Welcome to the Q&A Forum

My tip here is to use this geotarget feature only, and if only, you want to target ONE specific country. Otherwise, let Google decide.

In my experience, Google does not ranking lower longer URLs. I know Rand published once a correlation study that shows this, but I can show you many examples that I've used the first approach and got good rankings. Same for the second approach.

I think you should keep your website architecture solid, following the correct path and not removing one level.

Another thing is that dropping that specific level may cause you some duplicate URLs problem. You will need some database check before enable each URLs. Pay attention if you choose the second approach.

During my past years on SEO, I've seen cases with a 5% - 10% delta (negative) during the first 3 days. And about 3-7 days the traffic increased a lot.

If you do the 301 redirection correctly I think that you can find the same numbers.

Hi Robert,

Have you try special characters on meta description? Instead of showing the first 5 letters on your meta description, you can use something like this character "" to represent your review about it. Does it work?

You can find the complete list of UTF-8 symbols here: http://www.w3schools.com/charsets/ref_utf_symbols.asp

I don't think you should focus on doing SEO for this page. You should create a content that a reader loves... maybe telling the site history or anything funny about the founders. You need to find a creative way to tell the readers the history of your company/website.

Hi Jimmy,

Any chance you split that traffic by Mobile vs Desktop and then on Mobile traffic check the direct traffic by device? Sometimes it is related to a specific device or browser that is sending the wrong referral data.

I remember this Cyrus post, about Bing traffic (https traffic) showing as direct traffic. And there is also a post by Shahzad Abbas from Define Media on iOS traffic messing up with analytics reports. Maybe you can read those and have some insights.

Cheers,

Fabio

Why not use Advanced Segments? You can find more detailed information here: http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1033017

For example, if your old URLs looks like:

www.mysite.com/old.php?cat=12&pid=113

And the new ones looks like

www.mysite.com/category-12/product-113

You can easily create advanced segments to monitor the performance.

In my experience it is not harmful. But as you said it is really important to improve your CTR.

Just to let you know that the page was indexed in less than 24hrs. We didn't use Tony's tiip (share on G+) but we did all the following:

• Used GWT tool - fetch as googlebot
• Submit the URL using the button that appears after fetching as googlebot
• Included some sidewide links to the page
• Included the page in our sitemap.xml

Thanks all folks who added some insights and tips!

I don't see any real problems in your situation. Try to add a canonical from example.com/ to example.com just to make sure Google understand.

It is not a BIIIIIG deal, but the canonical should guarantee your rankings.