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Hi Paul, that would be the ideal fix. Unfortunately, it won't be an option for at least a couple of months. Maybe best just to wait then.

I have a website which has had trailing slashes added to the URLs by 301 redirects for over 3 years. However, the custom CMS does not allow navigation links to have trailing slashes. This is resulting in 301s every time a user clicks a navigation link.

The site ranks fairy well for some moderately competitive keywords.

If you were in my shoes, would you remove the forced trailing slash redirect in the .htaccess and replace it with a trailing slash removal redirect, or would you leave it like it is?

Thanks,
James

p.s. the CMS also doesn't allow canonicals.

Makes sense to me.

Thank you Peter!

Hi Peter

Thanks for taking the time to answer my question.

So I shall suggest to keep the subdomain a little longer after the competition (generally this is a one-pager) with a notification that competition is closed and a link back to the root domain.

After a while the subdomain redirects (301) to the root domain.

Correct?

Daniela

Hi all,

A client of ours tends to have a number of offers and competitions during the year and would like to host these competitions on separate sub-domains. Once a competition is over (generally these last for approximately a month) the sub-domain gets deleted and pointed back to the main site.

I was wondering whether this would have any effects on the root domain.

Can I get your opinion please?

Thank you Martijn. It helps indeed.

Could someone please confirm that if I do not want to block any pages from my URL, then I do not need a robots.txt file on my site? Thanks

Thank you for your suggestions Bryan! I will look into the links you shared.

Hi Andrea,

Thanks for your feedback.

I'm definitely with you that it takes time to rank and that it is not easy for people to find us.

We created new sections in the site where we can update content on regular basis - e.g. the About Malta and the News & Events section. I am trying to get a special offer too to make it more attractive for the consumer and instill some word of mouth.

We've done a small PPC campaign on google yet keywords were expensive for the identified keywords in the market we want to reach.

Thank you for pointing out the keyword stuffing issue - I will revise the content again.

With regards to the EMD update- we are adding original content, thus hoping that Google won't see our site as low-quality.

Well said KLLC!

Directories with NO editorial policies at all might be dodgy since everyone would be able to list his/her site their.

There are some good relevant online directories - before posting your site on directories ask whether you will benefit from traffic coming through this directory (remember that SEO is about quality traffic not just increased traffic). Also, ask yourself whether it is TOO easy to get a link from that site - if yes then you might want to be extra careful.

Hi all, I am optimising a site which is a hotel directory for a small island in the Mediterranean - Malta. The site is www.maltahotelsonline.com.

I did a keyword research and optimised the page. However I am now at link building stage. Since we do not have many links the site is still not ranking very well for the desired keywords (ranking fine on Bing and Yahoo yet not on Google). As a result there isn't much traffic on the site.

1. Is there any particular issue that you can spot on this site that is not allowing it to rank well on Google?

2. Any suggestions on link-building please?

Hi everyone, I am working on a new project for a telecommunications company with its target audience in various countries around Europe and USA. They only have 1 website in English and don’t have content specific to different countries.

Ineed to choose keywords for this project but I am finding it quite challenging as usually my keywords are localised. In this case I cannot restrict keywords to any particular country. At the same time I know that it would be extremely tough to rank for generic keywords. What do you suggest?