Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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 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.

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 Dejan

Thanks, all good points so much appreciated.

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.