Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi,

What would be the best practice for mobile detection:

• Best practice for redirections
• Best practice for detection and inclusion of a front-end element inviting to a mobile version of the site

I found this on www.W3C.org but it's from 2008 and I was wondering if any of you tried different approaches concerning mobile detection.

Thanks!

GaB

I'm afraid it doesn't.

I'm targeting Canada only and the big difference is that I already have two domains with history and authority.

What would be the best solution knowing that:

• My two domains contain an important keyword for their respective language
• I'd like to not loose the authority built
• The Creation of an other domain with .ca is out of the question

Hi,

One of my clients has a big duplicate content issue on his site.

He has two domain, on for each language (FR and EN) but each domain propose the two languages! Meaning you can reach every page with two URL.

Example:

http://www.brand-realestate.com/en/luxury/index.html (home page of the default site in english)
http://www.immobilier-brand.com/en/luxury/index.html (home page of the default site in french after clicking on the english link)

Each of the two site has a default language and a link to the other one. When you click the link the page you are on just refresh and the URL stay the same with an added language parameter (ie:http://www.immobilier-brand.com/luxe/index.html?lang=english), then all the link in the navigation switch to the other language.

So my question is, is it better to:

• Keep the two domain and instead of having the two languages on each send the traffic to the domain which has the targeted language by default (on the right page of course)
• Have both language on one domain and redirect all the pages from the other domain to this one (each page to the corresponding one)
• Just add a canonical URL on each alternative version of each domain

Let me know if I'm clear.

Thanks for the help.

GaB

Thanks Kent but I probably wasn't clear.

I took the example of removing the 11/08 to show that those folders are just an URL rewrite and don't really exist.

The date the article is published will show up in the SERP (type this query:

Interest Rates on Italian Bonds Pushed to New Levels) and I was wondering what was the point of having it in the URL too.

Hi,

I checked plenty of newspaper websites (example: http://www.guardian.co.uk/, http://www.nytimes.com/, http://www.lemonde.fr/) and all of them include the date in the url. (ie: http://www.nytimes.com/**2011/11/08/**business/global/italy-bonds-push-higher.html).

What's the point? Google said that this has no importance and those folders are not even real, you can't get all the articles from the NYT in november 2011 if you remove the rest of the URL.

If you use Schema.org properly and the google news sitemap is there still any use for this tactic?

Thanks for you answer Ryan.

I should specify a bit more the purpose of the site. It will aggregate stories created on regional newspapers. The inter-regional part will be managed by an editor who will choose the stories that will show up. Same thing on the regional level.

The problem comes from the dual navigation. We want to allow people to navigation on a higher lever instead of forcing them to be on the regional level as soon as they click a link.

Example:

You are on Western US page because you are interested in what happen in this region. You find an interesting article written by a local newspaper in California.

If we send him to the regional version of the article all the navigation will switch the a regional navigation. Meaning that all the categorie links (like politics) will send him to a list of California politics articles instead of sending him to the Western US politics section.

Am I clear in my explanations?

I'm thinking a cookie based navigation could work but again not sure about the SEO friendlyness of this technique.

Hi,

I'm creating recommendations for one of my client's site. It's a news site highly based on a regional aspect.

One of the main features would be that you can navigate on a high level, we call it inter-regional (with all the regions news) and on the regional level (with only news related to the region) which act as a filter which means that most of my content will be duplicate.

To allow the user to navigate the site on the two levels means that all the news pages will be duplicated, one with the inter-regional URL and one with the regional URL.

Example:

http://www.sitename.com/category/2011/11/07/name-of-the-article

http://www.sitename.com/region-name/category/2011/11/07/name-of-the-article

The regional URL is the official one, since it has all the keywords I want, and I'm planning to have a canonical on both version with the regional URL.

Is there a risk that this would affect my ranking? Any alternatives?

I read that I could prevent SE to crawl inter-regional articles using my robot.txt but I'm not fond of that.

Thanks!

Hi Sha,

I'm changing all the file names and we do have a DB behind the site infrastructure (Drupal) but no unique ID so I guess we'll have to do many rules.

Thanks for your help Sha.

Thanks Sha,

You are right, I will do a rewrite for phase 1 but for phase 2 I will need a lot of rewrite rules because the URL structure will change since I optimize it (removing useless folder, adding keywords, etc...) for pretty much every pages.

I don't think I have a choice here.

Thanks for your answer.

I'm trying to push a one phase approach but since I'm not sure we will be allowed to do it I prefer to have a back-up plan.

With the methode you mention woudn't it be a problem if the robot index the temporary OURLEX during the 3 weeks (my redirections will all be 301)?