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

Hello,

Yes, multiple sitemaps are okay, and sometimes even advised!

You can read Google's official response here."..it's fine for multiple Sitemaps to live in the same directory (as many as you want!)..."

And you can see a case study showing how multiple sitemaps has helped traffic here on Moz.

Hope this helps,

Don

Hi Armands,

Looks like I made an error in the code posted above (I did not edit the original post it so we can see the problem).

The 4th line:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

Should be

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

Since we are redirecting to the HTTPS version.

The corrected code is as follows:

#If http is requested (ie https off) then redirect to https none www
  RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.)$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.)$ https://%1/$1 [R=301,L]
#If https is requested (ie https on) then redirect to https none www
  RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.)$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.)$ https://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

That still shouldn't change the 302 problem you have, unless this code is executed prior to whatever is causing the 302. I just noticed the error myself and wanted to give you a heads up.

Thanks,

Don

Hi Armands,

Glad to help, as a side note if your developer can't get it sorted then you should be able to talk directly with your Hosting provider. These issues while can be complicated are somewhat common and most host have trained their help desk on how to fix them, at least from my past experiences with many different host.

Good luck,

Don

Hello,

Sorry for not getting back to you sooner. Weekend and all..

Okay the problem is still there. You can check the header response codes yourself here:

http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker

The URL http://www.a-fotografy.co.uk/ 302 redirects to https://www.a-fotografy.co.uk/ which 301 redirects to https://a-fotografy.co.uk/

There are 2 possible problems I can think of. 1 the code to redirect http://www.a-fotografy.co.uk/ is still in the htaccess file and before the code I gave you. Or 2 the host has a domain redirect in place that is executing on the server before the htaccess is read.

For me to help you further please post the contents of your htaccess file and I'll see if there is something I can pick up on.

Don

That is correct, 302 is a temporary redirect so it does not pass link juice the same way, and should be fixed asap.

Glad to help,

Don

Hello Again,

Okay so it looks like what is happening is:
the http www version is 302 to the https.www version and the https.www version is 301 to the non-www. So what you have is one redirect pointing to another redirect.

This is likely confusing Moz, or Moz has in the past crawled a different version and has more data for that so it wants to show you it instead.

The headers are:

http://www.a-fotografy.co.uk/

---

302 Found

Status:    302 Found
Code:    302
Date:    Thu, 31 Dec 2015 12:43:08 GMT
Server:    Apache
X-FRAME-OPTIONS:    DENY
X-XSS-Protection:    1; mode=block
Location:    https://www.a-fotografy.co.uk/
Cache-Control:    max-age=0
Expires:    Thu, 31 Dec 2015 12:43:08 GMT
Vary:    Accept-Encoding
Content-Length:    214
Keep-Alive:    timeout=10, max=200
Content-Type:    text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Connection:    close

https://www.a-fotografy.co.uk/

---

301 Moved Permanently

Status:    301 Moved Permanently
Code:    301
Date:    Thu, 31 Dec 2015 12:43:08 GMT
Server:    Apache
X-FRAME-OPTIONS:    DENY
X-XSS-Protection:    1; mode=block
Location:    https://a-fotografy.co.uk/
Cache-Control:    max-age=0
Expires:    Thu, 31 Dec 2015 12:43:08 GMT
Vary:    Accept-Encoding
Content-Length:    234
Connection:    close
Content-Type:    text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

https://a-fotografy.co.uk/

---

200 OK

Status:    200 OK
Code:    200
Date:    Thu, 31 Dec 2015 12:43:08 GMT
Server:    Apache
X-FRAME-OPTIONS:    DENY
X-XSS-Protection:    1; mode=block
Accept-Ranges:    bytes
Content-Length:    21886
Cache-Control:    max-age=0, public
Expires:    Thu, 31 Dec 2015 12:43:08 GMT
Vary:    Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
X-Powered-By:    WP Rocket/2.6.15
Connection:    close
Content-Type:    text/html; charset=UTF-8

What you want to do is get all your redirects to 301 to the correct version.

