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Hi,

I'm not the expert but I have dealt with Google Local listings many times. And no one is answering this question so I thought I could share what I know.

From my knowledge, you cant just change the name of the listing if the name is completely different. For example you cant change Yahoo HQ business listing to Google HQ, because the name is entirely different, but you can change the name from Yahoo HQ to Yahoo Main Office, or Starbuks to Starbucks.

I my solution to this would be not to close down these business listings, change the phone number and address. Let the landing page tell about the acquisition and move of business. Use a call to action to take people to the main website.

After all, having two or three active websites can capture a lot more traffic than one website. With the right way of leading users to one website, you could be achieving amazing results.

I hope this helps.

Issa

Sorry my response might not seem very helpful, however, the keywords from all I read here is "a lot of directories". I suggest you read more about Google Penguin Update.

Issa

Hi there,

Try reading this first http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

Also try reading about Google updates on Search Engine Land website, as well as Moz of course. 3 months old SEO knowledge might be outdated because of changes happening to Google through their updates, mainly Google Panda and Penguin.

Also follow some of the big names on Twitter and keep an eye on relevant tweets.

I hope this helps

Issa

Hi again,

Thank you for all this so far, however, it still doesn't help me very much. If i will need to follow the same system I will need to create a redirect line for each directory level and variation level I have on the website. Please not that in my initial question i said I have hundreds of cases of this issue.

I have discussed this issue with friends who came up with a solution that I thought i should share with you guys here. The redirect code should be:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^(GET|HEAD|POST)\ /[^\ ?]*?($|\ )

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

The first line ensures that the rule will only deal with question marks that appears at the end of the URL not the middle (as you kindly mentioned before). The second line then removes the question mark.

Plus, its just 2 lines, 1 rule which is a much shorter format

I hope this will be useful to someone else, it surely has saved me a lot of trouble, its now implemented and works perfectly.

Issa

Not sure how the status of this question has changed to "Answered" but no thats not the right answer I'm afraid. What I was asking for is a wildcard redirect not redirect for the three examples i provided.

As mentioned i have hundreds of pages that require this change.

Issa

Hi there,

I have a website that has hundreds of links with a "question mark" at the end of URLs. For example:

http://www.domain.com/directory/page.html?
http://www.domain.com/directory/another-directory?
http://www.domain.com/directory/yet-another-directory/?

I'm want to place a wildcard redirect on the .htaccess file but don't know what exactly to add. Ideally I want the URLs above to be:

http://www.domain.com/directory/page.html
http://www.domain.com/directory/another-directory/
http://www.domain.com/directory/yet-another-directory/

Any help is most appreciated.

Thanks
Issa

Hi David,

Exact Match Domain (EMD) names are currently being ignored by Google. A while back Matt Cutts (the leader of the spam team at Google) said it should have the weight people give it. Watch this video for more information.

In September 2012 EMD update first came into effect to prevent poor quality sites from ranking well simply because they had words that match search terms in their domain names. When a fresh EMD Update happens, sites that have improved their content may regain good rankings. New sites with poor content — or those previously missed by EMD — may get caught. In addition, “false positives” may get released. Our latest news about the EMD Update is below.

As Thmoas and Daniel said, focus on the quality of your content, usability (which is the biggest next thing in SEO) and accessibility. Ensure that your website is all about your customers and the product, NOT about search engines.

Ensure you help search engines and users find the useful content on your website, relate to relevant pages using internal linking, breadcrumb and relevant keyword optimisation between linked pages. Ensure you dont have orphan pages and watch your Analytics system to know which pages are being viewed most, have most time on site, referred, these are the pages users love. If you see high bounce rate and exit rate, or drop outs from some pages, these pages need some serious improvements.

And never buy traffic or pay to include your links in linking schemes, focus more on PR for external links and probably editorials. Partner with blogs and webmasters to host articles with relevant and high quality content on their blogs.

I hope this can help.

Regards,

Issa

I agree with ABK717.

Why every time a user clicks on http://www.cookerreviews.net/ they get redirected to http://www.slowcookerworld.com/ or another website?

A simple HTTP head review to http://www.cookerreviews.net/ returns HTTP 1.1/ 200 OK. This means it shouldnt redirect, but it does anyway.

Thats the first thing I see. Obviously Google will not like this.

You will need to host your page on one domain. You dont need the other domains, especially that exact match domain optimisation doesnt carry as much weight as it used to in the past.

I hope this helps

Issa

Whats the web address?

Issa

Please do go through this link which has a wealth of information and its by Google so nothing better to trust:

But yes for Brazil related pages use

<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="pt-br"> </meta http-equiv="content-language" content="pt-br">

and

Hi,

I understand you dont have two website, but you said somewhere you are using subdomains. For search engines every subdomain is a completely different DNS recored, so treated as a different website.

No one is saying you need to translate your website, however, the changes above need to be done to whatever languages you already have. You would need an army of people to translate to all languages and of course a million USD! Haha!

As I said before, language approach is not enough, you need to use the locale approach too. For example, English is spoken in many countries (like Australia, Canada, US, UK, New Zealand, South Africa). Same as German and a few other languages, so if you dont couple language with country, search engines will get confused.

I hope this helps

Issa

Hi again,

First of all, canonicals are not enough but definitely its good that you use them.

Alternate rel link tag is very important. Read this link please: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

As for the XML sitemap, do you use the language markup for each link there? If you want to know how to do that follow this link: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2620865

As for the Portugal and Brazil subdomains, using webmaster tools will surely solve this issue, but even with the language rel tag you have to use different language codes, so "pt" is incorrect, you need to specify the locale as well, so "pt-BR" for Brazilian Portuguese and "pt-PT" for European/Continental/Portugal Portuguese

I hope this clears things up.

Sorry there is no easy way

Best,

Issa

Hi Fabrizzo,

There are a few things you will need to do to help Google make a decision of which part of your website (whether its a subdomain or a subfolder). For example on the mobile-friendly website you will need to use the HTML annotation:

And on the desktop site you will need to add the canonical meta:

This way, you are telling google that  these two pages are the same pages, but one is for mobile and the other is for desktop users.

As for countries websites, you this is what Google looks at when they crawl your web pages:

• ccTLDs (country-code top-level domain names).
• Geotargeting settings. You can use the geotargeting tool in Webmaster Tools to indicate to Google that your site is targeted at a specific country. (If you have different subdomains then create a separate profile for each on Webmaster tool and assign each to a different country.)
• Server location (through the IP address of the server). The server location is often physically near your users and can be a signal about your site’s intended audience.
• Other signals. Other sources of clues as to the intended audience of your site can include local addresses and phone numbers on the pages, the use of local language and currency, links from other local sites, and/or the use of Google Places (where available).

(Source for this is Google support article #182192

In your situation i think you will need to 1) Use a dedicated Webmastertools profile for each countries domain. 2) use rel="alternate" hreflang="x" (see examples below)

• HTML link element. In the HTML  section of http://www.example.com/, add a linkelement pointing to the Spanish version of that webpage at http://es.example.com/, like this:

• HTTP header. If you publish non-HTML files (like PDFs), you can use an HTTP header to indicate a different language version of a URL:

  Link: <http: es.example.com="">; rel="alternate"; hreflang="es"</http:>
  

• Sitemap. Instead of using markup, you can submit language version information in a Sitemap.

I hope this helps, let me know if you have more Qs

Best,

Issa