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James can you elaborate a bit on your answer?

It looks like these guys do a lot more than just concrete repair.  For that reason alone, I wouldnt try and fully optimize the home page for just concrete related keywords.

Since the site itself has very low metrics to begin with, you basically have a clean slate.  Id optimize all of the services landing pages for their respective keywords (i.e. concrete repair, concrete repairs, concrete repair contractors for the concrete page, though I would not triplicate any one keyword) making sure they had good titles, good amount of unique copy and so on.

Its a natural approach to the taxonomy which always works well for Google placement.  It wont get your to rank with on-page alone (except maybe some of the more obscure services) so some inbound links will probably be needed.

Good Luck!

Hi Gregory -

Yes, as Frederico mentions you do not have to put the rewrite cond. before every rewrite since it the htaccess is on your root its implied. You might need to do this if you creating multiple redirects for www to non-www etc.

Also Frederico is right - this isnt the best way to deal with these links, but I use a different solution.  First I get a flat file of my inbound links using other tools as well as WMT, and then i run them through a test to ensure that the linking page still exist.

Then I go through the list and just remove the scraper / stats sites like webstatsdomain, alexa etc so that the list is more manageable. Then I decide which links are ok to keep (there's no real quick way to decide, and everyone has their own method). But the only links are "bad" would be ones that may violate Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

Your list should be quite small at this point, unless you had a bunch of links to a page that you subsequently moved or changed its URL. In that case, add the rewrite to htaccess.  The remaining list you can simply contact the sites and notify them of the broken link and ask to have it fixed. This is the best case scenario (instead of having it go to a 404 or even a 301 redirect). If its a good link, its worth the effort.

Hope that helps!

To clear up any uncertainty, I think there are two questions being asked:

1. Link to be disavowed: Do I disavow both the www and non-www versions of a bad link?
2. Site you own: Which site in webmaster tools do I upload the disavow list to - www or non-www?

The link to be disavowed is an easy answer because in most cases if you want a link disavowed, you probably don't want a link from that domain (because its suspect, de-indexed, etc.).  Therefore you can simply blanket it with domain:badwebsite.com. This will be sure to get any link from this site to yours, regardless of the subdomain (i.e. www.badwebsite.com, ww2.badwebsite.com, forum.badwebsite.com, etc.)

Answer #2 isn't quite as easy. The safest (and arguably proper) way is to link mine both the www and non-www versions of your website and treat each as a separate site (as Google does). Even if you are using 301 redirects or canonicals I still recommend this method. In many cases, one version will have a much smaller backlink volume. In any case, pick out the bad links and try to get them removed by emailing the website. Once the attempt has been made, Compile the remaining backlinks (still in separate lists for www and non-www), and upload them to their respective disavow tool areas.

Remember, Google uses LSI in their algorithms - so usually when you see strange discrepancies like this it means that the terms are being treated as semantically related. E.g. - if you search for "ready mix concrete" you'll see both terms (mix / mixed) in bold. Same for forklift truck / hire - you'll see both in bold.

I cant say that I know if this is the reason its just food for thought. I no longer use the Google Keyword Tool to estimate traffic as it can be really off - but what it still does well is measure relative traffic (keyword x has 2.5x the traffic as keyword y, and so on).

Hi Shubham - I see this domain cached on Dec 29:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.glanceseo.com/

Was it a specific page you were inquiring about?

I thought I'd come back and re-post the solution in case this shows up in SERPs or anyone other Moz members are looking for this answer (courtesy Noah Wooden of Izoox). HTACCESS:

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On

# Strip set of opening-closing parenthesis from URL and 301 redirect.
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [()]+
    RewriteRule ^(.)[(]+([^)])[)]+(.*)$ /$1$2$3 [R=301,L]</ifmodule>

Remember to put this in the proper 'order' on your htaccess file if you are doing any other redirecting. The code above 301 redirects URLs with parentheses into the exact same URL minus the parentheses.

thanks Merlin - Ill have their programmer try this.

Hi Merlin  - thank you.

Here is an example:

www.domain-name.com/category1/subcategory/product-name-details-(model-number)-length

needs to change to:

www.domain-name.com/category1/subcategory/product-name-details-model-number-length

Any suggestion would be great. Their programmer is having trouble creating a rule.

Thanks in advance

Im reworking a website for a client, and their current URLs have parentheses. I'd like to get rid of these, but individual 301 redirects in htaccess is not practical, since the parentheses are located in many URLs.

Does anyone know an HTACCESS rule that will simply remove URL parantheses as a 301 redirect?

Official SEOMoz complaint: I never did receive my hug from Roger. Just saying...

Update: Hug received via Twitter!

