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Hi Mozzers, We're currently in the process of a website redesign with new CMS and have the opportunity to change URL and structure. I would love some opinions as to what the best practise will be. A quick prerequisite, the website is entirely about France. French property, living, holidays, forum - everything. Therefore, we're unsure of the usage of the word France/French. Presently, we're running Classic ASP which allows for one subfolder then dynamic article ID. In my examples, I will take our activity holidays URL. At present this is /france-activity-holidays/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=12345. We know that DisplayArticle.asp?ID=12345 will simply become [article-title], however, its the preceding subfolders I would like some help with. Here are our thoughts on the options available. Can you please vote as to which you think is the best? /france-activity-holidays/ (one subfolder per category, as at present) /france/holidays/activity/  (always have a first subfolder with the word france) /holidays-to-france/activity-holidays/ (france in the primary subfolder) /holidays/activity-holidays-france/ (france in the secondary subfolder) /holidays/activity/ (because the whole website is about France, it is redundant to have /france/) /French-holidays/activity/ My gut feeling is either number 2 or 5. Concise, good for UX, OK for SEO. However, there is very little information around that is relevant to our sector. Thanks in advance! Matt

Hi Mozzers, We're in the process of re-developing and redesigning several of our websites, and moving them all onto the same content management system. At the moment, although the websites are all under the same brand and roughly the same designs, because of various reasons they all either live on a separate domain to the main website, or are on a subdomain. Here's a list of what we have (and what we're consolidating): Main site - http://www.frenchentree.com/ Property database - http://france-property.frenchentree.com/ (subdomain) Forum - http://www.france-forum-frenchentree.com/ (separate domain) Classified ads - http://www.france-classified-ads-frenchentree.com/ (separate domain) My question to you lovely people is: should we take this opportunity through the redevelopment of the CMS to put everything into subfolders of the main domain? Keep things as they are? Put each section onto a subdomain? What's best from an SEO perspective? For information - the property database was put onto a subdomain as this is what we were advised to do by the developers of the system. We're starting to question this decision though, as we very rarely see subdomains appear in SERPs for any remotely competitive search terms. Our SEO for the property database is fairly non-existent, and only ever really appears in SERPs for brand related keywords. For further info - the forum and classifieds were under a separate brand name previously, so keeping them on separate domains felt correct at that time. However, with the redevelopment of our sites, it seems to make more sense to either put them on subdomains or subfolders of the main site. Our SEO for the forum is pretty strong, though has dwindled in the last year or so. Any help/advice would be very much appreciated. Thanks Matt

Hi Mozzers, Is anyone aware of a tool that will tell me how many outbound external links there are on my website? Basically, I have a theory that our website is littered with links to other websites, but need to know the approximate figure. As far as I can tell, none of the Moz tools tell me this? Any help appreciated! Cheers Matt

Hi folks, Due to working on a site older than myself, I find myself in a position whereby I need to set up some redirects in the httpd.ini document. I had wrongly assumed this would be in the same way as I would in htaccess, but alas, no dice. There's nothing special about what I'm trying to do, but I think the expressions are what are confusing me. I'm trying to redirect this example page - http://www.example.com/subfolder/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=12345 to it's subfolder http://www.example.com/subfolder/. Here's what I have: [ISAPI_Rewrite] Redirecting old article to new locations RewriteRule ^/subfolder/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=12345 /subfolder/ [R=301,L] Can someone please point me in the right direction? Thanks Matt

Hi all, Sorry for the un-SEO-related question. I have had a few complaints that one of my websites is not fully compatible with 64-bit OS / browsers. I don't have access to a 64-bit machine, so this is a plea for someone to have a quick peek for me. The website (homepage works fine) - http://france-classified-ads-frenchentree.com Search results page (also works fine) - http://france-classified-ads-frenchentree.com/search/action/browse/search_category/0/new_category/34 Ad details page (broken!) - http://france-classified-ads-frenchentree.com/ad/17887-Left-Hand-drive-Peugeot-207cc The above ad details page is apparently appearing as just a blank page - correct? Can anyone suggest a fix? (The software is off-the-shelf, and my suspicion is that the software is not compatible). Thanks very much in advance of any responses! Matt

Hi Mozzers, I have a very popular property database on a subfolder of my main website. It accounts for about 2 thirds of my overall traffic. I'm moving the database to a new server, so my choices are now a sub domain or completely new domain. If I move my database to a new domain, will my main site lose SEO because of how popular the database is? Cheers Matt

Hi Mozzers, I'm redesigning a property database, and wondered whether it would be better to put this on a sub domain of my site or to set up a completely separate domain? Back story: My core website is about lifestyle, holidays and property in France. It's very popular, and benefits massively from long tail search. It's a fairly strong, recognisable brand, so I assume any association the database has with the site would greatly benefit it... Maybe. My current property database on the other hand is very poor in terms of SEO/visibility, etc, so we're having the whole thing redesigned from scratch. For the database, is it better to set up a subdomain of my strong branded site, or set up a completely new domain targeting keywords in the URL? Cheers! Matt

