It does need to be in the head tag. I was in a similar situation on another site where the rel next/prev was put in the . We saw no results from it (in terms of pages indexed) but as soon as those were moved back to the , life was good.

If you need documentation proof for your change request (which I was asked for!), these might help:

Google's blog post about this says "rel=”next” and rel=”prev” only need to be declared within the  section, not within the document ."

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

At a more basic level, the tag only works in the . See the "Tips & Notes" section.

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_link.asp

It doesn't make a difference whether you choose www or non-www as the canonical version of your domain. Choose based on your own preferences or the branding.

Regardless of what you pick, you do need to pick one version and have the other version redirect with a 301.

After picking your preferred version, you should set your preferred domain according in Webmaster Tools. Here is a discussion on that from Google. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=44231

I agree with what John Cross said here - multiple domains means more work. If there is a business case to justify that increase in work, then that is an easier decision. If there isn't enough business case to justify the work, then maybe from an SEO standpoint you should keep it on the same domain to get the new content ranking more quickly.

Along with SEO considerations, though, there are a few other ways to break down this question...

First, what are the user expectations? Yes, the products are different and not highly related but are the customers different? In the Tesco example, would people who are interested in groceries also be interested in banking? Or, put another way, would people who are interested in groceries (but not in banking) be offended to see that this company also offers banking services? If the users are interconnected or are (at minimum) not put off by the variety of products, then why not have everything on one domain? That way you get the strong SEO benefit of using sub-directories. This isn't always a cheap investment though, as it requires a strong architecture to keep the directories and content types/voices distinct, but totally doable and a good solution from an SEO standpoint.

Second, I'd look at this from a brand perspective. Is this all the same company delivering these goods? Is it all Tesco or Sainsburys? If it is the same brand name, then why not have everything live on one authoritative domain name (assuming you aren't going to chase away customers by showing the breadth of products offered)? Google is an example of this - look at the wide variety of services they offer mail, analytics, drive, G+, search, etc. - it is all Google, even though they offer a wide range of products to a diverse range of customers. Now, if New Product A is a different brand and a really different thing from anything else being done by the company (in Google's case - Android), then that likely justifies a separate domain and a larger business investment (not just for SEO, but for design and other types of marketing too).

Finally, you do need to look at this technically I think. Chances are that Tesco Bank has to live on a different domain just because of security considerations. Some times the technology limitations have to dictate what we do with SEO. If those are great enough, then we may have to do the work to create two distinct domains and get those domains earning rankings/traffic. In that case, the business/technical needs justify the work required.

Hope that helps!

How much traffic do you get to those duplicated pages right now from Google/Bing? Are all of those pages indexed? Can you tell if you are losing out to the manufacturer websites? If the pages are indexed, you are getting traffic, and seem to be "beating" the manufacturer's website, I wouldn't worry too much. On sites I've worked on, I've seen duplicated pages get no traffic (or only one page gets traffic, but not all pages) or they get some traffic but the manufacturer's website ranks considerably higher. That is when you know you have a problem worth correcting. Another way to approach this would be to take a sample of ~50 products that get some traffic from search right now. Take unique pictures and write unique content for those products. Then, measure the results. Did organic traffic increase after 30, 60, 90 days? If so, you know that you've got a problem with duplicate content worth correcting. I hope that helps.

Hi zmbatt,

URL masking is not an ideal solution for SEO as it masks the URL for subsequent pages of the site which can create perceived duplicate content. Here is an article with a little bit more on that.
http://webenso.com/domain-forwarding-seo/

In your case, the ideal solution is to setup a custom domain for your Blogger.com blog. Here are the instructions on how to do that. Click "Host my blog on a URL that I already own" then click on "Yes" for the "hosted at GoDaddy" question.
http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1233381&page=ts.cs

Doing that will let you have individual URLs appear in the address bar. As for the canonical URL you were asking about, it is best practice to use them if you can. They are only essential if you have problems with duplicate content. Here is an article discussing how to set them up in Blogger.
http://www.mybloggertricks.com/2012/02/solve-problems-related-to-blogspot.html

I hope that helps. Thanks,
Matthew

You do have two h1s. Your logo is in an H1 as is the page title:

[http://www.absolutepower.nl/](<a class=)" title="Sportvoeding en Voedingssupplementen - Absolute Power" style="height:100px;">Sportvoeding en Voedingssupplementen - Absolute Power

and

class="line">Proteine Shakes

I wouldn't say it is a huge priority, but if possible I'd remove the h1 from your around your logo if you can and keep it around the page title. From a quick glance at your site and css, it doesn't look like you are depending on that h1 tag for formatting. Again though, I would place that at a much lower priority.

