It's generally best practice to connect localized versions of your site with links in the header rather than redirects of any kind. Redirects tell search engines that only one of the pages should be indexed. A link indicates that both pages are important, and both should be indexed. My guess is that you'd like to have the English version of your site rank in America, and the Dutch version of your site rank in the Netherlands.

If you're worried that visitors will come to your site and get lost because there's just a small link in the header, you could create a pop up that says something like, "I see you're in the Netherlands, want to see our Dutch site?"

As an added bonus, when your American customers visit the Netherlands, they'll still be able to visit the American version of your site, since it's their choice.

Yep, that'll work!

Hi Pat,

You're right on track: you should get those long tail optimized landing pages indexed by linking to them from your already-indexed webpages and by submitting an XML sitemap to Google and Bing. And, of course, external links are a plus in any situation.

A few things to keep in mind:

• Those internal links should use the long tail keywords you're targeting as the linking text
• Make sure to fit these new pages into the existing URL structure, but don't add too many subdirectories. If you use the URL www.website.com/folder1/folder2/folder3/folder4/long-tail-keyword, the keyword in the URL won't be nearly as helpful for rankings.
• It might help to submit a sitemap to Google that only includes those long tail keywords. Google Webmaster Tools will give you the number of URLs in your sitemap and the number of those URLs that are indexed but won't specifically tell you which URLs aren't indexed. If you submit a sitemap with just long tail keyword pages, you'll be able to quickly see approximately how many of your long tail optimized pages are indexed.

Good luck!

Kristina

That's what I'd do. Just make sure to set up a 301 redirect from all of those pages to the homepage, so you don't lose any visitors with the change.

Hi Frank,

I would change the page titles to:

Tommeys Mardi Gras | [letter] | [page #]

For example, http://www.toomeys-mardigras.com/products_map.php?symb=C&page=4's page title would be:

Tommeys Mardi Gras | C | 4

That'll at least make them different, and show the structure of your site better. Generally, you want the page title first, then the brand, but since most people aren't going to search for the letter C, I put those last.

But, in general, it's probably better not to have massive indexes like this on your site. The category pages are much better for search engine optimization, and when you have both category pages and alphabetical lists, you're duplicating that content.

Hi Frank,

I think that the link you shared is locked for you personally. Do you mind sharing your website URL so we can look it up in Open Site Explorer ourselves?

Google doesn't penalize for duplicate content per se, but it'll generally hurt your rankings:

• If your issue is that you have identical pages with different URLs, leading to duplicate page titles, your link building efforts are going to be split. Google will only rank one of your duplicate pages on its results page, and that page will be weaker because some backlinks go to the duplicate.
• If the issue is that you have different pages that happen to have the same title, both could rank, but the pages won't be easily distinguishable from each other on the results page. It's much better to have a unique page title so that searchers can see what they're going to get from your page.

Hope this helps,

Kristina

Hi Jon,

You should 301 redirect (you should rarely to never 302 redirect) all vanity URLs to the URL that you want to rank organically.

A 302 redirect is a temporary one, so it's telling search engines that the vanity URL is the real URL for the page, but it's under construction/temporarily broken/being revamped, so you have to send visitors to another page, just for now. A 301 redirect tells search engines that the vanity URL is just a vanity URL and that the search engine should index the URL that the vanity URL is leading to.

SEOmoz has a pretty good explanation of it all: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection.

Best,

Kristina