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Hi Egol

This is very interesting and I would be interested to hear the communities thoughts on it. What made you suspect this in the first place?

Do you have any examples or situations that you have noticed which put this thought into your mind?

Good question - I have experienced something similar and I would personally go with your second location in a sub-folder as you say you have already established this site and you will be able to benefit from the authority already gained. I would place relevant anchor text including the location possibly in the main homepage navigation pointing to this second location. When I worked on a similar site I had three locations from one site and I placed the relevant terms in the main navigation anchor text and obviously did the other basics such as keywords in URLs. Then I concentrated on building the authority of each locations homepage, including using competitions to get social interaction to each of these and building great local content that I then exposed to the relevant local audiences. Each one of the location pages then started to gain more natural links from local sources and I found they all ranked really well for their local terms.

Hope this helps..

I would create a 301 redirect from your new short URL to your original product page as you are essentially just creating a new path to it and not new content.

Here is a post about canonicalisation from Matt Cutts - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

And another useful insight from SEOMoz on how to deal with duplicate content - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content

Hope this helps

Blurbpoint is also correct using his method will also work - blocking the page in a robots.txt file or using the meta-tags no index, no follow will also stop duplicate content issues! The down side is that any links that your short URL acquires will not pass any link juice unlike with 301s or canonicalization.

Glad I could help and give you something to think about - I would definitely think about 301 redirecting one site to the other site and push forward with building one great information resource for customers new and old..

That makes sense Egol - one thing you might be able to give us a clue about without giving away any client info is - did the site you are working on increase/decrease ranking with a change in price and no other significant changes to there site such as gaining of authority links?

Obviously there is absolutely loads that you could do with this but the place I would start is with a focused local SEO campaign.

Read all you can around local SEO and think of ways you can strengthen your clients online brand - for instance I like to use video and YouTube as part of my marketing strategy.

I would start here - http://moz.com/learn/local

Consider signing up to Moz Local for your client https://moz.com/local/overview as this will help strengthen your local presence as it will help manage your sites local listings

"Moz Local creates and maintains business listings on the sites, apps, and directories that factor most into local search engine results. Once you upload your location data to Moz Local, it’s easy to push business listings to the major data aggregators. You can use Moz Local to create and update your listings, manage your location information at any time, re-verify your listings, and find and resolve duplicate listings."

Also make sure your have structured data in place such as http://schema.org/LocalBusiness

Hope his helps as a starting point..

Did you by any chance send your link to this website in an email? I have seen this before when a site has copied a piece of code from outlook - it is a security feature in outlook to add this blocked::. It shouldn't have any impact on your link juice from this link, it is not the same as nofollow. Though for piece of mind I would email them and ask them to remove that piece of the code if you are not happy...

I think it is a good thing for a website to have some external links that are pointing to relevant sites that will help your users. There is no hard and fast rule to this, but if you think that 4 links is too much then you may want to consider placing a nofollow on some of the links but I would definitely leave some followed and not worry too much about this.

On a side note if you wanted to link to one site on four parts of your site I would leave one natural and nofollow the other 3 personally.

I wouldn't have a section on my site that is basically a link page to other sites - it would be much more relevant and natural, in my opinion, to link to the relevant sites in context with certain areas of your site and this would provide much more value to the visitor as well..

Hi Adam,

Out of interest have you run your sites analytics through the panguin tool? If you haven't come across this previously it maps all Googles updates against your organic traffic. The reason I mention it is because over the last month or so there has been a lot of change in Google and always worth checking every aspect.

http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/

When you say you haven't done any link building - I would recommend you still look at working on earning links with great content. By the sounds of it you do a lot around your blog, how's that content doing in terms of social shares etc?

In terms of new links what is the just discovered function of opentsiteexplorer saying? Many new links discovered in the last 60 days?