Sorry to hear about the drop in traffic. Like Hector said, it is really tough to know what caused the drop without more information. A few questions to clarify on this...

1. Like Andy said, are you referring to mobile organic traffic or overall organic traffic? What is the decrease in organic traffic per device (desktop, tablet, mobile)?

2. Let's go with it maybe having something to do with Google's mobile changes. Do you pass Google's mobile friendly test? I have seen a number of sites that had mobile sites, but they didn't fully pass Google's criteria. Do you see any errors listed in Google Search Console (Search Traffic -> Mobile Usability)?

3. If it isn't something with mobile, what other changes have you made to your site lately? Removed any pages? Removed any redirects? Blocked pages from Google's crawlers due to a code upgrade? Have you run a crawl test on your site - it can sometimes be the most basic of things that happened accidentally. Have you also checked for errors in Search Console?

4. Looking outside of your site, have any of your competitors made changes and/or gained rankings? Maybe the decrease in traffic doesn't have anything to do with you, just a competitor moving up quickly. I'd check the rankings report in Moz as well as the Search Analytics report in Google Search Console to see if you notice any changes.

Hope those questions give you some help in figuring out what is up.

Hi Catherine,

I'm with you on publishing my home address. Like you, my business is home-based. I opted to get a UPS store address instead of publishing my home address. However, despite my using that address for the last 11 years, this is apparently no longer acceptable practice. Same goes for PO Box addresses. (See http://www.billhartzer.com/pages/google-bans-ups-store-locations-for-google-maps-listings/ for example).

The other route some people have taken is to get a shared office space, somewhere where you do physically work (at least some of the time) and where you can receive mail. That way you can use that address instead of your home address. This can be expensive depending on what shared office spaces are available in your city. But, if getting into Google Local is important, it might be worth considering so that you have an address to use that isn't your home.

Good luck!
Matthew

Hi Jacob,

You do want to include a canonical on page 2 but you want the canonical to reference page 2. This confused me at first but the reason is that you want Google to see page 2 as something separate from page 1, but part of the same series as page 1, page 3, etc. So, for that page 2, your should have:

I look at it this way: the canonical says, page 2 is a page that Google can index but the prev/next links reminds Google that this page doesn't stand alone.

Here is more from Google. See the "A few points to mention:" section.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

I hope that helps. Thanks,
Matthew

Hey Vanessa. I'd ask a few additional questions about the pages before making a decision...

1. If you were to implement redirects, would the redirect go from Treatment (the page) -> Treatment (the Ajax-loaded content)? Or, would it go from Treatment (the page) -> topic page (and people would have to click a link to view treatment content)? If the redirect goes from the page, to the related content of the page then maybe this isn't too terrible an idea. That would mean the Ajax-loaded page section for treatment would have some unique kind of URL associated with it (like /topic-name#treatment).

2. Next question, though, is how much traffic does this affect? Of the traffic those pages get individually right now, how much of that traffic enters the site on those pages (from any source - direct, referral, social, organic, paid)? If right now almost everybody comes into the site via an overview page and then clicks to Symptoms or Treatment, then probably okay to consolidate those into a single page. That said, if all three pages are landing pages for a reasonable amount of visitors I'd be reluctant to make this kind of change to disrupt the traffic...esp. if the answer to question #1 is no.

3. What about links? Do you have a lot of links pointing to the individual pages within each section? Yes, redirects will help retain the link equity, but with any redirect you lose some. So, if a large percent of the links to your site are to these pages, I'd be hesitant to make any kind of change without further testing/research around the weight and importance of those links.

Along with those questions, I'm also wondering why the agency thinks this would help with load time. Why can't they improve load time on the individual pages? Are they talking about the load time from clicking to the Treatment page from Symptoms? If so, there are probably better ways to address that vs. removing pages from the site. When you run a speed test, what is slowing down the page load? Is it something with the server or content that can be tweaked? I'd start there before trying to consolidate pages and running the risk of disrupting any existing traffic.

