Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Ok, thank you.

Thanks Donna. Very insightful.

If i understand correctly, if the nature of my business has kws which do not map to a local business category (which means i can only hope to rank organically) then placing location in title tag will not help to rank for non geo queries.

correct?

Thanks Patrick! Some key tips that i will most definitely keep in mind. Thanks.

Oh cool. I heard about that, before my time though.  Thanks again!

Thanks Keri for the tip - just asked again.

Great to hear our sweatshirts are keeping someone warm - 'tis the season.  We don't send it out to just anyone you know.  Must be one of our real fans

ICUMI - http://youtu.be/vfPgwQU6H8o you'll both get a good laugh! Take care!

Hi. Wanted to know if targeting local traffic online and the search volume of KWs in the area do not include the local names (according to KW planner) does it still help to keep the town names in the title tag? does google deliver local results based on location names in title tag if query didn't mention it?

Hi. I know a lot has changed since this response.  However, generally wanted to know if targeting locally however kws in local area do not include the town names, does it still help to keep the town names in the title tag? does google deliver local results based on location names in title tag if query didnt mention it?

We have on the home page of our charity site a section called "recent donations" which pulls the most recent donations  from a database and displays them on the website via an asp write,  (equivalent of php echo) . Google is crawling these and  sometimes displays them in description tags  -- which looks really messy. Is there a way to hide this  content without it being considered cloaking?

Thanks Tammy for your response! We do plan on adding the hreflang  tag to the different versions.

That being said  - I've seen many seos advise to use  set up # 2

but I’ve seen many brands do it differently

for example:

apple does it like # 1

ikea like # 3

so I wasn't sure whether there is any real difference.

Regarding tld .ca -- we  do own it and plan to redirect it to our subfolder. At the moment we prefer to use that route so we don't split up our link juice among two different sites.  Evnetually we can always separate them if we feel it will be better for use

Our organization is currently only operating in the USA but will soon be entering the Canadian market.

We did a lot of research and decided that for our needs it would be best to use  a subfolder for Canada.

Initially we will be targeting the english speaking community but eventually we will want to expand to the french speaking Canadians as well.

The question is - is there a preferred version in setting up the subfolders:

www.website.org/ca/ -- default will be english

www.website.org/ca/fr/ - french

www.website.org/en-ca/ - english

www.website.org/fr-ca/ - french

www.website.org/ca/en/ -english

www.website.org/ca/fr/ - french

Thanks

I'm pretty sure it's a 301 redirect

Just to add -- they must have used ikea.ca at some point because opensiteexplorer is showing that they have 6,135 links and some social signals pointing to that .ca domain.

Does the fact that is has so many links to the .ca help it rank? even though the value of those links are being passed over to the .com site?

Thanks for your response

nope i don't own the domain (wish i did though ) I just have never seen that occurring before.

As to your two points:

1. It's interesting I''ve tried different http header checker tools - some return a 301 response code and some return a 200 for that url.

2. I don't think it's a recent implementation -- ikea been using their .com website as their main website for long time with different subfolders for international users. In fact if you check the ikea.ca cache it shows the ikea.com/ca/en page which was last crawled on Jan 3 2013.

How does a 301ed page rank in google?

In google I  searched for" ikea.ca" which is set up as a  301 redirect to www.ikea.com/ca/en

and was surprised to see the url --> www.ikea.ca actually ranking.

IKEA Canada

<cite>ikea.ca/</cite>IKEA Featuring Scandinavian modern style furniture and accessories. Include storage options, lighting, decor products, kitchen appliances and beds. Bedroom - Kitchen - Living Room - IKEA North York

Sorry everyone -- we clarified.

It was a ppc display ad that was bringing in the "undetermined" keywords.

Thanks for your responses though.

Google analytics is suddenly showing a new keyword "undetermined".

Traffic Sources > Sources > All Traffic   with the primary dimension set to Keyword. It's currently our 13th keyword and it is displayed without parentheses around that you see with (not provided) or (not set).

Anyone have any idea what this is?

Thanks!

I have a couple of nested div's. I'd like to do an onclick="location.href='http://www.example.com';" - within the outermost div so that all content within will link to one url.

Can the Search Engines crawl this?

Thanks!

We are redoing our faq page and we were trying to decide on the best format.

1.  Create each question on a separate page

2. Create one page with all the question and have the questions expand

3.  Create different  faq category pages (like 4) and divide the questions between them

From my perspective #1 seems the best ---. you can create hyper relevant content for the user and optimize each question really well

Any experience with this?

To answer the second question :

We actually use google's website optimizer to run our test -- the problem started when someone linked to the test page....

Not sure if these scenarios are different for google -- but just trying to understand it

1. if a page was never indexed before and you put a rel= canonical on it (pointing to a different page) than the rel = canonical will keep it out of the index?

2.  If a page was already in the index and you put on rel=canonical  is that a strong enough signal for google to go and remove it from the index?

obviously both these scenarios are once the pages have been crawled

A page that has a no index on it still gets crawled  and therefore the rel=canonical directive is still "seen" by the bot --- so why wouldn't the rel=canonical pass the credit over?

We have been doing an a/b test of our hp and although we placed a rel=canonical tag on the testing page it is still being indexed.  In fact  at one point google even had it showing as a sitelink .  We have this problem through out our website. My question is:

What is the best practice for duplicate pages?

1. put only a rel= canonical pointing to the "wanted original page"

2. put a rel= canonical (pointing to the wanted original page) and a no index on the duplicate version

Has anyone seen any detrimental effect doing # 2?

Thanks

Would love it as well if possible, thanks!

I should clarify that the link is on this page

http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycwasteless/html/resources/prod_serv_auto_cars.shtml anchor text cars for kids, which is indexed although it doesn't seem to be cached. #odd

My main question was if this kind of redirect counts as a link.

Found a .gov link to my website www.kars4kids.org. The url it links to is

http://www.nyc.gov/cgi-bin/exit.pl?url=http://www.kars4kids.org/

which does eventually redirect to kars4kids. Will search engines see this as a link?

1.Does anyone know where google pulls that anchor text for the organic site links?  -- Is there a way to manipulate the anchor text of the  sitelinks to get our more important pages to stick out more (capitalization, punctuation etc.)

2. If i block a few of my sitelinks from showing will goolge replace it with a new sitelink or will i be left with fewer?

Thanks!

Srs