Hi Marcel,

301s can be done in the htaccess, just make sure as Patrick noted above that your site does not link to http version but directly to the https. You will want to avoid redirecting people from one version to another without need.

Another thing that might be important. Webmaster tools might require you to add another property as if I'm not mistaken it considers http and https as separate entities, it will be good to set it up and monitor both versions to notice that you don't have strange errors during and/or after the migration.

Hi Marcel,

A switch to https shouldn't hurt but would most likely have a positive impact on your baseline. Which is significantly more important than any loss in traffic. That said if you do the strategy properly and you redirect all the pages to the equivalent in https it should be fine (assuming you are not changing URLs and/or content).

What you might want to be wary of is the following.

1. Make sure that your CMS is able to automatically serve all your assets in https. So if you have images which are linked directly with http://domain.com/image.jpg you'd have to run a script to change the http into an https.

2. Any third party scripts / images also need to be run over https. As you have a web shop I don't think you're doing some kind of third party advertising but check in case you have any other http content.

Any of the above two will mark your site as unsafe, which will deter visitors and possibly be a negative flag to google.

Good luck on the migration.

If your title is incorporated in an image (not the recommended) what you can do is wrap the image tag in an H1, and provide an ALT description.

You could also hide the H1 under the image, but I am not sure if that could possibly trigger some flags by search engines.

I'd appreciate if someone with multilingual experience can jump in and give some ideas.

I've just set up a client who uses internationalization on Google Webmaster tools and Google Analytics. For easier management they opted to use subfolders rather than subdomains or cctlds.

So I set up a Google Analytic Property, with one Unfiltered profile, and another 3 profiles filtered per language. With the main language English being exclude anything starting /fr/ /de/ as it resides on root.

The filters seem to work fine; however after linking this to the Google Webmaster Account to be able to access Search Engine Optimization I do not seem to get any language filtered data. I was wondering if someone had any idea or possible solution to this problem. As I would expect to at least have the Landing Pages if not exactly the keywords filtered by the same criteria that the rest of the data is being filtered.

I know there's also an option to create a separate webmaster tools account, however this way I still cannot filter just the English; and I cannot link it to all the separate profiles.

I would appreciate some more feedback, I'm looking to group some of these pages from the 100k we're bringing it down to around 33k.

As regards comments not sure it's very feasible from research we did not many people go into back-dated entries so it's highly doubtful we'd receive much if any comments.

On my browser the page returns a 302 (temporary redirect). It could be that MOZ would still expect the page to eventually resolve. A 302 usually means that the page is temporarily down or not available. Thus should keep the page in index as it should eventually re-appear.

If you are not planning on making this page available again I would suggest you use a 301 instead.

I tend to use this quite a lot; It does not harm Search Engines, what is important is that only inline elements are contained within an H1 tag, that is span is a perfectly valid element, however a div is not. In your case you should use multiple spans with separate class names.

You should also consider splitting it into H1 / H2 depending on your site structure and navigation as it might make more sense in some cases.

If you have still left the redirects in place; these should work. As they would indicate that the 'old' page redirects to the page without comments. I would also suggest adding a canonical link to all your pages. So in case you missed a redirect or you have disabled them it would tell Google that the page it is visiting is exactly the same as the one in the canonical link.

Change will not happen overnight; it will take some time; especially if you had a robots blocking Google from doing to that url, as it would have to first identify the url to be 'crawlable' then find the redirect or canonical, after that update the serps & indexes.

Right, I guess that's true as we still rank for other terms. However there are concerns that this could effect the Domain Rank ( I don't think its the case). We've decided to try drop at least 1/3rd of these 'automated pages' by displaying them in AJAX this way there should be a bit less stuff in the google index.

I don't exactly want all content to be deemed to be unique, what I'm more interested in is making sure that this content does not penalize the rest of the website; it's fine if its ignored by Google if its more then a week or two old. What we don't want is old results coming up when today's value is far more interesting.

I'd be happy if Google would prioritize the 'daily' posts more with relation to 'freshness'.

One of my clients provides some Financial Analysis tools, which generate automated content on a daily basis for a set of financial derivatives. Basically they try to estimate through technical means weather a particular share price is going up or down, during the day as well as their support and resistance levels.

These tools are fairly popular with the visitors, however I'm not sure on the 'quality' of the content from a Google Perspective. They keep an archive of these tools which tally up to nearly a 100 thousand pages, what bothers me particularly is that the content in between each of these varies only slightly.

Textually there are maybe up to 10-20 different phrases which describe the move for the day, however the page structure is otherwise similar, except for the Values which are thought to be reached on a daily basis. They believe that it could be useful for users to be able to access back-dated information to be able to see what happened in the past. The main issue is however that there is currently no back-links at all to any of these pages and I assume Google could deem these to be 'shallow' provide little content which as time passes become irrelevant. And I'm not sure if this could cause a duplicate content issue; however they already add a Date in the Title Tags, and in the content to differentiate.

