Hi,

You're quite right that having clean readable url's are usefull - both for visitors & bots.

There is no technical need to have these 'ugly' urls - as they can always be rewritten to something nicer. You will have to use a combination of URL rewriting & redirects) - you can find some useful links here on how to implement the rewriting (the article is not very recent - but these basics haven't changed). If they use a CMS it could also be useful to check the documentation - almost every decent CMS offers some build-in rewriting functionality.

The second issue with the strange domain name can be solved with a 301 redirect - by adding these lines in the .htaccess file of the "strange domain"

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com$
RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

(no need to tell that you'll have to replace olddomain & newdomain by the actual domain names)

Apart from the wrong domain the issue with the tracking parameters in

http://website1-px.rtrk.com/?utm_source=ReachLocal&utm_medium=PPC&utm_campaign=AssetManagement&reference_id=15&publisher=yellowpages&placement=ypwebsitemip&action_target=listing_website

could be solved by either a redirect or a canonical url. With the redirect rule above the webwite-px.rtk.com will be redirected to www.yourdomain.com - but this doesn't get rid of the tracking code.

You could put a self referencing canonical url in the head of the pages -

or strip of the parameters using a redirect (you can find an example on how this could be done here

If you use the canonical solution - it could be a good idea to strip off the parameters in Google Analytics

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Agree, coffee does make a difference. 3pm here in Europe so I already had my daily dose

Hi,

I don't really agree with the answer of Verbinteractive: disavowing links in WMT only concerns Google - there is no way Moz OSE is able to know that these links have been disavowed.

If these sites no longer exist than it's quite possible they will disappear in OSE, but not because of the disavow. If the links are from crappy sites it's quite possible that Moz crawled them once, but is not crawling them again (while the number of pages they crawl is huge - it's still limited).

Wait for the next crawl (Sept. 9th) & if these links are still present I would contact Moz directly.

rgds

Dirk

Hi,

In the specific example you give it's doesn't really matter - as all the pages of the pagination have a canonical pointing to the homepage.

On top of that - the site indicates on every page that the alternate url for lang=es is the homepage as well.

If this is your site, I would correct this - make the canonical self referencing & do the same for the alternate url (or just drop the alternate url if the site is only available in Spanish)

To answer your question the link pointing to the next page is a plain html link: 2 so can be indexed by Google without major issues.

On endless scrolling & pagination with Ajax in general - there is an interesting article on Google Webmaster Central: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

It's quite simple - just go to https://moz.com/subscriptions/cancel

(you can also go via the navigation - click on your avatar (upper right corner - select "Billing & Subscription") - on the next page click "Cancel" on your current plan)

rgds

Dirk

I didn't check all the references of Patrick - but yes, the way you build your url (folders or "flat") will have no impact on how you are positioned in the SERP's (if they contain the same keywords)- so both of the options you mentioned in your original question are equal if you only see it from SEO perspective.

rgds

Dirk

The resources mentioned  by Patrick are all good ones - I am even going to add one: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/structured-urls/ . You don't even have to read it :

• structured url's help semantics  - the folder like structure helps search engines understand how the site is structured
• it's easier to check which pages are indexed as you can do a site:mysite.com/folder/
• reporting is way easier with a structured url

Apart from that, and probably most important argument: a site depth is measured on how many clicks you need to get to a page and how pages are cross-linked - Google is not counting the number of "/" in your url's to determine if your site is flat or not.

rgds

Dirk

Hi Pete,

Personally I am not a big believer in trying to funnel link juice across the site - but theoretically yes, if you reduce the number of (unique) links on the home, the more link juice is passed to the categories below.

On the other side, the fewer links you have on the homepage, the more you are pushing content deeper in your site (number of clicks from the homepage to reach pages).

The other point - you can structure your URL anyway you want (best is to keep them quite simple so that they are easy to remember and not too long). For the depth - Google is looking at the number of clicks to reach this page (starting from home) - they are not counting the number of "/" in your url.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Edit: you might want to check these resources: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2316757/matt-cutts-on-linking-guidelines-how-many-links-on-a-page - and this one https://moz.com/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

Hi Pete,

No need to worry about the duplicate links - to quote Matt Cutts (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ybpXU0ckKQ)  - nothing to worry about (as long as it's not 5000 internal links with over optimised anchor)

266 links on the home is a lot - but not an amount of links that is surprisingly high for an average e-commerce site (especially with the duplicates). Regarding the number of links I would rather think about usability than SEO. If having this much links on the page is making it easier for your visitors to go through your site - keep them. If this number of links is making them confused - try to reorganise & regroup the links. A small user test with a few people not too familiar with your site can learn you a lot about the usability factor and how many people are actually using the links to navigate (vs just using the internal search function)

Hope this helps,

Dirk