I hope that helps as you work toward a decision.

Hi Judd. You wouldn't need the title or description tags for Google's sake (or Bing's sake) on pages behind a login since they couldn't crawl those pages. That said, title tags aren't just used by search engines. That is also the title that shows for the page in the browser window and in the bookmark name (if people bookmark those pages), so it can be worthwhile to add a good title tag to help your visitors. Obviously, beyond the meta description tag, there are other meta tags that you might need (like meta viewport or metra reresh, etc.).

I'm not sure how or if you can get traffic data from specific keywords in Moz Analytics. However, if you are looking for specific traffic on keywords you are already getting, you can find this in Google search console (google.com/webmasters). This also report shows you impressions so that you can find areas where you have lots of searchers, but few clicks. I hope that helps.

I'd argue there is value in looking at and benchmarking both numbers, though you might not get an accurate picture of both through Google Analytics. You want to know how many sessions ended up in an order, regardless of how many repeat customers there were that converted. As you said, every visit could end up in an order (you could get a little more detailed and segment to clarify just how many sessions qualify) and you want to know just how true that is. At the same time, you want to know how many unique people placed an order as well and repeat order rates.

Here is the tricky part. Google Analytics is pretty good at telling you how many sessions resulted in an order (the conversion rate you see in goal reports is goals per session). With the Time to Purchase report, you can get a fairly decent idea of sessions it took for those higher margin products. Now the other side: unique users. Users is wonky in how it is calculated (for instance one customer uses different browsers/devices or your customer deleted their cookies) so knowing how many users converted won't always give you the number you are after and, in my mind, it isn't reliable enough to benchmark.

What I do to get at the number of unique customers and orders per customer is use other tools (CRM, order system, etc.) to track that number--those systems are designed around people not sessions, so you are going to get a far more accurate picture of how many unique people placed an order. That is your benchmark, but you can map order dates and/or transaction IDs to GA so that you can understand traffic patterns for repeat customers and how they might differ.

Hope that helps.

Hey,

Those two pages are not identical but they are nearly identical. I've seen SEOmoz's tool trigger these types of duplicate content before. For example, both page headers and titles are "Misc. Spare Motor and Pumps", both contain nearly the same equipment description, and the same links to the right of the buttons. That is normal on product sites, but that is probably why they are considered duplicated.

When I've seen this happen on my campaigns it almost always follows that Google has only indexed one of those pages and not the other. Is that happening to you as well? Or, has Google indexed both pages (and ranking both pages and sending traffic to both pages)?

If Google is performing okay with these pages (the pages rank for relevant terms and you get traffic), I wouldn't worry too much about the duplicate content errors in your campaign. However, if Google hasn't indexed either page (or one but not the other) you should find ways to differentiate these pages.

To make these pages unique, formatting changes won't do it because the content will still be the same. You would need to add content that is truly unique. For example, you could add a short paragraph about each product to each page. You could make the title tag and header more unique. Or, you could try adjusting your alt text (right now, the alt text on the main image is the same on both pages).

I hope that helps.

Really great question and there really isn't any one right answer here. In general, from an SEO perspective, I lean toward one consolidated website that is really well organized. That way all of your SEO efforts benefit one domain. For example, instead of building links to three sites, you can concentrate on building links to one website. Even if the content for patients gets more links (let's say), if everything is on one domain those patient oriented links will still help the content for therapists earn rankings because they'll contribute to overall domain strength.

Along with the SEO though, my other question would be if there is any great harm in having one website serve multiple audiences? There are numerous examples of companies who are able to do exactly that with their content. Doing so requires a strong information architecture to clearly define what each section is, who it is for, how sections are labeled, how you navigate to various sections, etc. Totally doable, and good IA tends to also be good for SEO too. That said, in some cases one audience group might be distracted/offended/annoyed by content that is intended for another audience group or maybe there is just one set of content you'd rather one group not see. Do you have any situations like that? Have you surveyed users for their opinions about the content to identify these pitfalls?