I believe the keyword field you are talking about is setting the meta keywords on your page which unfortunately has no positive impact on your rankings in the search engines. The most adding keywords in this field will do is tell your competitors what keywords you are targeting at a quick glance. This field use to be used by a type of search engine called a meta-crawler and it was common that when you searched for something totally unrelated you would get porn as they would have unrelated keywords in their meta tags (this is the common example people mention when talking of such) hence why this type of search was surpassed for more efficient methods years ago.

You need to make sure you include your keywords in the title, headers, body and so on in order to target keywords with your web pages. I would have a look at seomoz beginners guide to seo for a better understanding of on-page optimisation.

Btw you do want to do some keyword research in order to identify which keywords you want to target in relation to you niche but don't try and target the same keywords with every page and I would focus on one rather than multiple keywords per page personally But the trick is to write decent content that adds value and is natural not just aimed at targeting a keyworI in the search engines.

hope this clears things up...

This might be a much simpler solution for you -

http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/articles/301-redirect-IIS.asp

This might also be helpful as installing a form of ISAPI rewrite module would also make the solution quicker and more simple than what it sounds above.

http://forums.iis.net/t/1176085.aspx

Hope this might help..

Hi Eunan,

I have done this very thing in the past - creating a forum for the ecommerce site that I was working on. I actually put the forum on its own domain and found that it did help increase relevant traffic to my main website. However I found that customers were reluctant to post on this community in comparison with a well known independent forum in the same niche. The one thing I didn't do at the time and think that I should have done learning from experience is inviting customers and others with interests relating to my site to be moderators. By doing this I think that you would help increase some exposure through these sources and also give the forum more of a feel of independent discussion even though it is attached to your business.

One other thing I would say that I think you should consider is the fact that if your forum is on your main site and creates a sudden surge in traffic will your site be able to handle it without causing the whole site to slow down. As we all know there is nothing worse for user experience than a site that is slow and clunky. We also know that this also has an influence on rankings.

Hi Marisa

If I were you I would keep producing fresh content, but I would also think about how I can go about it. Have you thought about asking authoritative bloggers to do guest posts on your site? This can really help with exposure as they are likely to mention this to their loyal readers and you will start to gain exposure and links from this. I would also think about guest blogging myself on other sites to bring up the interest of what you have to say - that way people are more likely to be drawn to follow what you have to say on the site blog.

I think that you have a very marketable subject - running a judo club myself I would suggest you think about sponsoring clubs with some reductions on badges and embroidery if possible and for this I would ask for a link from their sites etc. I would also think about getting these different clubs and organisations to contribute to your blog if possible. just glancing at your blog I think there are lots of opportunities to gain links.

Yes you are talking about the words that the areas you have mentioned above focus on but remember don't just use your keyword try and make your optimization look as natural as possible whilst including it in these areas.

Yes you have the right idea in terms of your homepage and subsequent pages.

Copy is very important when it comes to websites in terms of SEO. Search engines will see every element on that page as part of it and it will take into account the text wherever it is. Just remember that the higher up the page the more weight is given to that content. Descriptions of your videos will count as they are text on your page so they will be read when crawled by Google.

Can you just repeat your question on site wide footers as I am not sure what it is and can't see it above?

In terms of your footer I don't think it is a good idea to have a keyword cloud like you have repeated across your site as this just shouts over-optimization in my opinion and you are risking trouble as it is clearly there for one reason and one reason only - boost rankings! I also think it isn't worth repeating a paragraph about you on every page. In the current climate there is little advantage to your footer as you have it in terms of helping you rank - as I say content above the fold/ higher up the page is where the most weight is placed.

You also need to remember that only the first link on a page is counted, so repeating your menu in the footer has zero value from an SEO point of view.

Footer tactics for ranking are old hat and the likes of Google have wised up to manipulation tactics using them...

Well I haven't had an issue with duplicate page titles and if you include your brand name in the format I mention and the rest is unique then there won't be an issue with Google and duplicate titles, in my opinion. Also if you are still unsure start looking at major well ranked sites and how they have most pages branded without this problem. Take SEOMoz's titles for instance, they use this format effectively without issue...

