Hi James,

An interesting question, my initial thoughts is that the Yoast article is wrong, or at the very least kind of wrong. In the sense that no one strategy is going to work for every site.

Do you have a link?

Interested to hear other opinions as well.

Don

I agree with Lynn

Your canonical tags are pointing to outside the subdirectory

example:

http://www.hilden.co.uk/blog/member-spotlight-joy-arkley-from-the-yr-hen-llaethdy-holiday-cottage/

is canonicaled to http://www.hilden.co.uk/bed-linen.html

Also just a heads up you don't need the <meta content="INDEX,FOLLOW" name="robots"> tag as that is the default behavior.

Hope this helps,

Don

Completely agree with SilverDoor (thumbs up). Backlinks should always point to the most relevant page.

The way I always approach it by not driving myself nuts over pushing up Domain Authority or a certain page's Page Rank rather focus on the unique content that will drive itself to get links. Once you have the content in place, you of course have to do some work getting yourself noticed, but once that happens you'll find backlinks coming from multiple places with no additional work required.

By definition, if the purpose of buying the domain is to manipulate your search rankings then that is black hat. Ryan laid out the only case I can think of that would be an exception to this rule, that is buying a domain that is in your industry or field and redirecting the traffic would be more of a business acquisition then manipulation.

I think there are a lot of people who get tripped up trying to understand the differences between various SEO practices. Why is putting keywords in your title tag, and h1 tags considered white hat when one can argue that you are purposely doing this to manipulate search results, but participating in a link ring considered black hat?

The difference are subtle, the big thing being anything that is done with the sol purpose to trick a search engine into ranking you higher then your site naturally warrants is black hat. Making changes to your site that make it easier for search engines to understand, crawl, or attribute credit to is white hat.

A good analogy would be putting on a nice suit for an interview, this would be considered white hat since you are just trying to present yourself in the best possible manner. (Proper Title Tags, H1 Tags and Page Content, Link Structure, Anchor Text)

However, stealing a new suit, or bribing somebody at the company to say good things about you is considered black hat. (Link Exchange Rings, Buying Links, Buying Social Media, Spamming Forums ect..)

In the end both practices may get you the job so to speak, but more then likely, eventually, the company will find out about it and which practice will you be more proud of? Putting on a nice suit? or paying somebody to say good things about you?

Hello,

Duplicate content is usually pretty simple to deal with see Sheena's response.

I would recommend at this point in design looking at the URL structure not primary as trying to avoid a negative, rather how to incorporate the most positives. That is how can you get the most SEO value out of the url's. Since you're at the point where you can make these changes, then now is the time to evaluate how you want your site to appear to the users and search engines.

Here are 2 Good, nay VERY GOOD post on Moz to help with this process.

1. Moz: Guide To SEO Chapter 4
2. Dr Pete: Anatomy Of A URL

I hope this is helpful,

Don

www.barcelonaexperience.com/barcelona-bike-tours

Would not be considered spamming. First your domain is likely considered one word "barcelonaexperience", even if it wasn't using the same word more then once is some what common.
Example www.Some-Hosting.com/hosting/dedicated-servers
Example www.Board-Games-Shop.com/shop/classic-games

I think you are 100% okay!

A couple things.

First Google is also a Web Registrar so they have the ability to know what domains are registered. It appears that Google has a cached version of the domain exotravel.vn indexed. It also appears to have Social Media exposure.

The redirect if setup is not correctly working. A ping and Whois search on http://exotravel.vn/ brings up no response from the server. Check the mxtoolbox entry here

Once you fix your 301 redirect issue, and have content ready for those keywords submit a site map to Google and give it some time to update.

Hope this helps,

Don

Hi,

I pointed out that Google is a web registrar to elude to the fact they can search registered domain names and return those as results. Google can WILL also use anchor text and links from any site they find a link to your site. Even if you disallow crawling via robots.txt.  If somebody is linking to you and Google finds it, and there are no more appropriate results they will return it when somebody searches those keywords.

I would say first your main issue is the redirect. Second you must not have a strong enough keyword profile or you just launched and have not given Google enough time to get an updated SERP out. Either way fixing the redirect should be your primary focus.

To answer your question sorry for being blunt here, the reason the parked domain is out ranking your live domain is because as far as Google is concerned it is the most relevant result. There is social media, it is registered and there is a cache of anchor text that is out ranking your live domain right now. You need to fix the redirect, build a link profile on new domain and give it time.

It may not make much sense if you look at it from only your side. But Google isn't a magic genie that can update billions of SERPs every minute. The best thing you can do is help them help you.

By fixing the redirect you tackle the issue 2 ways. 1. Even if Google returns your parked domain the user is sent to the correct domain. Second Google will see the redirect and index it appropriately thus removing the ranking from the parked domain.

I hope this helps and I didn't mean to sound rude if it came off that way,

Don

This is a VERY old way of indicating a link to the "homepage" which is usually index.html /.php /.asp .

The term "Home" was very prevalent in the late 90's early 2000's. This gave rise to companies with home in their name like homestead.com (webhost / design). Many companies and people still see the word home and relate it to root. However the top 10 websites in the world do not use the term except Yahoo.com. Though you may find many "house" icons still about.

The newer generation just generally knows that clicking the logo will take you back to the root, Back in the early days of the web people needed to understand what each link meant, there weren't many standards but "home" caught on quickly and is still used a lot today. In addition to this many host still use the term "home" to indicate the users public_html folder where their pages are served from. It maybe that somebody who worked at the company found "/home" very comfortable looking due to these reasons.

I agree though having it in the url is pretty silly nowadays. I would suggest they just 301 it back too root -> site.com

Hope this helps,

Don

Hi Neil,

Sounds like you have put some thought into this and want to start off in the right place.

Categories: In your line of thinking you seem to landed on wanting category pages either for organization or for keyword opportunities, which is great. However, without knowing exactly what your categories are, or what type of website you're using, it is hard for us to commit further on this line of thinking.

Dynamic vs Static: Depending again on what type of website you're building or working on and the amount of items you'll ultimately end up with its hard for me to give a recommendation. That said, I do have some general rules I like to follow. If we are talking +100's of properties I would absolutely go dynamic.

Dynamic requires more initial coding to get setup, but once done you end up with a very easy way to add properties with minimal effort.

If you're only listing 20-40'ish properties, you may find that putting the personal touch into each page and going static is a better route.

In the end the dynamic vs static debate comes down to time and reward. If I were selling 10, 50 million dollar properties you could bet your left one, that I would absolutely take my time and do them static. But if I had to list 50, 60k properties and 2 150k's I would spend my time on the back end coding something that allows me to plug and play the stats.. so to speak.

To summarize I used property sales as an example here, but it wasn't quite clear if you were talking about selling properties, or possibly hotel rooms. In any case, using categories is usually a good thing.  In the Dynamic vs static debate it all comes down to time vs reward, which is the best way to use your time given the potential return?

Also don't forget about the Schema when you make your decision. https://schema.org/RealEstateAgent

Hope this helps you,

Don