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Hi there, We're an online booking portal for the hair and beauty industry, and also provide salon management software. We're thinking of creating a separate subdomain on the main site, probably along the lines of salons.example.com as a resource point and advice centre for salons. In it, I was thinking of featuring links and extracts from various blog posts I've written on salon marketing, downloadable white papers and featured videos we've created - a sample of each that you can click through to get all the bits on one page i.e. you click a see all vids bit to be taken to a page with all the vids on it. This is very much conceptual at the moment (though we do have a fair number of resources on the blog and the like), but I'd love it all to be drawn into a helpful section for salons. I'd love to hear what you think about it and whether there are some other ways we might look into doing this. No right answers, hoping for a bit of a debate/advice around resource centres. Thanks a million!

Hi there, I'm working on a site that has a ridiculous number of 404s being returned by webmaster tools. We believe this was because there was an onpage error that was amending the urls and adding in folders that shouldn't have been in a big spiral i.e. /salons/uk/teeth became something like /salons/uk/teeth/salons/edinburgh/hair/teeth... Anyway, we think the issue is now sorted, but these pages were indexed it seems, and so it looks like Google is still searching for them when it crawls the site. What's my best move? It's the sheers volume (over 13,000) that has me concerned so I thought it best to seek some expert advice before continuing. Thanks in advance!

Hi, So, we have a site going up on Monday, that in many ways hasn't been gotten ready for search. The focus has been on functionality and UX rather than search, which is fair enough. As a result, I have a big list of things for the developer to complete after launch (like sorting out duplicate pages and adding titles that aren't "undefined" etc.). So, my question is whether it would be better to noindex the site until all the main things are sorted before essentially presenting search engines with the best version we can, or to have the site be indexed (duplicate pages and all) and sort these issues "live", as it were? Would either method be advisable over the other, or are there any other solutions? I just want to ensure we start ranking as well as possible as quickly as possible and don't know which way to go. Thanks so much!

Hi, This is probably going to sound a bit stupid, but I nevertheless want to check. We have a site that's going to have identical pages (really not my choice) for a sales reason. The two examples would be example.com/profile-name and example.com/location/profile-name Users using the onsite navigation will always end up in the latter example naturally as they have to select a location before viewing content (plus having the location in the url is nice as there are multiple profiles across different locations that have the same name). However, it's easier to sell our services when we can offer just example.com/profile-name to users for their own marketing reasons. I'd like to make the example.com/profile-name noindex follow, and have just the example.com/location/profile-name indexed, but not sure if it would be better to implement canonical tags instead? Can anyone see any potential pitfalls of using either method or does it not really make a difference (which is what I suspect, but I'd rather look stupid than get this wrong)? Thanks!

Has anyone had any experience with seo4ajax.com and moz? The idea is that it points a bot to a html version of an ajax page (sounds good) without the need for ugly urls. However, I don't know how this will work with rogerbot and whether moz can crawl this. There's a section to add in specific user agents and I've added "rogerbot". Does anyone know if this will work or not? Otherwise, it's going to create some complications. I can't currently check as the site is in development and the dev version is noindexed currently. Thanks!

We have a website being built that will effectively function like an e-commerce site. When customers search within the site, we will display the results (sometimes hundreds). We were thinking of implementing infinite scrolling, but with so many results which all function as links to product pages, would this look funny i.e. having too many onpage links? Would the links at the bottom pretty much just be ignored (which is fine) or would they bring disrepute to the results further toward the top of the page? Thanks!

So, we're a service where you can book different hairdressing services from a number of different salons (site being worked on). We're doing both a male and female version of the site on the same domain which users are can select between on the homepage. The differences are largely cosmetic (allowing the designers to be more creative and have a bit of fun and to also have dedicated male grooming landing pages), but I was wondering about duplicate pages. While most of the pages on each version of the site will be unique (i.e. [male service] in [location] vs [female service] in [location] with the female taking precedent when there are duplicates), what should we do about the likes of the "About" page? Pages like this would both be unique in wording but essentially offer the same information and does it make sense to to index two different "About" pages, even if the titles vary? My question is whether, for these duplicate pages, you would set the more popular one as the preferred version canonically, leave them both to be indexed or noindex the lesser version entirely? Hope this makes sense, thanks!