Hi Mickel -

The answer is both. Keep your html sitemap, and keep the link in the footer as is. Crawlers will look at these but they are generally more for human visits.

Then create your xml sitemap (www.url.com/sitemap.xml) and verify it in Google Webmaster Tools.

Hope this helps!

It looks like these guys do a lot more than just concrete repair.  For that reason alone, I wouldnt try and fully optimize the home page for just concrete related keywords.

Since the site itself has very low metrics to begin with, you basically have a clean slate.  Id optimize all of the services landing pages for their respective keywords (i.e. concrete repair, concrete repairs, concrete repair contractors for the concrete page, though I would not triplicate any one keyword) making sure they had good titles, good amount of unique copy and so on.

Its a natural approach to the taxonomy which always works well for Google placement.  It wont get your to rank with on-page alone (except maybe some of the more obscure services) so some inbound links will probably be needed.

Good Luck!

Hi Brian -

Simply use the same analytics account - you can usually copy paste the code, but make sure if your tracking is different (maybe you are tracking a subdomain now, or maybe you are an ecomm site where variables need to be edited for ecomm tracking).

When you add it to the new site, make an annotation in Google Analytics showing that you made the domain change on that date (its just handy when youre looking back at October a year from now).

Dont forget to 301 your old pages to your new ones!

Hi Ilya, I replied to another recent question so Im pretty sure I know you're dilemma

From what we are seeing, averaging thresholds where your kw anchor is less than 20%, and then using Brand & URL, as well as others "click here" to fill in the rest. Brand is good I still wouldn't exceed a threshold of 30% on any one keyword. So for example, a company called Sparkling Flooring, we would use Sparkling Flooring no more than 30%, www.sparklinkflooring.com around 30% (but you can go higher with URLs, we just choose not to), and no more than 20% on 'hardwood flooring', etc.

Combined with excellent unique copy, a good information section like a blog or installation tips section, and other good Optimization techniques, and youre golden.

Hi Joshua,

There are a number of ways to stop Google from counting your dynamic urls as duplicates. Its unclear from your question why you can't use canonical tags for this.  If you went here:

http://luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/lake-mary/hanover-woods.html

And add the canonical tag in the HEAD section:

It will solve your issue of duplication when people choose property variables like waterfront or bedroom #. I think you were trying to point out the reason this wont work at the end of your question but Im not exactly sure what you are eluding to there?

James can you elaborate a bit on your answer?

You do lose some juice on 301's so obviously the best course is to contact sites that house the link and ask them to change it to the new URL (once the new URL is live, and you would still 301 redirect).  This isnt always easy to do particularly when there are 1000's of backlinks, so it really depends on how feasible an option that is, and how many backlinks you have (are there only 3? then having an optimized URL will probably be more beneficial than leaving the URL unoptimized, even if you cant have the links changed).

As to 'exactly' how much do you lose? I dont think anyone has a definitive answer. But I have worked with websites that 301 redirect almost every page when they migrate to a new platform and the SEO impact is not severe if done properly.

I still recommend mining your backlinks and having their targets chaged (at least for the more authoratative ones).

Hi Dana - Let me see if I understand this correctly:

In question 1 you asked if this would be a duplicate content issue. The canonical tag retains the exact same URL regardless of the search parameter (and resulting search results). Therefore, regardless of the search being made, Google and other crawlers will not index page with a search parameter since the canonical references to the original url (http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/search-return). This means that when Google accidentally lands here http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/search-return?q=countryman it sees the canonical tag and understands that it should not index this page as it is only a variation of the core page.

This would of course be a problem if you actually wanted Google to index every query page. Alternate methods could be to disclude the query parameter in WMT or Robots.  But the canonical is built in for you so that you dont have to.

In situations like this I also like to add site search to analytics and block the query parameter so no query pages show up as landing pages.

Definitely to reiterate Dana, need more info about the specifics because yes there could be disastrous effects if not done properly.

Besides meta refresh, there are other things to consider. Probably most importantly is the positioning of the home page in search results for the 'product'. If you are ranking top 5 for your product keywords, and the ranking page is your home page, you may find that when you rework your home page to reflect your brand, you lose that positioning.

If you were moving from one landing page to another (i.e. /products to say /products/buy, it would be a bit different because you could 301 the /products page and officially tell Google and other SEs that you are simply moving the page. You cannot, obviously, do this with the root domain (301) or that would defeat the branding purpose.

I would definitely check positioning and revenue for your money keywords first. Also, once you move the product, i would at the very least have a link in the main navigation of the home page that links directly to the product with the appropriate anchor. If you only have one product, or one product set, i would also encourage you to optimized the URL (i.e. instead of /product it could be /

Still need more info to make solid recommendations.