Hi Sansonj - there is no set optimum for word count when it comes to SEO - the most important thing to remember is that you should write you content for the user's experience and not just for search engines. Yes include your keywords, but make sure it sounds natural. Obviously you should judge your word count in terms of quality if you just have a sentence or two that is rammed with your keywords then this is not good, especially with the over optimization penalty looming from Google. Try to create pages that are information rich and will serve a purpose for the user - something that will actually benefit them from reading. Also try to think-  have I just created this page to rank well and it doesn't really fulfill any other purpose in relation to visitors of the website - if this is the case look how you can improve your page and actually make it beneficial for visitors.

I think it will work out if you stick with the guest posting route - it will just take some time and effort to encourage others, but it will be worth it. Just a thought - have you thought about running a patch design contest with the best design winning a quantity of free badges of their own organisation? They would have to be voted by visitors and not your company. You could give them a specific design challenge and then you could contact all your old customers and contact any clubs and organisations inviting them to submit their design and information about them and why they should win. Or your contest might be designing some sort of advert in relation to your brand or what you do and getting visitors voting on which they think would be best. I could see something along these lines helping you with traffic etc - what do you think?

No problem - well I would definitely look at removing the keyword cloud for a start as this just looks so spammy in my opinion and is likely to stick out like a sore thumb to Google. The other issue you have is that some of your pages with videos on are very thin on content and so all this repeating text in the footer across the site isn't likely to help in terms of duplicate content.

I don't see an issue with the pictures and they do look good apart from why do you have them on Flickr and not hosted on your site maybe I am missing something? I would consider adding another link to your top menu for the whats new links and have them on sub-menu as your other items currently do rather than repeating them on every pages footer as they look like targeted keywords to me. Adding them to the main navigation won't complicate things and at worst gives these pages more weight. I would also have one page that talks about who you are but I also think that repeating it across your site devalues your homepage content as the majority of it is basically your footer. In short I think the current layout will be devaluing your SEO, but the choice is yours...

Yes you want to make each page title and content unique with the keywords that best describe the content of that page. If you can't create a unique page title then you need to ask yourself this -

why do I need two pages that are titled the same, could I just have them as one strong page?

I always include the brand name at the end of my title -

keyword/description | brand name

is the format I use successfully -  brand name at the end of the title for branding/recognition purposes.

For a decent guide on title tags see SeoMoz's guide here - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag

Hi Benjamin - it looks like you have a real challenge - you could drop your branding to help cut the size down as Irving suggested, however you are still going to have an issue with books that have long titles, as I am sure you have numerous that surpass 70 characters. In this situation I think you will just have to exceed it as this has to be the case for your competition as well - anyone selling books is likely to have long page titles. Have you checked your competitions tactics? I would have a look at Amazon if I were you...

I have worked on a site that targets two locations - for the terms that I have targeted in those locations they both rank number one. How I went about this was as follows: I setup a page on the website for both locations, optimizing all the relevant on page factors titles, headers, keywords in text etc. In your case you could focus on the clinics, how long they have been going and include testimonials from customers of each making sure that reference is given to the specific location. I also setup the URL structure to include the location targeted keyword for each page e.g Chester-acupuncture.html and Knutsford-acupuncture.html and I included the links to the pages in menu structure of the site. I then went about link building for each page getting both listings for their location. I also built group pages for each on Facebook and pointed them to the individual website pages. I went about pushing the social media exposure gaining members through offers and information building a rapport with users, this gained likes for both webpages. I found that this strategy lead to decent local rankings and traffic from the targeted place keywords. Obviously this is a brief summary of the strategy that worked for me, it took time and effort with analysis of my competition, but I gained the results I was after and I think you are looking for.

Hi Robert,

I definitely wouldn't start creating multiple title tags as that is just going to cause the search engines confusion. For the pages that you want to rank have you considered moving them up the hierarchy/internal link structure. It would be great to have an example of the pages you mentioned in a previous question and your site address to get a better feel for exactly where you are and what you could do...