Dear SEOmoz folk, At the moment, I have one (rather large) site set up as a campain. I have decided to split off parts of my site into sub domains. My question is, can I set up these sub domains as a completely separate campaign on here? I'd very much like the crawl reports separated out for each one. A very real fear I have is that my site is well over double 10,000 pages, so I never truly see the actual number of errors that I have. Thoughts appreciated. Many thanks, Matt

Hi All, I have an issue whereby print versions of my articles are being flagged up as "duplicate" content / page titles. In order to get around this, I feel that the easiest way is to just add them to my robots.txt document with a disallow. Here is my URL make up: Normal article: www.mysite.com/displayarticle=12345 Print version of my article www.mysite.com/displayarticle=12345&printversion=yes I know that having dynamic parameters in my URL is not best practise to say the least, but I'm stuck with this for the time being... My question is, how do I add just the print versions of articles to my robots file without disallowing articles too? Can I just add the parameter to the document like so? Disallow: &printversion=yes I also know that I can do add a meta noindex, nofollow tag into the head of my print versions, but I feel a robots.txt disallow will be somewhat easier... Many thanks in advance. Matt

All, My site is rather complicated, but I will try to break down my question as simply as possible. I have a robots.txt document in the root level of my site to disallow robot access to /_system/, my CMS. This looks like this: # /robots.txt file for http://webcrawler.com/
# mail webmaster@webcrawler.com for constructive criticism **User-agent: ***
Disallow: /_system/ I have another robots.txt file in another level down, which is my holiday database - www.mysite.com/holiday-database/ - this is to disallow access to /holiday-database/ControlPanel/, my database CMS. This looks like this: **User-agent: ***
Disallow: /ControlPanel/ Am I correct in thinking that this file must also be in the root level, and not in the /holiday-database/ level? If so, should my new robots.txt file look like this: # /robots.txt file for http://webcrawler.com/
# mail webmaster@webcrawler.com for constructive criticism **User-agent: ***
Disallow: /_system/
Disallow: /holiday-database/ControlPanel/ Or, like this: # /robots.txt file for http://webcrawler.com/
# mail webmaster@webcrawler.com for constructive criticism **User-agent: ***
Disallow: /_system/
Disallow: /ControlPanel/ Thanks in advance. Matt

Hi All, This is a rather lengthy one, so please bear with me! SEOmoz has recently crawled 10,000 webpages from my site, FrenchEntree, and has returned 8,000 errors of duplicate page content. The main reason I have so many is because of the directories I have on site. The site is broken down into 2 levels of hierachy. "Weblets" and "Articles". A weblet is a landing page, and articles are created within these weblets. Weblets can hold any number of articles - 0 - 1,000,000 (in theory) and an article must be assigned to a weblet in order for it to work. Here's how it roughly looks in URL form - http://www.mysite.com/[weblet]/[articleID]/ Now; our directory results pages are weblets with standard content in the left and right hand columns, but the information in the middle column is pulled in from our directory database following a user query. This happens by adding the query string to the end of the URL. We have 3 main directory databases, but perhaps around 100 weblets promoting various 'canned' queries that users may want to navigate straight into. However, any one of the 100 directory promoting weblets could return any query from the parent directory database with the correct query string. The problem with this method (as pointed out by the 8,000 errors) is that each possible permutation of search is considered to be it's own URL, and therefore, it's own page. The example I will use is the first alphabetically. "Activity Holidays in France": http://www.frenchentree.com/activity-holidays-france/ - This link shows you a results weblet without the query at the end, and therefore only displays the left and right hand columns as populated. http://www.frenchentree.com/activity-holidays-france/home.asp?CategoryFilter= - This link shows you the same weblet with the an 'open' query on the end. I.e. display all results from this database. Listings are displayed in the middle. There are around 500 different URL permutations for this weblet alone when you take into account the various categories and cities a user may want to search in. What I'd like to do is to prevent SEOmoz (and therefore search engines) from counting each individual query permutation as a unique page, without harming the visibility that the directory results received in SERPs. We often appear in the top 5 for quite competitive keywords and we'd like it to stay that way. I also wouldn't want the search engine results to only display (and therefore direct the user through to) an empty weblet by some sort of robot exclusion or canonical classification. Does anyone have any advice on how best to remove the "duplication" problem, whilst keeping the search visibility? All advice welcome. Thanks Matt

Good morning all, As part of the analysis of our website, we have realised that we are diluting our keyword strength in a particular area by having multiple zones all targeting the same keyword. We have decided to combine these zones into one, and set up 301 redirects so that the remaining zone gets the benefit of the other zones' link juice. When setting up a 301 redirect from zone "X" to zone "Y" say, do I need to keep all of the content in zone X, or should I remove all content before the redirect is set up? Does zone Y still get the benefit of zone X's link juice if the content is removed? Many thanks Guy

All, I read within the SEOmoz blog that search engines consider 100 links on a page to be plenty, and we should try (where possible) to keep within the 100 limit. My question is; when a rel="nofollow" attribute is given to a link, does that link still count towards your maximum 100? Many thanks Guy