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Hi Mozzers,

I'm looking for recommendations for well known, reputable agencies, who have a strong background in Local SEO. I have a US based client I want to refer.

Awesome, thanks Jennifer.

Got asked this today, and I don't know the answer, so throwing it out there to all your mozzers!

If I 301 redirect a page that has built up a lot of tweets, likes, shares, even +1's, does that social data get transferred over to the new page in as far as social strength/ authority is concerned?

Would Google still be able to see the previous version of this page had x amount of tweets etc, and take this into consideration when ranking the new page?

There's actually about 20 categories that would ideally have a new slug and the number of posts in each category varies between about 10 in each to around 50.

Is there a limit on the number of posts in a category before we start running into issues?

Hi Greg

Cool, thanks. I probably didn't ask the question as clearly as I should. I realise there are plugins out there than can do this, but I really wanted to know whether this had any SEO implications. I've never considered redirecting by category, only by page, so wanted to know what other SEO's thought on this.

Hi Greg

The content will remain the same and remain in the same category, the only thing that'll change is the name and slug of the category itself.

Hi Guys

It is possible (and best practice) to 301 a category as a whole rather than every page within the category.

I was asked this by a developer the other day, and it was something I'd not considered before as I've always done it by page.

It seems there's some wordpress plugins out there that do it.

Thanks in advance.

Thanks Ryan, that's the kind of info I'm looking for. I have a lot of faith in the developers in this project and they are suggesting Joomla is a better option for them to achieve what they want, but very aware of the SEO aspects and want to ensure I'm happy. Appreciate your thoughts.

Great feedback so far guys. As I said, I have little experience with Joomla. The content I've found online seems to focus on issues such as duplicate content issues being a bit of an issue. I've found a few plugins that seems to be able to fix such issues. Is there any major drawbacks on Joomla that I should be aware of though? Any limitations?

Hi All

I'm about to start on a new project where I've been having lots of discussions with the developers involved on the merits of both wordpress and joomla. I'm experienced with wordpress but haven't really done too much with Joomla. I've found some general info on Joomla online, most issues seems to be around duplicate content, but can't seem to find too much else.

Therefore I thought I'd throw it out there for discussion as I'd love to hear from those of you who have used both CMS's and the drawbacks/ pitfalls or plus points in both.

The project is based around a non transactional site, offering a service, but no product. There's lots of thought leadership type content planned, either through interviews, surveys, articles, video etc, and some linkbait etc. Lot of content will also be newsworthy so keep Google news etc in the back of your mind too. Lots of social integration too...

Looking forward to hearing what you might have to say Mozzers.

Hi Darryl

There's no SEO advantage to having a trailing slash or not. Both are viewed the same. The important thing is to choose one and make sure it's consistent throughout the site. I prefer no slashes, cos it looks nicer, but that's just me and has absolutely no SEO relevance.

Hi Jeanie, I just had a quick look at your site and noticed you have noindex, nofollow on all of the pages I checked. You may want to adjust this as you're telling the search engines not to index these pages. Take a look at your source code and you'll spot it quite easily.

Hi All

I'm about to start on a new project where I've been having lots of discussions with the developers involved on the merits of both wordpress and joomla. I'm experienced with wordpress but haven't really done too much with Joomla. I've found some general info on Joomla online, most issues seems to be around duplicate content, but can't seem to find too much else.

Therefore I thought I'd throw it out there for discussion as I'd love to hear from those of you who have used both CMS's and the drawbacks/ pitfalls or plus points in both.

The project is based around a non transactional site, offering a service, but no product. There's lots of thought leadership type content planned, either through interviews, surveys, articles, video etc, and some linkbait etc. Lot of content will also be newsworthy so keep Google news etc in the back of your mind too. Lots of social integration too...

Looking forward to hearing what you might have to say Mozzers.

Hi Thomas, Great point about checking for similar exact match domains already in the SERPS. I've always thought the search engines considered the hyphenated option spammy rather than the searcher, or is it both?

Hi All

I'm looking for some feedback regarding a site architecture issue I'm having with a client. They are about to enter a re-design and as such we're restructuring the site URLs and amending/ adding pages.

At the moment they have ranked well off the back of original PPC landing pages that were added onto the site, such as www.company.com/service1, www.company.com/service2, etc

The developer, from a developer point of view wished to create a logical site architecture with multiple levels of directories etc. I've suggested this probably isn't the best way to go, especially as the site isn't that large (200-300 pages) and that the key pages we're looking to rank should be as high up the architecture as we can make them, and that this amendment could hurt their current high rankings.

It looks like the trade off may be that the client is willing to let some pages be restructured so for example, www.company.com/category/sub-category/service would be www.company.com/service.

However, although from a page basis this might be a solution, is there a drawback to having this in place for only a few pages rather than sitewide? I'm just wondering if these pages might stick out like a sore thumb to Google.

Generally I'd say social promotion, but you could be more specific and target writers who have blogged or written on a similar subject in the past.

I would suggest that it would be beneficial to have the blog on your own domain unless there is a very valid reason not to. By bringing the blog under your own roof, you're adding fresh content regularly and should the content be linked to or tweeted/ shared, you're domain will get the love.

Its a valid question, and something I've noticed myself. There's a couple of things I'd suggest considering.

Firstly, how long ago were the listings in the local directories submitted and accepted? If it's been less than a month it may well be that Google hasn't associated the citation/ link yet to your places listing.

Secondly, have you carried out a search in Google to see if they have indeed indexed the page the link is on, or run a
"link: " type search to see if Google acknowledges the link.

Hi Dejan

Thanks, all good points so much appreciated.

Hi Eric, this tool has been dodgy for me for a while. Never seems to pick up rankings and when it does, it seems to be incorrect. I think I remember someone saying it needed a makeover, or was having one.