Hi - for a guide on video SEO I think this is an excellent place to start and it helped me a lot with my approach to it - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo

Big credit to the author - Phil Nottingham from Distilled

I would personally go for the domain.com/lawn-mowing.html structure, less clicks to get to your information and easier from a crawl perspective, the extra category page seems like you would be having a page for a pages sake and you would just be burying your important content deeper in the site. Having a menu that has these ten services at the top level is much more efficient site architecture in my opinion. Obviously if it starts getting to much you would have to think about categories.

Remember you always want the minimal amount of links between the homepage and any other page on the site. For a small site you can have one level on your menu and provide relevant anchor text in the navigation on each page to the corresponding page. Obviously for any bigger site you would want to implement a pyramid structure to order the information efficiently.

To increase linking root domains you need to develop a link building strategy. Basically great content + exposure will help you gain these links. There are lots of ways that you can develop content that people will want to link to and there are lots of link building strategies. I would suggest searching on here for link building and have a look at both blog posts and Q&A for some ideas and an in depth insight.

Once you have started gaining more links you will increase your domain authority automatically.

To give specific link building ideas I and I am sure the rest of the community would need to have some more information on your site and what niche you target.

Hi Sofia,

Yes server location does still have an impact on SEO in my experience and if you are looking to target the UK then I would definitely make sure that your server is hosted in the UK.

A hosting provider that I have used for several sites and found to be reliable, in my experience, is www.uk2.net - servers hosted in London, UK and they use CPanel. Hope this helps.

Have a look at this - it might give you some ideas in regard to Bing and optimisation

- http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/uk/archive/2012/04/13/optimising-website-content-for-higher-rankings-on-bing.aspx

Hi Rohan,

You can use hyphens in sub-domains, however when using hyphens in relation to any domain or sub-domain I tend to stay away from them, if possible, as they tend to be related to spam practices, especially with multiple hyphens. I think you will find this SeoMoz best practice in relation to domains a good guide as to what is the best tactic to take - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain

Hope this helps

have you made sure your robots.txt is loading in your browser by adding robots.txt after your domain same as a normal page and can you see contents? has your site been down in this period? have you changed the contents of the file just before this issue? are you sure googlebot hasnt come back since that date - whats your analytics say? do an index site: search for your domain to see if it is in google.

Hi Ruud - a 302 redirect is a temporary redirect whereas a 301 is permanent, so yes you would be better using the 301 redirect as this measure isn't a temporary one from what you have written. Therefore you want search engines to know that the page you are redirecting to is the new location of the one you are directing from.

For more information on redirecting here is the SEOMoz Best Practice link on redirection - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

The guide highlights how important using the correct redirect is in terms of whether link juice is passed - which we all know is important. 302 redirect doesn't pass any juice but 301 does!

Hi Alex,

This is a good question - if I were you I would look at this whiteboard friday as it gives you insights into all your options for this scenario.

Also don't miss the next to last paragraph on redirection, which I personally avoided when I was in a similar situation to you, due to potential mix-ups. I chose the ccTLD path at the time, though I would heavily consider the subfolder option if presented with this challenge again...

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

Hope this helps...

Very interesting response Robert, with some very good and valid points - though I think you would want a expert in order to carry out that change, although that might not be the right place to find them - a very nice example of why hyphens, in the right situation, are very valid.

When you have worked with hyphens and domains what is the largest number of hyphens on an EMD you have worked on?

This has set off an interesting discussion in the office with the feeling that a domain with multiple hyphens is less trusted by the majority here when they appear in the serps, therefore receiving less click-throughs.

In general do you think users have been educated to be suspicious of domains that appear long and and exact match with hyphens and that is why it is believed to be spammy by some?

The most I have worked on in regards to EMDs with hyphens is one and this dominated the SERPs for the targeted terms.

Do you think EMDs with multiple hyphens possibly set off alarm bells with Google in regard to over-optimization rather than efficient labelling of a resource online, in particular since Penguin?