I am not sure how I should handle these pages; is it possible to have Google prioritize the 'daily' published one. Say If I published one today; if I had to search "Derivative Analysis" I would see the one which is dated today rather then the 'list-view' or any other older analysis.

Hi Chris, I've already done my fair bit of keyword research, over here zip codes are not used so much because the country I'm working with is fairly small, (Island State). Thus most searches I presume are directly on the name of the country itself, rather then the cities however due to 'duplicate' names of certain attractions accross the country I think it is best to include the name of city/village.

Whilst these might bring some 'SEO' value I do not expect it to be that much when paired with the names of attractions, as major cities only recieve a few thousand searches a month just on the city-name. In which case a city-based page should hopefully work the SEO. What I'd like to do is ensure that for the readers both the title nad url make sense

So I'm working on a website for a client in the Tourism Industry. We've got a comprehensive list of museums & other attractions in a number of cities that have to go online. And we have to come up with the correct url structure, title tags and obviously content.

My current line of thought was to work the urls in the following way.

http://domain.com/type-of-attraction/city/name-of-attraction/

This is mainly because we think that the type of attraction is far more important then the city (SEO wise) as the country as a whole receives more searches, however we require a city in the url to make it unique because some attractions across cities happen to share names and we don't want to have the names of attractions littered with city names.

However for title-tags I wanted to go the other way around, again due to the attraction type being more important then the city.

Name of Attraction - Type of Attraction - City - Brand Name

or Name of Attraction - Type of Attraction in City - Brand Name

I am quite confident in working it this way; however I would appreciate if I receive some feedback on this structure, you think its good or you would make any suggestions / alterations.

One last thing, There's the possibility of having many urls ending up with the same city names (For each type of attraction) I would think that just providing a list of links & duplicate text is not enough; would you suggest a canonical pointing to a link containing just information on the city? and using the other pages for user-navigation only? or should i set variables in the text which are replaced by the types of attraction so that the text looks different for each one?

I guess for the home-page go for the highest searched first; but due to the fact that you would want to rank for "Ski Rental" and "Snowboard Rental" I would also consider doing two separate pages in the website which tackle each separately; this way you would have a page optimized for Ski and another for Snowboard with more details on each. This way you could still capitalize on both. For the homepage I would probably go for 
"Ski & Snowboard Rental Lake Tahoe"

I'm not that fluent with Wordpress Yoast, but I think you should have in the preferences top option to include or remove the title tag at the end. However you would also need to pay attention to your template, because this too could be adding its own title tag and appending stuff at the end.

I would say no, importance is related more to the content then the fact of a page being a home page or no.

I would even think that for stuff like keyword in url, an internal page could be much better to optimize then the homepage. The homepage should give an overall picture to describe your enterprise. main keyword here would be your branding keywords to make sure you're first for your brand name.

I would then use internal pages for better optimization of the text, and SEO for the various terms. This way your page would be about the term rather then just mentioning the term - should be more relevant to the user / reader.

Yes and no;

The root domain usually tends to get far more links then your inner pages, as any links about your website / brand usually come in here. Should you target keywords on the root; it would benefit from having the increased in-links.

The result would then depend on the level of on-page optimization that you are able to do on the home-page or internal page. Usually on internal pages you can control far more the content and thus make better on-page optimizations, should the levels of optimization be more or less the same I would safely assume that your home page (root) would take prominence.

The CMS should be up to the designer to use - obviously you as a client should make sure that there is a good product delivery and that the back-end meets your expectations.

I would agree with your Developer that WordPress is very limiting. Whilst good for Blogs and News-oriented websites it was not built to cater for other websites. CMS like TextPattern or Symphony allow much better control on the structure and output, allowing for better dissection re-use of code and potentially better SEO. I've been using Symphony for over 2 years and I've found it brilliant - I can control and make small SEO tasks much simpler, as I structure the data the way I would like it, rather the standard way the CMS thinks is correct.

Note that SEO has nothing to do with the CMS itself, its more about the implementation as done by your developer. Whilst WordPress has some plugins to make this easier it is not necessarily the only and best way.

It would depend on what you refer when you say to go for a new HTML5 pattern.

If you want to replace some div elements with section you can go ahead it should not make as much impact. As long as your HTML is valid and makes sense it should be good. Make sure that when you upgrade to HTML5 you still support the current browsers. IE8 and lower require some rules in order to render HTML5 properly.

I would suggest if you are doing this switch to also use things like Microdata - which on the otherhand can really improve visibility on search engines.

Hi Kirstian, I think it would depend on the context. Is your website or service relevant to this wiki? Who does this wiki cater for; are they people who might be interested. What will the wiki-page be about just your company or else is it just a link in a normal article.

I think all of these play a part. If there is a relative high traffic to be expected from this page / site it could work out as branding or marketing exercise. Then you are not just measuring SEO value gained, but also possible leads. I believe a link would still be somewhat valuable however I would be more inclined to take it up if it is relative to the particular context.