Of course, the other question to ask here is if there is a strong business case for dividing the sites apart? It doesn't sound like it based on your question, but I want to throw that idea out there. I've worked with some organizations where they have one department focused on a certain audience group. To simplify dev and maintenance, the business case is pretty compelling to split the sites apart. Still though, in a lot of cases it is easier to have one website because then all dev, design, branding, etc. budgets (of time and money) can be focused on the one domain vs. divided across multiple domains.

Yep, all of those tactics will be considered black hat and those tactics will not be likely to work. Google can see hidden text and can easily detect those kinds of tactics.

Here is an article more about the hidden text and other black hat techniques. Don't do any of these!
http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/tactics/black-hat.htm

Hi Charles,

I think this is definitely one of those areas where there really isn't a solid yes/no answer. My personal preference for archive links is to block those directories via robots.txt so that they do not get indexed. Archive pages can lead to duplicate content issues so blocking those for SEO purposes can be helpful. However, I would leave the links on the page for users so long as your visitors are using those pages. I'd recommend monitoring traffic to those pages. If none of your visitors are accessing those archive pages then I'd remove them completely from your site.

That is my two cents anyway. Hope that helps!
Matthew

Hi Adrian,

You want OG tags and Twitter card tags to be specific to each page on your site. For instance, pagea.html's tags should relate to that page's content and pageb.html's tags should contain information related to pageb.html's content.

On Schema, that is going to be specific to the content...so if you've got a review on your home page and the same review is on a second page, then the same Schema markup might be contained on the home page and on the second page.

Hope that helps. Let me know if you need more clarification.

Thanks,
Matthew

Google talks about this as part of Dynamic Serving of content. Here is their article, which also includes tips on how to distinguish user agents (including how to signal this to Google):
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/configurations/dynamic-serving

This is an okay practice and I'd not had any Google penalties when I've utilized it. The big concern with doing this type of dynamic content shift for different devices is to avoid cloaking, which Google mentions in that article as well (be sure to click on the link in that Dynamic Serving article for more about cloaking). So long as you avoid cloaking, you should be in okay territory.

My advice is to test out your user agent matches thoroughly - I'd even go so far as to try this on one or two pages with some simple changes for each user agent and then make sure Google indexes those pages correctly before rolling this out to your entire site.

Hope that helps.

Hey,

It looks like you might have a duplicate content problem contributing here. For instance, you linked to: http://www.getpaper.com/find-paper/engineering-paper/bond-20-lb/430-20-lb-laser-bond-22-x-650-1-roll.html

And there is this duplicated page, that doesn't have the category directory structure for the URL.
http://www.getpaper.com/430-20-lb-laser-bond-22-x-650-1-roll.html

That duplicated page is indexed by Google. It also looks like the duplicated page is what is listed in your XML sitemap, not the page you have linked to from the paginated pages.

In spot checking some of the other product pages, it looks like there is a similar issue going on. I'd recommend altering your XML sitemap to reference the URL you want indexed. Or, since it looks like Google has already indexed the pages on your XML sitemap (some of them, at least), you may want to use the URLs that have been indexed (the ones without the category structure) instead of the URLs with the category structure.

In terms of your possible fixes, I think fix one makes more sense. The more direct links you can add to deeper pages of your site, the better. On fix two, moving the sidebar and header to the bottom of the code and controlling the design with CSS can present some problems in various browsers...in my experience, it usually is more pain than gain.

I hope that helps. Thanks!
Matthew

Hey Lewis,

I would imagine it is possible to merge the two sites with limited implications. From a pure SEO standpoint the biggest consideration factor is if there is any negative "baggage" associated with the B2B site--especially spammy backlinks or any wonky technology that would impact the B2C site (speed, redirect issues, etc.). Given that, I'd do a careful review of the B2B site first to evaluate backlinks to that site and any errors reported about that site (using something like Moz's crawl tool and/or in Google Search Console).

The other potential risk is if there is any duplicate content that would be created as a result of the merger of the two sites. For instance, if you have a page on the B2B and B2C sites about Product X, after the merger you'd potentially end up with two pages about Product X. From what you said, it seems like the B2B's site content would be hidden behind a login and wouldn't be accessibile to bots. If that is the case, then maybe this isn't much of an issue. But where this is an issue, I'd also work to figure out the sitemap of the merged site and map out any link changes or redirects that are required to implement that new sitemap.