Hi - here is what Matt Cutts has to say on the subject -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXt23AXlJJU

And in regards to international SEO I think this whiteboard friday should help:

- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

As long as the code produced is readable in a web browser then it being bloated shouldn't have much of an impact in terms of SEO. The code bloats only downside is that it might slow the page load which will have impact on SEO. Remember crawlers like Google bot essentially look at the page content in terms of textual content, what labels (alt tags etc), images and links are on there not how neatly it is presented or whether it is valid markup or not. I would take a look at your page speed otherwise I would worry as long as it is able to fulfil all the basic on page requirements such as headers, page titles etc.

Just to reiterate this - I have worked with CMS driven sites that aren't W3C compliant and don't produce the nicest html, but have loaded fast and ranked in the top 3 for competitive terms.

I completely agree with the fact that those of us that do this everyday aren't the best to ask in regards to this, though our office is a mixed bunch, not all marketeers.

In general I have noticed that more and more users that I have come across are becoming more aware of what they are clicking on in the SERPs. They are filtering results based on their own judgments, not just trusting the search engines as they may have done in the past. Though as you say with the growth of the last five years there is probably one hell of a lot of people that trust in the SERPs whatever they serve for a query. In relation to this suspicion; I think page titles and descriptions influence this more than EMDs.

It would be an interesting study to see the impact of hyphens(the amount) in EMDs and their click through rates from the SERPs.

As we have both attested, though, we have had success with EMD with hyphens, though this is obviously down to many factors in relation to SEO strategy we have employed, not just a good domain.

Thanks for your input it is very valuable.

Here is to the day that we don't have to make a domain registrar rich!

Hi John,

Penguin is the over-optimization update which is looking for sites that are engaging in tactics purely to rank highly in Google. Google are always looking at ways that they can improve the quality of their search results to keep them ahead of the game and penguin has been designed to look for webspam or those that are overtly SEOing their websites to rank better, tactics include keyword stuffing, link schemes, doorway pages and more. In relation to link profiles they are under more scrutiny than ever and link schemes can be creating link networks to boost your site, using low quality link tactics such as forum and blog comments and having a high concentration of links with exact match anchor text. Also link profiles with lots of links from sites that aren't in their niche as this is clearly unnatural.

SEOs need to concentrate on building quality sites which serve the purpose they are intended for and have excellent usability. Here is Googles take on Penguin in their own words - http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html

Also for more details on Penguin and the specific tactics it is looking at in relation to SEO and over-optimization take a look here - http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-update-targeting-webspam-in-search-results-119295

I hope this helps answer your question - concentrate on building great content with relevant on page optimization clearly using best practice and not keyword stuffing, then make sure you are getting this content exposure using tactics such as social media, but not dodgy tactics to gains links such as forum, blog comments and anywhere else that allows people to create any link for a links sake and you will be fine, in my opinion. A few reciprocal links are fine and natural but don't engage in a practice where you are reciprocal linking to unrelated sites which giving a link to won't enrich the users browsing experience.

Well I would not go down the route of sub-domains if you were bringing all your sites under one for SEO purposes. I personally would consider putting each of the sites in a sub-folder on your corporate site and then 301 each domain to that folder. You need to remember that sub-domains are often viewed by Google as separate domains, which means any links pointing to the sub-domains pass little benefit onto the root domain (in this case the corporate site). This in my opinion defeats the object of raising the domain authority!!

Just to be clear that when you decide which version you want to be your main url structure you need to make sure that all your internal should point at the preferred format.

So if you are putting preference on the trailing slash as in your 301 redirect is from none trailing slash to trailing slash then your internal link structure should match.

You are diluting your homepage strength as you could have some links to one version of the page and some to another. I would create a 301 redirect from the /index to the plane .com version. In Googles eyes you have two pages with the same content, this is a common mistake with a lot of websites and their homepage.

For more info read:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work

Well when I was in the same situation as you and had loads of pages that were part of an archive that were all indexed in Google - numerous with low PR - I used a 301 redirect on all of them to tell search engines of their new home. I did this in 2009 and they are all still indexed and bringing traffic into the site today - I am leaving the redirects there forever.

