Hey Tina,

I'm afraid your colleagues saying that the best way to go is to have it under a subfolder are right. Basically, all search engines consider subdomains as separate domains, meaning that if you put the learning center on learning.website.com will have the same effect as having it on somenewdomain.com, neither will help website.com unless you link from one to the other, and that could be seen as doorway pages which will ultimately hurt more than they could help.

Using a subfolder, any advantage you get from website.com/learn/ will influence website.com without putting website.com at risk (unless you post completely unrelated stuff in that new folder). But as you trying to write about the same niche, it is like basically having a blog. Take this Moz section for example. The community folder in a subfolder under their "money site" and I assure you it is working far better than if it was a subdomain.

I'm with your colleagues on this one

Hope that helps!

Hi Rob,

I personally wouldn't go the way you are heading... that could be seen by Google as a technique to manipulate search engine results (which you stated it is).

But to respond to your question, why don't you use the "definitive" version of the page as the canonical? If the one including "near downtown" is the most accurate (and complete one as I guess the hotel IS near downtown) then you should go with that and noindex the alternatives... although I know that's not your intention, that is the way it should be done.

Hope that helps!

Implementing the redirect at the server level will be much better as you can redirect all pages to their correspondent page in the .com version.

You will need the URL-rewrite extension: http://www.iis.net/downloads/microsoft/url-rewrite

Then create a "Canonical Hostnames" rule to redirect the other domains.

Hope that helps!

I agree, it doesn't make any sense. I would redirect everything instead to a subfolder:

example.domain.com -> domain.com/example

example.domain.com/page-1 -> domain.com/example/page-1

Not directly. However you could implement an internal tracking method by looking at the referrer "google.com", "bing.com" and "yahoo.com" (+ any other major source you would like to track) and then set a session variable to track the visitor around the site and finally, if he/she converts you can fire an Analytics event based on that session variable.

Eugenio,

I don't think there's a way to tell Google what to show. However, if you are building your site in such a way that it has content markup (such as schema, microformats or using the highligh tool in WMT), you are basically telling Google that that is the best way to display the search results.

If you actually prefer to show the meta description (although it is impossible to force Google to do it), you should remove whatever markup you have in your site, then let Google just display what it wants (hopefully your meta description).

PS: the keywords tag isn't used by Google anymore, that's a useless tag you can safely removed. However, Bing said that they still use the keywords meta but it is just one of over 2000 ranking signals they use. So it's basically up to you use it /don't use it (you won't find a big site making use of the keywords meta anymore).

Hope that helped!

I think you did the right thing. Engines will take a while until they re-crawl your robots.txt and actually following what you commanded.

Extra steps I would take:

• 302 the redirect, probably is just a line of code doing the redirect after setting some cookies or session variables.
• Try to edit the affiliate codes to work with Javascript instead of naked URLs ( could be something like <ins class="affiliate">that is later switched to a text link or banner using JS). This will not only allow you to set a nofollow for those links, but you could be able to remove/block specific affiliates or pages where you don't want your links/banners.</ins>
  

PS: have you tried fetching your robots.txt from Google WT (Crawl -> Blocked URLs) to see when was it downloaded and id the contents are ok?