Along with SEO considerations, there are of course non-SEO factors to consider that could have indirect implications on SEO. Would there be any harm in the customers of the B2C side knowing the B2B trade side exists? If so, that could potentially harm the visitor experience and the brand which could negatively impact clicks, social shares, link building, etc. in the future. Likely not a risk, but I've seen a handful of companies who've merged their two sites only to find that they should have kept their audiences more segmented.

Hope that helps!

any duplicate content that would be created as a result of the merger

Yeah, that would probably make the most sense. For sites where I've done something like this before, it is usually a single page (or maybe a few pages, depending) that talks about the trade program, answered common questions, allowed login, and encouraged signup. You could then promote that page(s), optimize it for appropriate terms, get links going to it, etc.

You are correct that the Search Analytics queries report does limit down to 999 queries. However, when you load the Acquisition -> Search Engine Optimization -> Queries report in Google Analytics, you may be able to see more than 999 terms. I just double checked in a dozen or so accounts and all reports in Google Analytics were plus 999, though that may or may not be changing based on Google's new updated to the Analytics report. Also, keep in mind though that there is a limit to how long the data would stick around - for clients I work with ongoing, I export the reports monthly just so I don't lose the limited data you do have.

As Charles said, though, this data about queries isn't always reliable and it is limited in what you can get out of this data. That said, if you are using it for a general idea of what terms people found you for and what pages were related to which term, it can be helpful. Certainly not as good as the pre-"not provided" days and you obviously can't rely on it to calculate ROI, but it at least gives you an idea of terms and a relative idea of performance.

As for other ways to get around not provided and find those queries, here are some articles with some good tips and tricks:
https://moz.com/blog/landing-pages-report-in-moz-analytics
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/unlock-keyword-not-provided/
http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2297674/google-not-provided-keywords-10-ways-to-get-organic-search-data

The best way to do this is by adjusting the .htaccess file. The htaccess file directs traffic to the correct page very quickly and efficiently. (An alternative would be to go through WordPress but typically this isn't an efficient alternative.)

The htaccess file is located in the root directory - /httpdocs, /public_html, etc.

At the very end of the htaccess file, add a new line and on that line, you will want to use a line like this. Update the URLs to match whatever you want to redirect from and to.

redirect 301 /servicos-de-marketing-digital/publicidade-online/ http://digitaldiscovery.com.pt/new-page-url-here

The first URL (after redirect 301) is the old URL you are redirecting from. This needs to be a relative URL back to the root directory of the website. The second URL (after the space) is the URL to the new page you are redirecting to. This needs to be an absolute URL (even if it is on the same site).

A couple words of warning on the htaccess file:

First, make sure your URLs do not have any special characters and if they do, make sure you escape them. (Space becomes %20, for example.)

Second, before making any changes to your htaccess file definitely create a backup of what the current htaccess file is. If you make a mistake in the htaccess file it can return an internal server error for your entire site. So, be prepared to roll back if something doesn't go quite right!

There is a good resource on htaccess 301 redirects here. It also talks about a meta refresh option but I'd avoid that as it isn't as good for search engine purposes.

http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles3/spiders-301-redirect.htm

Hi Johan,

A 410 response code is perfectly acceptable for expired pages. With a 410, you are communicating that page is "gone" and expired content usually is "gone", so it fits. However, with 410 you are going to see that page fall out of the index and that page will lose traffic (assuming it would get any given that some expired content likely won't get any traffic since it is no longer timely) and, more importantly, lose link value (if you had any links to those pages).

As for 301 redirects, I'd start tracking visits to the 410 expired page and links to the 410 expired pages. How much traffic are you getting? How engaged is that traffic? How many links are there and are they good quality? Links are easy enough to track in OSE and for tracking traffic you can use Google events (http://antezeta.com/news/404-errors-google-analytics).

When I see a lot of links or a lot of traffic (especially traffic that leaves), I've converted a 410 page into a 301 redirect that goes to our best (programmatic) guess. For instance, 301 redirect the user to a search for the properties in a similar location or similar price range (or etc.). What I've often found is that when I get the the user redirected to the best page, I'm more likely to see them engage and use the site. Along with the user benefits, I've also see that help with overall organic performance when there are a lot of links back to these pages.