If I was in your situation and it makes sense to put a 301 redirect on a page as it still exists just under a new URL then I would do it. 301 redirects don't cause issues with search engines when they are used properly to move a whole site from one location to another - content relocation this is their purpose.

Hope this helps Gary and answers your question..

I agree with goodlegaladvice if you have time to rewrite the content this would be the best scenario as you are likely to pick up search visitors.

If you don't have the time you could consider cross domain canonicalization crediting the original clearly to the search engines - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday

Yes if you just want to redirect individual pages like that - you could have it so any requests on the domain www and none redirect to the new domain and then specific pages can point to specific pages - see below:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.co.uk$ [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.co.uk$

RewriteRule ^/?$ "http://www.newdomain.co.uk" [R=301,L]

RewriteRule ^page2.html$ "http://www.newdomain.com/page2.html" [R=301,L]

If you have used a canonical tag to point to the best version of your page then there shouldn't be an issue in terms of SEO and search engines as you are actually telling the search engine that you have two pages that contain the same information and you would like them to take the one mentioned in the canonical tag as the original. You are actually practising good optimisation and that is the whole reason the canonical tag was introduced to help optimise website structure for search engines.

A quick question - when you create this new page that will have a different URL and Title are you going to be keeping the rest of the content the same? If so I would personally use a 301 redirect to the new URL and make sure that you have changed any internal links such as navigation to the new URL and not the old one. When I have had a situation such as this that is what I have done and it has worked well. It is important when changing your site structure and URLs that you make sure your navigation reflects your new URLs and not the old redirected ones, so you don't give mixed messages to the search engines.

I don't think it would be wise hiding any content in the header as you are essentially cloaking, so I would either have all your H1 visible or I wouldn't include the part that you are trying to hide from visitors. The likes of Google won't look very kindly on this in my opinion as it is not much better than putting some keywords in a white text on a white background, which the search engines cottoned on to years ago....

RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.co.uk$ [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.co.uk$

RewriteRule ^/?$ "http://www.newdomain.co.uk" [R=301,L]

Add this to your .htaccess file of your oldsite and it will redirect both www. and none www. to your new domain passing on link juice - sorry I wasn't specific before.

That is why for peace of mind I would go for a 301 redirect which will pass the majority of link juice in terms of SEO and it will eliminate the old page pointing straight at the new one and telling search engines that your old page has permanently moved to the new URL.

Once search engines catch up they will only index your new page URL and Title which you have optimised eliminating the old unfriendly ones but passing any link juice they have gained at the same time.

Does this make sense?

It could be the fact that you haven't put the exact term in with accent on the **é ** as it is on your site? I just did it and your page got an A with this term  **privé chauffeur huren **and your site - **http://www.oceandrivers.nl/ - **though your screenshot shows your keyword without the accent...

Are you by any chance using relative urls for your navigation? I think this issue will be down to your navigation/internal link structure, but I would need to see your site to tell your for sure.

The article is still applicable today and here is more info on your topic from a Q&A earlier this year - http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-content-and-http-and-https

You will notice the top endorsed answer (endorsed by DR Pete) uses this method and points to this article

You will also notice a 301 redirect is recommended solution as I mentioned above though they do it the other way around. I would do it to the secure version as that is the one I would imagine you want to be the page that is used as it is secure. Search engines can index both protocols so doing it either way won't harm you...

I personally wouldn't worry about this as that feature makes your site more user friendly even though it will be considered as having to many links on-page. From experience of having two many links reported on a page when changing a design of an e-commerce store I have found that the site actually preformed better in the search engine results pages.

I believe that making your site more user friendly is the key and there are lots of top e-commerce sites that have a similar feature which will take them over the recommended limit for links on a page, but they still do very well in the search engine rankings...

Here is a Q&A from earlier in the week that might help - as it is in relation to too many links on a page within an e-commerce store http://www.seomoz.org/q/should-i-nofollow-the-links-in-the-drop-down-nav-menu