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Think pretty much any Javascript menu would be obfuscated for Google..... but bit of a grey hat approach though. Been reading some interesting articles about pageRank sculpting and whether it's still possible.

This question seems to come up a lot.

70 flat page site. For ease of navigation, I want to link every page to one-another.

Pure CSS Dropdown menu with categories - each expanding to each of the subpage. Made, implemented, remade smartphone friendly. Hurray.

I thought this was an SEO principle - ensuring good site navigation and good internal linking. Not forcing your users to hit "back". Not forcing your users to jump through hoops.

But unless I've misread http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many then this is something that's indirectly penalised by Google because a site with 70 links from its homepage only lets each sub-page inherit 1/80th of its PageRank.

Good site navigation vs your subpages are invisible on Google.

I meant it still reads the link as "Newcastle" rather than "Scrap Car Newcastle" (i.e. it doesn't inherit information from the parent list-item - i.e. Scrap Car) but the point about the actual landing page being optimised for "scrap car Newcastle" being enough is a good one and seems to be the best approach.

Re-reading http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

I don't think I have any choice except to use rel=canonical tags and work at improving page content. Adapting this question to ask the speculative "how much does duplicate content hurt my ranking"

My client's got 14 physical locations around the country but has a webpage for each "service area" they operate in.

They have a Croydon location. But a separate page for London, Croydon, Essex, Luton, Stevenage and many other places (areas near Croydon) that the Croydon location serves. Each of these pages is a near duplicate of the Croydon page with the word Croydon swapped for the area.

I'm told this was a SEO tactic circa 2001. Obviously this is an issue.

So the question - should I 301 redirect each of the links to the Croydon page? Or (what I believe to be the best answer) set a rel=canonical tag on the duplicate pages).

Creating "real and meaningful content" on each page isn't quite an option, sorry!

ErrorDocument 404 /

In the htaccess. Or spider the frick out of the site with Screaming Frog. There's an article on this;

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/8-ways-to-find-old-urls-after-a-failed-site-migration-whiteboard-friday

Yeah... which is why I wanted to know why a major brand like Hungryhouse thought it was okay. The answer is "they're wrong" I guess.

I agree it does look like a schoolboy error... but do you think you'd avoid overoptimisation if they only use this style of footer on the homepage. Just taking the homepage on its own, they've used the word "takeaway" 54 times for (amusingly) 3% keyword density.

Hungryhouse don't appear to be ranking anywhere near as much as their budget (TV adverts, newspaper, etc.) so I'd imagine they've probably been penalised somehow.

Yes, that's the question! Similar problem on a client site.

http://i.imgur.com/WLawo.png

I'm optimising the menu system for a scrap car recycling company. Unless I stick in a nofollow, the anchor text in each link in this navbar will be the "description" Google takes for the page. I'm trying to optimise each of the location pages so I might not need to do this.

Some people believe that having a link for each keyword and a page of content for each keyword (300+ words) can help ranking for those keywords. However, the old approach of having "restaurant New York", "restaurant Buffalo", "restaurant Newark" approach has become seen as a terrible SEO practice. I don't know whether this was because it's spammy or because people usually combined it with thin content that was 95% duplicate.

Which brings us to;

http://hungryhouse.co.uk/

Why does such a major company have the following on the site (see the footer);

• Aberdeen Takeaway
• Birmingham Takeaway
• Brighton Takeaway
• Bristol Takeaway
• Cambridge Takeaway
• Canterbury Takeaway
• Cardiff Takeaway
• Coventry Takeaway
• Edinburgh Takeaway
• Glasgow Takeaway
• Leeds Takeaway
• Leicester Takeaway
• Liverpool Takeaway
• London Takeaway
• Manchester Takeaway
• Newcastle Takeaway
• Nottingham Takeaway
• Sheffield Takeaway
• Southampton Takeaway
• York Takeaway
• Indian Takeaway
• Chinese Takeaway
• Thai Takeaway
• Italian Takeaway
• Cantonese Takeaway
• Pizza Delivery
• Sushi Takeaway
• Kebab Takeaway
• Fish and Chips
• Sandwiches

Do they know something I don't?

[unnecessary links removed by staff]

http://www.swellpath.com/2012/09/your-3-page-agency-website-sucks-for-seo/ found it!

Visit http://www.google.com/placesforbusiness on the client's login. You'll probably see the listing on the Control Panel.

The issue with the images is just a bug when you select "Upload from website" rather than upload them from your computer. Download the images and upload them.

But then when you've confirmed you own the site, setup a Google+ Local account. http://www.google.com/local/add - it'll ask you for a phone number, the info from your Places listing should pop up. Select it. Don't create a new listing. If it doesn't come up, stop now.

In a convoluted way, this will eventually give you a Google Places listing with Google+ functionality.

Guess, those are just backups of the htaccess file...

Thanks Robert but there's a certain... authority that comes in being able to present your clients with a link to an article to support your proposals so I'm probably going to go crazy looking for it.

The first one is setup at Google Places For Business - http://www.google.com/placesforbusiness - the second one doesn't appear to be. If you didn't set this up, it was probably added by Google's data source providers (I'd guess they use something like Thomson Local or Yell) so you probably should 1) claim the Google Places listing for the York one 2) setup Google Places on the Arbroath site.

edit: https://plus.google.com/113126854644958993718/about?hl=en

Screaming Frog can spider a site - free version handles up to 500 pages. Alternatively, xml-sitemaps.com does something similar... but what an odd hosting package!

Read an interesting article about how websites with just a "services" page suffer and they should try to create a meaningful page for each service they offer...

Read so many blogs right now that I can't remember where I saw it

There's a great htaccess file generator at http://www.htaccessredirect.net/

In a way, I suppose this is a question about how well Google understands breadcrumbs and how much it values the information vs link anchor text. I'll do a blog search!

Obviously Google likes descriptive anchor text. At least the first version on the page.

But suppose you had a list of scrap yard depots on a hover site menu, would you go for the person friendly nested list, so

• Scrap Yard Depots
  • Newcastle
  • Chester
  • Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

Or the presumably more Google friendly;

• Scrap Yard Depots
  • Newcastle Scrap Yard
  • Chester Scrap Yard
  • Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch Scrap Yard