Hope that helps. Thanks,
Matthew

I'd agree that the main domain would be ideal but if there are too many business reasons (or financial burdens), you would probably be okay with a subdomain. A subdomain does get some benefit from the root domain.

Certainly, if you do go with a subdomain route you'll want to make sure that you do all the right things around that subdomain (links, optimization, social, etc.) so that Google/Bing see indicators not just to the root domain but the subdomain as well. Along with that, you'll want to have plenty of internal linking between the main site and the subdomain site.

One other thought is, is it possible to do this as a sub-directory (suretybond.com/storefront)? A sub-directory would be considerably more beneficial from an SEO standpoint since you don't have to worry about how much link juice/trust/authority is passed from the root domain to the subdomain. I realize technically that isn't always possible given the way things are configured.

Also, there was a good blog post about this on SEOmoz from 2009 that you might want to check out. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

For what it is worth, I'm in the US and seeing the 999 limit on all my accounts and domains. So, I guess that means the clock is ticking and if you don't have that limit yet, then you better get downloading fast!

Hi,

I have a client's site that posts job openings. There is a main list of available jobs and each job has an individual page linked to from that main list. However, at some point the job is no longer available. Currently, the job page goes away and returns a status 404 after the job is no longer available.

The good thing is that the job pages get links coming into the site. The bad thing is that as soon as the job is no longer available, those links point to a 404 page. Ouch. Currently Google Webmaster Tools shows 100+ 404 job URLs that have links (maybe 1-3 external links per).

The question is what to do with the job page instead of returning a 404. For business purposes, the client cannot display the content after the job is no longer available. To avoid duplicate content issues, the old job page should have some kind of unique content saying the job is longer available.

Any thoughts on what to do with those old job pages? Or would you argue that it is appropriate to return 404 header plus error page since this job is truly no longer a valid page on the site?

Thanks for any insights you can offer.
Matthew

Hey Andrew,

Yeah, I've seen the same kinds of issues where that seems to be somewhat inexact. So far, I've not been able to find an explanation. In terms of the large drop off, I did see a similar drop off on one of my sites shortly after correcting a duplicate content issue.

However, like you said, you need to watch for things out of the ordinary. For now, I'm not worrying too much about the graph. It is interesting, but I'll pay more attention to the graph in Google Analytics telling me how much traffic I have from Google. If I see a large drop there, then I'll worry.

Matthew

Hi,

Are your pages manually driven or created out a database system? If they are in a database of some kind, you should be able to query for the URLs and generate the XML sitemap. If they aren't able to generate the sitemap to /sitemap.xml file, make sure you put the URL of the sitemap on your robots.txt file. (For example, if the sitemap ends up being sitemap.php instead.)

If they aren't database driven pages or if you developers aren't able to create an XML sitemap for you, I'd recommend this service:

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/standalone-google-sitemap-generator.html

You can setup a scheduled job on your server to run this on whatever schedule you want. I've used it on a number of client sites where the data drive XML sitemap isn't an option.

Hope that helps.

This URL contains some advanced tricks to specifically prevent prefetching by Firefox. I've only tried to the htaccess mod_rewrite technique. However, I modified that technique to send prefetch attempts to an empty file instead of the normal 404 page (saving resources): http://www.petefreitag.com/item/312.cfm

I would avoid only showing tags to Googlebot. It does look a little spammy and like cloaking but more than that, adjusting content for Google can be an involved coding process that comes with risks (accidentally showing something else to Google, etc.).

I am pretty picky about linking out to other websites and rarely have an external link more than once per page unless it makes complete sense to have the multiple external links on that one page. That said, it does depend on the site and the page. If it is a blog, I'm more generous with external links. Still though, with any external links I make sure it is a site I'm willing to link to (good authority, good fit for users, etc.).

Given that I'm only linking out to trustworthy sites, I usually don't add in a rel nofollow. On the few occasions I've had to link to a site that is questionable, I'll always nofollow that link.

