Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Again - thanks a lot. I totally agree. Next client meeting I'll stress that not only do Ifeel strongly about the subfolder issue, but the good people at SimplifySEO feel the same:) And they know their ish. Or something.

Hey Quilbur

As stated, the meta keywords tag isn't worth your time and can even show competitors which keywords you plan to target.

Meta descriptions, while not a major ranking factor, can help with click-thru rates on search engine results pages. If any of the query appears in your description, it will bold. The bold text gives the searcher that much extra assurance that you are the source to trust.

Hey Rob,

Thanks a lot for this. This is great advice and really well-written. And you're preaching to the choir. I also prefer subfolders, but it's just not in the cards for this client for the time being. As it stands, we're stuck with subdomains.

Any other thoughts re: fourth-level vs. third-level domains, folks?

Hey moz

New client has a site that uses:

subdomains ("third-level" stuff like location.business.com) and;

"fourth-level" subdomains (location.parent.business.com)

Are these fourth-level addresses at risk of being treated differently than the other subdomains? Screaming Frog, for example, doesn't return these fourth-level addresses when doing a crawl for business.com except in the External tab. But maybe I'm just configuring the crawls incorrectly.

These addresses rank, but I'm worried that we're losing some link juice along the way. Any thoughts would be appreciated!

Much appreciated, Christopher.

Howdy mozzers

I have a car dealership site with an inventory page that allows users to specify dealer location, model, make, year, etc. with drop-down menus. Each new choice changes the URL parameters and unspecified categories appear as "...&model=&year=..."

I've attended to the URL parameters in Webmaster Tools, and according to Google's new URL parameters video, it looks like they've got a handle on navigating the site. That said, I do get warnings in my seomoz crawls that these URLs are overly dynamic (there are up to 12 parameters per URL).

How concerned should I be? How would the Moz community suggest handling this many parameters in my URLs?

Thanks as always

Thanks a lot for this. That video couldn't have been more timely!

Howdy mozzers

I'm hoping you can lend some advice. I'm dealing with a site now with loads of URL parameters. It's a vehicle dealership group which hosts its entire inventory from multiple locations on one page, sorted by parameters.

Example inventory URL: www.dealership.com/car-inventory.asp?pa=&ns=10&so=m&sor=DESC&ma=&mod=&mt=&yr=&bs=&pr=&t=used&ln=

Where pa (page no.); ns (number of vehicles shown); so (sort by condition); sor (sort order); ma (make); mod (model); yr (year); bs (body style); pr (price range); t (type - new, used, etc.); ln (location no.).

As you can imagine this generates a gazillion URLs (or slightly less). Any thoughts on best canonicalization options?

Thanks as always

Also worth remembering that if your content eventually changes on the new page, the old canonicalization tag will no longer apply as it will now be pointing to different content.

Hey all

I'm handling some redirects and am fuzzy with Apache server stuff. I'm redirecting dynamic URLs and the only thing that's changing is the new domain. I have implemented this in the server file (thus far unsuccessfully):

RewriteEngine on 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^.oldsite.com$ [NC] 
RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://www.newsite.com/$ [L,R=301]

Any ideas on what I can change to make it work? For those who are more familiar I know I'm missing something simple. Thanks as always!

Awesome - thanks Matthew.

Thanks Ade. This is really helpful. Much appreciated!

Howdy mozzers,

I just took on a telecommunications client who has spent the last few years acquiring smaller communications companies. When they took over these companies, they simply duplicated their site at all the old domains, resulting in a bunch of sites across the web with the exact same content. Obviously I'd like them all 301'd to their main site, but I'm getting push back.

Am I OK to simply plug in rel=canonical tags across the duplicate sites? All the content is literally exactly the same.

Thanks as always

Hi all,

Agency SEO here. Finally getting around to doing some work on our own site and had a thought. Any agency SEOs out there including "Website design by xyz" links in client website footers? (Only with client permission, of course.) We have a solid variety of clients and have tons of web work for them. Any agency SEOs want to speak to this?

Any thoughts appreciated.

James