Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi all, Is it that detrimental to SEO if you link to the CMS page ID of a URL rather than the text URL of a page even if when you look at the source code Google sees it as a text URL? Thanks! 🙂

Hi all, If I had a global domain but with local country pages on it, i.e. xxxx.com/uk/xxxx xxxx.com/usa/xxxxx xxxxx.com/au/xxxx What's the best way to ensure that the relevant country gets the relevant pages. I.e.  the /uk/ pages show in the UK, /usa/ pages in the USA, /au/ pages in Australia. etc. etc. Is this a Google Webmaster tools setting? Thanks!

Hi all, A client I am working on had a CMS built in recently which has resulted in all their canonicals tags being taken off the website, and as such the same page with both a .org/uk and .org.uk/uk domain have appeared in the search results and I am wondering what your guys take is on the best cause of action. For further background: Historically they have always used .org.uk/uk (not sure why) for their UK website and used .org/xxx for other countries (they also have a .org splashpage FYI). Having seen the .org/uk pages, and knowing they have to choose one to avoid duplication, they would like to move their uk website to the .org/uk domain to fit in with the rest of the divisions. However due to the historical use of .org.uk/uk their backlink profile contains links to both the .org.uk and .org domains. My question then: would a canonical tag on all the .org.uk/uk pages pointing to the .org/uk pages be strong enough to pass on link juice to the .org/uk pages (from all links pointing to .org.uk) or would a 301 redirect be required in this instance, or indeed would it be best to stay with the .org.uk/uk domain? Thanks, Diana

Hi all, One of my clients has local domain websites in various parts of the world (co.uk etc. etc.) and there has always been a discussion about where a move from local domain (the current set-up) to a targeted .com domain (i.e. .com/uk) would benefit from a SEO perspective. The main reasoning (seo-wise) that keeps coming up is that there'd only be one domain to link to which would help with link juice being passed around. Any thoughts as whether this would actually be the case or if this possible benefit would be outweighed by other cons? Recent moves (local to .com) from a few websites (the Guardian newspaper in the UK being the most recent one off the top of my head) has made me start thinking about it again! Diana

Hi all, Is there a huge loss of SEO performance if a URL shows spaces with an actual space (i.e. %20) in the URL rather than a "-" (or indeed a "_")? I know the preferred option is to have a "-", but I am just wondering if it is worth our effort to manually change the "%20" to a "-" in all the instances? Thanks 🙂 Diana

Hi all, We changed the payment part of our site to https from http a while ago. However once on the https pages, all the footer and header links are relative URLs, so once users have reached the payment pages and then re-navigate back to other pages in our website they stay on https. The build up of this happening has led to Google indexing all our pages in https (something we did not want to happen), and now we are in the situation where our homepage listing on Google is https rather than http. We would prefer  the organic listings to be http (rather than https) and having read lots on this (included the great posts on the moz (still feels odd not refering to it as seomoz!) blog around this subject), possible solutions include redirects or a canoncial tags. My additional questions around these options are: 1. We already have 2 redirects on some pages (long story), will another one negatively impact our rankings? 2. Is a  canonical a strong enough hint to Google to stop Google indexing the https versions of these page to the extent that out http pages will appear in natural listings again? If anyone has any other suggestions or other ideas of how to address this issue, that would be great! Thanks 🙂 Diana

Hi everyone, Could any of you recommend a good resource to learn about dynamic SEO? Thanks very much, Diana

I know buying new websites hoping to 301 redirect them to achieve higher rankings before they’re established is not a good idea, but what about uploading a info pages +  on-page SEO + some link-building and when the site is established (it ranks) direct visitors to a landing page? Buying a new domain for the SINGLE purpose of 301 redirecting won’t boost the rankings (don't think it would get penalties either, unless it’s the only link building activity). Not planning to redirect to the homepage, but to the related sub page on our main site (specific landing page). Will this pass the appropriate anchor text and link authority to the right page on our website and help those pages to rank for their keywords? Only thinking of a few pages (no more than 3).

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| One of the most common warnings on our site www.sta.co.uk is the use of parameters in URL strings (they're crawled ok, it's mainly duplication content issues we're trying to avoid). The current traffic manager suggested ‘stage 1’ - remove the unwanted folder structure but wouldn’t tailor the dynamic url I'd say it is difficult to quantify what result this would have in isolation and I would rather do this update in tandem with the ‘stage 2’ which adds structure to the dynamic urls with multiple parameters.(Both stages will involve rewriting the page url and redirecting the long url to the short) Any thoughts, please? Is there any benefit in removing the subfolders (1) or should we wait and do it in one go? Thanks everyone, |