On your question of the <a>tag...when I do link out, I do always put it in a regular link just so that I don't make the website harder to use. I've tried the plain text route before and didn't see any huge SEO impacts but did see a huge negative usability impact.</a>

<a></a>

Hey Iain. If it were me, I'd probably just accept that Bing can't crawl the sitemap and let it go. XML sitemaps are important, but not something that will generally make a huge life altering difference for your website's performance.

Now, I say "probably" because I'm wondering if you are having indexing problems with Bing. Are there pages you want Bing to index that maybe they can't reach easily (or at all) without an XML sitemap? If that is the case, then maybe it is worth the 3 hours of dev time to get the XML sitemap in place. Alternatively, you could find other ways to link to those pages Bing isn't currently indexing (on your site or others) to get those pages noticed.

Not sure what your problems are with PHPLD and why you want to change, but for an alternative to PHPLD (but staying within PHP), you may want to check out phpmydirectory.com. I've only worked a little with both, but from what I've read and heard from other developers, phpMyDirectory has better options when it comes to plugins. Hope that helps. Thanks.

From the sounds of it, you need to set canonical URLs as there probably is no easy way to block the review or navigation URLs (since those are on a product-by-product basis). For example, on the review URL (blah-blahtext/reviews/category/categoryname) you would have a canonical tag to blah-blahtext.html. On the category URL, you could set the canonical to product-name.html. That way if Google/Bing see the URLs and the duplicated content, the canonical indicates that those URLs should be treated as an alternative version of the canonical URL.

Hey,

1. It sounds like you don't have a funnel, you have a destination goal. A funnel would be something like a form that was several pages - users go from page 1 to page 2 to page 3 and then thanks (think of a cart). So, your site (in the funnel sense) is not a step toward thanks.

2. To know which pages are performing better getting people to thank you page, you can use segments to look at converters and non-converters. That sounds like what you want to know - how do those groups compare? Here is a Google support article about this:
   https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3125360?hl=en

3. For the iframe issue, you should check out cross domain tracking. Without that, yes, your stats will be skewed weird.
   https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034342?hl=en

4. For CTAs, are you talking about buttons or links? For instance, a linked image that says "Contact Us Now!"? Do the links lead to the form.html page? If it is something like that, event tracking can give you an idea of where people are clicking on the page. If, instead, you have the form itself on multiple locations of a page (instead of links) you can get creative - one way I've pulled this off is to have the forms send to a different thank you page so that you can track as multiple goals.

Hope that helps!

I would say it depends on what the website is and the nature of the links.

Are the multiple links all on the same page or are they on several different pages of the site? Getting links on many different pages of a website would be more beneficial than getting multiple links on the same page.

What about the placement of the link to your website? Is it just a link in the directory or is the link part of a highly relevant blog post? Multiple links inside a relevant blog post can continue to add value if those links go to different pages of your website.

Also, it is worth considering if it is a high authority or low authority website. If it is a high authority site, then multiple links would be worth pursuing. If it is a low authority website, there wouldn't be much value to multiple links from that kind of website.

Hey,

The same basics apply but I've found that links to the domain and authority of the domain matter more than page authority. In terms of fast indexing, make sure you have an RSS feed. Also, if you are trying to get accepted in to Google News, do make sure you have met those requirements: http://support.google.com/news/publisher/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40787. Having a news specific XML sitemap is also helpful: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=74288

Why would you remove the content a day or two after publication? If you have an online newspaper, that content may still be relevant for some time after the original publication date. I've tended to keep news content around years after original publication and still gotten some traffic to those articles.

Given that, I've not has experience removing content that quickly but when I have removed content from news websites, I try to redirect the old url to the most relevant new article (if possible) or news category page (usually easier to do). This preserves link value, which is obviously important. For really old stories that don't have links or traffic, I set the article to return a 410 status on that URL to signal that page is removed permanently. Again though, I'd default to keeping the article around as long as possible.

Hope that helps.

1. Ah, gotcha. You could do that as a two step funnel. You can also look at total sessions on the first page and see how many people from there complete a goal.

2. Cool!

3. Then, in that case, you should be able to add GA on there vs worrying about cross domain (phew!). Looks like Dmitrii suggested the same thing.

4. In that case, I'd use event tracking on the buttons and links so that you know what people are clicking that leads them to the form. UTMs could lead to messy reports since these are internal pages. You'd just have to be careful how you set it up and walk through all the various edge cases to make sure it will work, but it should.

