Thank you for your reply.  I think you may have misunderstood my question a little.  I was asking if...

This tag:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">

is the same as this tag:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW">

?

Currently we employ this tag on pages we want to keep out of the index but want link juice to flow through them:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">

Is the tag above the same as:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW">

Or should we be specifying the "FOLLOW" in our tag?

Would it be beneficial to NOINDEX category listing pages except for the first page.  For example on this site:

http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/101/fsx-missions/

Has lots of pages such as Page 2, Page 3, Page 4... etc:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflyawaysimulation.com+fsx+missions

Would there be any SEO benefit of NOINDEX on these pages?  Of course, FOLLOW is default, so links would still be followed and juice applied.

Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.

The question is in the title: Should HTML Heading Tags ALWAYS be in Hierarchical Order?

For example, using them in order: H1, H2, H3... etc.

Or is it OK to have H2 tags before the main H1 tag on a page? - for example sidebar content with H2 headings before the main content H1 tag?

Your thoughts are greatly appreciated.

Thanks for that reply.  What about paginated META Description tags?  Remove them completely?

Thank you for your responses.

I think 30 is a reasonable number as we currently have 15 per page.

Also, for the numbered pages - what would be preferred titles:

"Page Title (Page 2)"

or

"Page 2 for Page Title"

When optimizing a forum topic page for SEO, would it be better to have a higher number of posts per page than seperating the topic up into multiple pages?

For example, out of the box a forum may display 15 posts per topic page - would there be any SEO benifit in changing that number to say 30 posts per page?  I.e. more content per page and decreasing unnecessary "page 2, page 3, page 4"... etc.

Your thoughts and comments are most appreciated.

In the eyes of Google, would the font text size of say a news article affect SEO?  For example, a slightly larger font being easier to read by those with bad eyes?  Accessibility?  If so, what size would be ideal? 10, 12, 14?

Your thoughts and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

OK, so I have taken it upon myself to now have our URLs as follows:

/news/853/free-flight-simulator/

Anything else gets 301'd to the correct URL.  /news/853/free-flight-simulator would be 301'd to /news/853/free-flight-simulator/ along with /news/853/free-flight-sifsfsdfdsfmulator/ ... etc.

Also, trailing slash?  Or no trailing slash?

Without

/downloads/878/fsx-concorde

With

/downloads/878/fsx-concorde/

Dear Theo,

Thank you for your response - i found your article very interesting.

So, just to clarify - in our case, the best URL method would be:

/images/aosta-valley/6816/
/downloads/flight-sim-concorde/1101/
/forums/what-is-best-addon/3360/

This would remove the suffixes and also have the ID numbers at the end; placing the target keywords closer to the root of the URL; which makes a very slight difference...

EDIT: Upon thinking about it, I feel that the final keyword-targeted page would be more natural if it appeared at the end of the URL.  For example: /images/6816/aosta-valley/ (like you have done on your blog).

Also, should I limit the amount of hyphenated words in the URL?  For example in your blog, you have /does-adding-a-suffix-to-my-urls-affect-my-seo/ - perhaps it would be more concentrated and less spammy as /adding-suffix-urls-affect-seo/ ?

Let me know your thoughts.

Thank you for your help!

We have thousands of pages on our website; news articles, forum topics, download pages... etc - and at present they all reside in the root of the domain /.

For example:

/aosta-valley-i6816.html
/flight-sim-concorde-d1101.html
/what-is-best-addon-t3360.html

We are considering moving over to a new URL system where we use directories.  For example, the above URLs would be the following:

/images/aosta-valley-i6816.html
/downloads/flight-sim-concorde-d1101.html
/forums/what-is-best-addon-t3360.html

Would we have any benefit in using directories for SEO purposes?  Would our current system perhaps mean too many files in the root / flagging as spammy?  Would it be even better to use the following system which removes file endings completely and suggests each page is a directory:

/images/aosta-valley/6816/
/downloads/flight-sim-concorde/1101/
/forums/what-is-best-addon/3360/

If so, what would be better: /images/aosta-valley/6816/ or /images/6816/aosta-valley/

Just looking for some clarity to our problem!

Thank you for your help guys!