allow and disallow directives, the most specific rule based on the length of the [path] entry will trump the less specific (shorter) rule. The order of precedence for rules with wildcards is undefined."

Robots.txt Specifications - Webmasters — Google Developers

So for Google, order is not important, only the specificity of the rule based on the length of the entry. But the order of precedence for rules with wildcards is undefined.

This last part is important, because your directives contain wildcards. If I'm reading this right, your particular directives:

Allow: /models/ford///page*

Disallow: /models////pageSo if it's "undefined" which directive will Google follow, if order isn't important? Fortunately, there's a simple way to find out.Google Webmaster allows you to test any robots.txt file. I created a dummy file based on your rules, In this case, your directives worked perfectly no matter what order I put them in.

| http://cyrusshepard.com/models/ford/test/test/pages | Allowed by line 2: Allow: /models/ford///page* | Allowed by line 2: Allow: /models/ford///page* |
| http://cyrusshepard.com/models/chevy/test/test/pages | Blocked by line 3: Disallow: /models////page | Blocked by line 3: Disallow: /models////page |

So, to summarize:1. Always put Allow directives first, as most search engines follow the "first rule counts" rule.2. Google doesn't care about order, but rather the specificity based on the length of the entry.3. The order of precedence for rules with wildcards is undefined.4. When in doubt, check your robots.txt file in Google Webmaster tools.Hope this helps.(sorry for the very long answer which basically says you were right all along