Hi Paul,

Justin gave you some great pointers below. In terms of it being unnatural I would completely agree as you are essentially leaving your site and coming straight back. Keep your internal links internal. Both methods Justin mentions would work well - I too would prefer the enhanced link attribution method.

I personally don't see the why you would want to do this other than if you are trying to track clicks in which case you would be far better using Google Analytics as you mentioned. All internal links on a website should be on that sites domain not on a redirected link. Is there any other reason for using bit.ly? If so maybe myself or one of the community could make so suggestions to a better alternative?

I personally would ask for a name and email address, as this is common practice online and it will allow you to know what each person is specifically interested in as you say. I don't think that is too much information and the data gathered would be valuable. In my experience this won't put people off and if it does are they really that interested in your product in the first place - I think you a separating the wheat from the chaff that way!

In terms of QR codes and their use in Asia you may find this article about China's use of them useful - http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/29/people-actually-use-qr-codes-in-china/

Hi Jordan,

I have worked with all of the platforms that you mention and my personal favourite is Magento. I find it to be very SEO friendly and there are lots of great tweaks that you can make to help with things like site speed. I also find the wide variety of extensions is very good with Magento. Some platforms are also more difficult than others for setting things like Google Analytics ecommerce tracking up - Magento is super easy

Hope this helps

Using the redirectmatch directive to redirect the entire deal directory to deals should definitely work for your situation. You then just repeat for each - so for deals:

RedirectMatch 301 /deal/(.*) /deals/$1

Hi Tai,

I understand what you are saying in regards to making it easier with all the different URLs, however you will need to specify some start point in terms of being one level down from the domain root else you are effectively placing a wildcard on the whole domain, which wouldn't work when you are still working on this domain. So you need to try to identify the few main category URLs such as /listing and so on in order to create a rule.

Did the redirect I give you work for all URLs apart from the one listed? It should have worked for that.

An alternative you can try is:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^listing/(.*)$ http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business/ [R=301,L]

Hi Tai,

I had a look at your site homepage and from your examples I could see you have relative urls which can cause 404 errors and as you mentioned 8000 I thought this could be part of your problems - no domains in your main navigation links so /business rather than www.yourdomain.com/business in coding - so no base URL can cause this. I took one of your links you mentioned to check if your hrefs were relative.

Putting what I mentioned aside for a second do you just want anything that is /listing and /deal redirecting to /business?

Have you tried this for the listing example and repeat for the others such as /deal/:

RedirectMatch 301 ^/listing/.*$ http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business

You can fix this issue much easier than trying to sort out redirects in htaccess. You are coming across this issue because your site uses relative URLs rather than absolute.

Example:

A relative URL isn't tied to a base URL so:

/business

Absolute would be:

www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business

Using relative means that when you visit a page your link is relative to that location so if I was on

www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business and visited the same llink it would become

www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business/business unless redirected.

Having to fix this issue in htaccess can get messy for this and it would be much simpler to change your nav links in the template of your site. I checked this was the case in your sites source code to be certain and you definitely use relative URLs.

I don't see why there would be an issue with 301 redirecting the second location domain and using it as a link on site, however I have actually not done it this when I have done this previously I have managed to gain links to domain.com/location2 and so on.

I also don't see your main logo linking back to the root even on the second city page as you are not going to be hiding the fact it is in a sub folder and not the main homepage/root. This was the case on the site I mentioned - navigation the same throughout the whole site.

Hi Dana,

I have done lots of work on site speed (a little obsessed with it but I have seen great results!) and I have made changes to a lot of sites that have massively improved load time and I have checked a couple and they are loading as quickly in Safari as the other browsers. I would be happy to give you some advice on possible quick fixes that you could make relatively easily and they will speed your site up significantly if you haven't already implemented them.

Drop me a pm with your site address and what server setup you are on Apache or IIS. I will have a look and see if there is any changes that may help

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..

Hi LW

At a very basic level you can see if a website is cloacking by looking at the page and then viewing the source code with a right click in your browser - are you seeing text in the source code that should appear on the site when you browse it, but you can't see it? This is most likely being cloacked.

Another way is to use the Lynx web browser and have a look at what it displays and then compare it with a browser such as IE, Firefox or Chrome. Lynx is a text browser for the worldwide web and has been used by many digital marketers over the years to get a flavour of what the search engines will see when all the styling and visual elements are stripped back. I would personally use this to check if you are concerned. Once again if there are differences in what text you can see in Lynx and another browser there is a good chance you are violating the webmaster guidelines.

<cite class="vurls">lynx.browser.org</cite>

Hope this helps..

Hi Iris

Sorry about the slow reply been very busy - 3600 is seconds which is the equivalent to an hour so it should be fine with this new value.

Have a look in /wp-content/plugins/wp-super-cache/wp-cache-phase1.php you will find it there

Hi Brad

Sorry I have only just come back to you - it was late night here in the UK, but it looks like Alan has already answered your question

Have you tested your 404 page with fetch as Google in webmaster tools - you should see that it can see the links on your 404 page and as such will continue crawling them as Alan has said.

So what is a benefit to a user will also be a benefit to Google crawling your site in my opinion

Hi Brad

Firstly it is great from a usability point of view to have a custom 404 page and I would link it to your most popular content and maybe add a search feature on the page for your site to help find the content that is missing. I have come across some nice 404s that actually have very concise sitemap in order to help the visitor navigate the site.In order to prevent Google from indexing your 404 page you need to make sure it returns an actuall 404 HTTP status code.

In order to understand how Goolgebot crawls your site I would look at the following post from Google themselves - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182072?hl=en

Rather than being concerned about a 404 page having links on to keep the crawl going make sure you have an XML sitemap that you have submitted to Google via Webmaster Tools as this will help your crawl process.

Googlebot alots a set amount of time to crawling your site and it doesn't just stop crawling because it encounters a 404 error. However make sure that you monitor Google Webmaster Tools and take care of any reported 404s with 301 redirects for instance if the page has changed location. You will notice that Googlebot reports 404 erros on the days it finds them and these can often be multiple 404 errors encountered in one visit to your site by Googlebot. Keeing an eye on this and making sure you keep it updated will make your site as crawl efficient as possible which is clearly what you are after - as we all are

I thought this would also be interesting reading in relation to this - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html

Hope this helps

How are your rankings and more importantly traffic generated by these posts doing? You are right you need to be sure before taking this action and to be honest I think there is a good chance that the difference will be negligible even though I think we both agree that we would prefer the full post title URL. If we strip it back to a very base level then you are getting your most important keywords in the URL which is helping your page relevancy so why make this extra work for yourself.