This should cover it in your .htaccess file
EDIT 01/07/2016: Please see the below responses for corrected code.

#If http is requested (ie https off) then redirect to https none www
  RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.)$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]
#If https is requested (ie https on) then redirect to https none www
  RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.)$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.)$ https://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

Hope this helps,

Don

My first thought was exactly what EGOL suggested. However given the decission that they are dead set on rebranding I would suggest the following.

Split the wholesale site off first, leaving the current domain in place for a transitional period. After a pre-dertmined period of time (however long they feel it necessary for wholesale buyers to get used to the new website), then change the retail side to the new brand, and take full advatange of 301 and change of address.

My thoughts hope it helps,

Don

Great Answer Peter!

/thumbs

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

Hi,

Something is generating those links, and that is what I would want to fix. It sounds like a module or add-on is incorrectly coded, or installed improperly. As p=1_1 is usually a form of pagination and / or sort order.

You could of course easily fix it by putting a canonical tag on the root page to itself or work out a mod rewrite rule, but that isn't actually fixing the problem. As soon as you add another category you may have to revisit the fix again.

Here is an example of using mod re-write on Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14666140/htaccess-rewriting-php-pagination

I hope that helps,

Don

Hi Satish,

Then my first response is appropriate. Google will use whatever "title / Description" it feels is best, again I recommend you watch the YouTube video from Matt Cutts (former Google SEO guy) about why that is.

In your particular case it could be the Doctor Deepu Chandru is driving more traffic to the site then your focused keywords, so as long as people keep engaging with Google's suggestion they will keep using it. Or perhaps you have made changes and not allowed Google enough time to re-index the site.

My suggestion remove the H1 tags from the docotor's names you are using multiple h1 tags there, this could be a bit of confusion for Google, change them to H2 tags. Then under your Logo write in H1 the Page title "Liposuction Surgery and Laser Hair Removal". This will tell Google the most important thing on this page is those specific keywords. Give it 1-3 weeks to get re-crawled and Google to get its indexes changed and you should see the difference.

Hope this helps,

Don

Okay it is possible that I misunderstood the question.

Where specifically are you seeing that Google is not indexing your title and description?

Google Webmaster or Search Results ?

Thanks,

Don

Hi Malika,

Blocking image directories or images themselves in robots.txt only prevents the image from being added to "image" search results. You will still get the full benefit of the alt text on the page, the image just won't appear in the image results.

How this actually works is the crawler will crawl the site and index all the text and weight (h1, h2, alt etc..) then when the crawler moves to add the image to the search cache it finds it can't access it due to robots.txt and simply ignores it and goes on.This leaves your original text as what is indexed as a search result, and nothing for image results.

If you are using Apache you may want to not use robots.txt as the method of blocking images. I would recommend using the .htaccess file with a code like this...

<filesmatch ".(bmp|gif|jpg|png|tif)$"="">Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex"</filesmatch>

This is a blanket declaration and would prevent indexing of any images with the noted extensions on your site. This is particularly useful if you have multiple image directories. Further more if there are a few images you want indexed you could pick a particular extension like .jpeg for example (note jpeg not jpg), then just convert those few images and know they will be indexed as they are not in the exclusion list.

Another benefit of handling it this way is if you already have images that are indexed, using the noindex tag will get them out out of the image directory much faster than blocking them. The reason is you are giving Google a new directive which is "noindex", otherwise they will just treat them as inaccessible and move on, leaving any cached version to appear in the directory for some time.

Hope that makes sense and helps,

Don

Hi Satish,

Google will treat your title and description as suggestions. The reason they do this is because they want to provide the best possible description to their users. In such case they may generate their own description based off words, alt text, your description or combinations of all three.

This is nothing new, Google does this to everybody. You can view a video by Matt Cutts on this exact situation here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3HX_8BAhB4

Hope this helps,

Don