That is a good point!

On that though, what would the more preferable placements be for a multiple link situation? I would say it would be better to have multiple links in the content area as opposed to multiple links in the footer. Or, do you think a distribution of links would be better...for example, one link in the content and another in the footer?

Hi,

Let me back up a step. When you say remove duplicate content, do you mean delete the page? For example, pageA.html and pageB.html have the same content. In your example, are you asking do you delete pageA.html or delete pageB.html? I wouldn't delete either page as both pages likely have traffic, links, etc.

Instead of deleting, you want to pick which page is the canonical version of that page. More simply, when somebody Googles the terms that page is targeting, do you want pageA.html to show up or do you pageB.html to show up? If you decide you want pageA.html to show up, then you need to redirect pageB.html to pageA.html. That way, if somebody goes to pageB.html they end up on pageA.html. If you delete pageB.html and somebody goes there, they'll end up on an error page.

Now, on where question...in terms of deciding what version is canonical, I would suggest you look at authority first and foremost. If the domain authority in OSE is higher for pageA.html than it is for pageB.html, keeping pageA.html makes sense. Things like URL structure are only mildly important, especially when making decisions like this.

Hope that helps. Thanks,
Matthew

Hey, You are solving multiple problems. The code looks properly written to solve one of those problems--the naked domain to www domain redirect. So long as going to http://mydomain.com 301 redirects to www.mydomain.com, then you know that piece is working.

The second "problem" you have is that you can reach your home page with /index.html and without /index.html in the URL. So long as only one is indexed by Google, this isn't that big of a problem. You should however put in a canonical on your home page to make it clear which version you do want indexed. Then make sure all internal links go to that URL.

Alternatively, you can 301 redirect /index.html to the root via the htacess file. That code would go something like this:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.index.html\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ /$1 [R=301,L]

The third "problem" is that your home page can be accessed with or without a trailing slash. Again, I wouldn't say this is a problem unless both versions are indexed. And, like the home page, you can fix this by adding a canonical element to the home page and link to that canonical consistently within your site.

However, this too can be fixed via htaccess. Here is an example of the htaccess code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^.mydomain.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

Thanks,
Matthew

Sadly, I think that is part of what you have to do unless you want to risk the paid link route.

Usually in these situations, I've tried to find alternative ways to rank in areas that the competitor with paid links is ignoring. For example, targeting the long tail searches is usually a good option as many paid link setups narrow targeting only a few keywords. Another route is to build up up social proof (including reviews on local sites if it is a local business).

While there is still a lot of work to do in those areas, that work can at least see returns as compared to competing against somebody with thousands of paid links.

You can do this via RedirectMatch statements. There is an example of different match types you could use here. Basically, you create a pattern and then the code is smart enough to redirect based on that pattern.

http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/301-redirect-with-mod_rewrite-or-redirectmatch.html#301_Redirects_RedirectMatch

Your redirect might look something like this though you might want to adjust the pattern match the directory in between /reviews/ and /item/. Mine is just a basic alphanumeric catch all.

RedirectMatch 301 ^/articles/reviews/([-A-z0-9]+)/item/(.*)$ http://clients.qwconsulting.com/reviews/$1

I hope that helps.

Hey,

I don't think you are safe from an issue with cannibalization just because the one tool says you don't have that. From the situation described, it sounds like you do have issues on your site with overlapping content and that could be hurting your ranking (as could other factors too, obviously). The best way to find out is to remove the content that you think is overlapping or self canabalizing and then see if you regain rankings.

I'm not certain how the cannibalization check happens in SEOmoz's on page tool, but I have seen instances where cannibalization is missed if those pages are not linked together. As I understand it, that on page tool checks only the one page as opposed to an in depth site crawl.

Hope that helps.

Matthew

Yes...but, that rests on a couple big assumptions. First, that all 100 pages are equally important. Second, that all these websites you are blogging on are all equal (same authority, same relevance, etc.)

However, it is likelier that some of those pages are more important than other pages. It is also likely that some sites are more authoritative than others. Given that, you'd want to promote the more important pages more often. And you'd want to promote the more important pages on the more authoritative sites.