Hi, I work for a site that allows people to book a variety of different services in different locations (mainly hair and beauty related). The site is still in development so I can't link to it I'm afraid. My colleague is about to start writing these descriptions for each of the beauty salons we have signed up and I thought I'd take the opportunity to check what everyone else thought about these descriptions. As far as I'm concerned, a near perfect example can be found at http://www.toptable.co.uk/fishers-in-the-city We have about 100 words at the most, so I was thinking that as long as we get in the name of the salon, the location (being more descriptive than the general area our services search function allows for) and the USP of each salon -  their specialty services. Is there anything else you'd include? Foremost, I want this to be as descriptive as possible to offer more detailed information about the salon. Thanks!

Hi, I was rather hoping for a little advice on how to best get my content out there. I made a simple, and pretty poor quality (though funny I hope), guide on making homemade slippers for Father's Day - you can find it here http://appointedd.com/blog/homemade-slippers-for-fathers-day/ I guess my question would be, where would you put it up? Being fairly new to this kind of content creation (and this was only something I did in my spare time), I'm still trying to get my head around some of it. thanks!

We've a new intern who spent a good few hours writing this article http://appointedd.com/blog/nominees-for-the-british-hairdresser-of-the-year-2013-announced/ - quite a good we one feel. Our main competitor has taken almost the entire thing word for word and put in up on their blog http://www.inaa.com/apiblog/?p=821 While this is a foolish move on their part, we're still quite offended over the incident as this was the intern's forst article and she'll be looking to add it to her portfolio. I was wondering what the best practice is in this situation? Is simply writing to them enough if they've demonstrated they're underhanded? Should we call them out on it? I'm simply unsure as I want to protect no only the business but the intern also. thanks!

Hi, We recently (yesterday) had a developer make a new site for us on Wix http://www.appointeddhq.com/ as the one we were planning to put up had a few teething issues (the beackend booking system wasn't ready and we needed something up immediately for a TV show we were being featured in). Having now had the chance to look through it, I'm not quite sure what's going on. None of the text appears to be there on any page, I can't find any of the descriptions we gave the developer, the alt tags behind pictures (and even the pics themselves) don't appear to be there, the URLs are messed up, titles are incorrect and there are no title tags to be found. Am I misunderstanding or is the whole site built in java? Obviously, this is quite a huge issue and I'll want to get it sorted immediately, but I thought it best to see what the good folks here though. Thanks!

Hi, I seem to be having a few problems with getting google authors set up on Wordpress. I've set up my G+ account, put the link to my blog http://appointedd.com/blog/ and then registered it on the yoast plugin. However, I'm not sure it's set up correctly and I can't seem to be able to get it to work. I'm hoping a fine someone here has experience in this as I'm a little flustered. thanks.

Hi, I know that it's not advised to engage in link swapping activities, but what about when it's actually useful for our readers? As an example, I'm writing a guest post on a hen party website on how to choose the right hairdresser for your wedding day (relevant content to both their site and mine). They asked if I'd like a post in return about the best way to do makeup if you're going on a fancy dress night or hen party (which is again relevant to both our audience groups and will be of great interest to them). Is this sort of link swapping okay, when the primary goal is to actually provide our audience with a richer experience, or would this still raise red flags for search engines? Thanks!

Hi, I do most of the current copy for our blog which you can find here http://appointedd.com/blog/ I believe having a regular blog structure with a mix of irregular ad hoc posts to go in around these. So, for this blog, I write an article on "Beauty Industry News" every week. Now, I don't want to use the same title for each post, so I've peen butting in the date after each one i.e. "Beauty Industry News - 24/04/13". Is this best practice or is there a better way of naming regular posts? Thanks in advance!

Hi! Do you think it better to: a) have all archives crawled (date, time, category etc.) even though they create duplicate content,. or; b) disable crawling of all archives? Ideally, I'd like to set up just excerpts in the archives and have a unique intro for each, but I'm having trouble doing this just now so was wondering which is the smarter option in the meantime? Thanks very much!

Hi, I recently started a very much "learn on the job" SEO position, transitioning from  a copywriting background. We currently have a wordpress blog up and running (and producing some decent quality content too I hope!) at example.com/blog/ and a sign up page located at example.com (sorry, can't put the address right now) for a site that is being custom built as it's got some nifty software linking to back end systems. My question is whether the content on the blog will bring SEO benefits to the main domain or whether it'll just be for the blog itself? If the latter, should we navigate the blog onto the a separate page of the main site? Thanks so much! I'm learning as much as I can as quickly as I can, but somethings still get me in a little bit of a tizzy.