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Hi,

We're currently working with a brand name which happens to be the name of a small town in the US (126 population). When Googling the brand / town name, there's a map on the right-hand side of the SERP. (Google Maps, with the town highlighted)

We're based in Sweden, and this is even showing up on a search on the Swedish Google.

I'm wondering; Is it possible for the map to "be removed" as our brand becomes more known? Does anyone have any similar experiences? Is it a better idea to just switch brand name?

That's what I suspected! Sorry then, can't help as I don't have too much experience with mention.net.

Hi Jason,

Which app are you referring to? I know that in Fresh Web Explorer you can do the following query:

example -rd:example.com

Where example is the brand name and example.com the domain. This will find any mentions of the brand that doesn't include a link to your website.

Perhaps this can help?

Hi,

I think this is a good question, and one of those where you should think on it from a user perspective.

First of all, you want to have a URL that is:

A) Easy to remember for the user

B) Does the best possible effort of describing the content on the page, so that it's obvious to the user what the page is about, even before clicking the URL.

In this post, Rand says that the URL should be < 90 characters:

http://moz.com/blog/visual-guide-to-keyword-targeting-onpage-optimization

Moreover, on this page you can see that there's a limit on URL characters in Internet Explorer(4-8, but there's also some limits in newer versions) which is 2083 characters:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/url

There's also some additional good information on that page, for your reading. For more information on the length from a technical standpoint, I'd recommend the top answer in this thread:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/417142/what-is-the-maximum-length-of-a-url-in-different-browsers

This blog post indicates that most of Google's urls are around 70-90 characters, which may be a good indication:

http://www.johnfdoherty.com/lessons-from-google-about-url-lengths/

As a final note, SERPs seems to only show around 50 characters in the URL fields, so this may also be something to keep in mind, however, they do tend to highlight the keywords and shorten the rest of the URL (for example www.google.com/.../insidesearch/howsearchworks/...).

To summarize, I do not think there's a "definite best practice" defined in terms of URL length, as a general rule of thumb in these scenarios; as long as it makes sense to the user, it should make sense to the search engines too.  I hope I was able to help somewhat.

Hi Eric,

I'm glad I could help! Feel free to send me a PM if you need further help.

I do not use Apache that much unfortunately (prefer Nginx), but assuming you are using Apache, you'd probably want to add something like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^brickmarkers.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.brickmarkers.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Both yes and no. It doesn't directly hurt your ranking to use your root domain for web, but it can affect your rankings to use both www. and the root domain. Typically what most people do is to redirect either www. or the root domain to the other, with the most common being redirecting the root domain with a HTTP 301 to the www.

In your case, this means that everyone visiting brickmarkers.com would be redirected to www.brickmarkers.com. This is helpful from a SEO perspective, as the "link juice" will be passed from brickmarkers.com to www.brickmarkers.com, consolidating all of your ranking power to one domain, instead of splitting it up over two.

The problem described in the quotation you included is however that you are tracking rankings for www.brickmarkers.com, but that it may sometimes be brickmarkers.com that shows up in the serp, and therefore the tracking isn't working correctly (or that's at least how I interpret it).

You can redirect the entire domain, you don't need to redirect the entire site. You can use this page on MOZ to read more about the 301 redirect and how to implement it:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection