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Hi Klarke, yep that's the first thing I tried. Unfortunately with the way this particular site is setup that technique doesn't work. This theme uses custom widgets as the nav menu, and using a regular WP nav won't work without some serious recoding.

I'm currently working on a very awkward custom-WP setup, in which I can't maintain the present drop-down navigation menu without having those pages under a parent or without completely recoding everything.

I have two requirements, for SEO purposes I'm looking for the following structure for each targeted landing page:

www.example.com/landing-page

as opposed to www.example.com/sub/landing-page

Of course, having my landing pages as a child, I get the latter of the two. For navigational purposes they need to fall under a specific category in a drop-down menu. With any other theme or setup this is an easy fix, but not here. What I have now is that the landing pages are currently placed under a parent category page. But, they have custom permalinks. The permalinks are setup as follows www.example.com/landing-page

But, technically the exact structure is still www.example.com/sub/landing-page which then redirects to the custom permalink.

So, my question is - in an attempt to get my most important landing pages close to the root for better PR and crawlability, do I still get the same benefit with my current setup? Is this structure I have, better, worse, or indifferent?

Thanks.

I had most of my keywords within the top 10 for this site, some were even ranking in the top 5. For a possible minor boost, more-so to cover all the bases, I decided to add images to all of the pages, and they were uploaded as a gallery with most of the image file names being the same as the keyword. Thus, url's were created with our targeted phrases, extending off of the corresponding sub-page.

After that, Google quickly picked up the url's to the images and began indexing them, when that occurred the sub-page which was to be the landing page, quickly tanked. Nothing else on-site changed besides the uploading of the images, so I'm sure they're conflicting and for whatever reason Google can't decide which page to index. The page that contains the images used, or the actual intended landing page.

With WP I didn't see a way to not have them link to anything at all, and just be static when using a gallery, stock at least.

So, my question is how can I quickly alleviate this problem and what should I do in the future to avoid this? I believe if I change link thumbnails to image file instead of attachment page, that should fix the issue... Then, I'll have dead URL's which I suppose I should 301 to the sub-page. Alternatively, is there a better solution that will work, I was also thinking about no-indexing the attachment URL's, but that doesn't seem to be an option.

This might be a silly question, but one important enough for me to ensure that I understand the best practice of URL redirects...

I'm thinking of changing my URL's and hierachy of some of my WP subpages around, in order to logically fit the keyword into the url and place the subpage closer to the root domain.

My question is, when doing this, can I simply edit the URL and create a redirect after the fact, essentially killing the old URL. Or, do I create the new page with the updated URL and hierarchy, keeping the old page live and intact, but have that 301 redirect to its new corresponding destination?

Thanks

I'm still learning, so it's a little hard for me to explain. But basically, I have 95 duplicate content warnings. What's coming up is the tag linked to the post and the actual post itself. Which in itself seems like a problem, plus I thought maybe that's related to the rel can. notices.

Hi,

Thanks everyone for the great insight. I think I may have found another problem that's related to this though. I also have a lot of duplicate content warnings, which is also odd. Here's what I found.

Seems like I have tag urls linking to content - for instance:

autodebut.com/tag/carrera/

is this considered being linked to the actual post/perma?

autodebut.com/2012/techart-2012-porsche-911-revealed-at-geneva-motor-show/#more-6382

Could that be causing the problem?

I have a huge rel canonical issue showing up on my website, and I'm not sure that I fully understand why. To my knowledge, this is something that comes about when alternate urls are used to link to the same page. However, this is not a technique that I've used with my website, yet it's still raising a flag on just about every page.

http://bit.ly/jYyTYN

Can anyone enlighten me on what's causing this?

Thanks

SEOmoz pro just finished crawling my website and it's coming up with 250 rel canonical warnings.

Here's one example:

http://bit.ly/ukLlbS

"

<dt>Description</dt>

<dt>Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical."</dt>

<dt>That's all it's saying. I also have metarobots set to noodp,noydir - but I'm sure that doesn't make any difference with this.</dt>

SEOmoz pro just finished crawling my website and it's coming up with 250 rel canonical warnings.

Here's one example:

http://bit.ly/ukLlbS

"

<dt>Description</dt>

<dt>Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical."</dt>

<dt>That's all it's saying. I also have metarobots set to noodp,noydir - but I'm sure that doesn't make any difference with this.</dt>