As far as the search engines are concerned, the URLs are nice and clean with relevant keywords, but if a user browses the site in IE then the URLs do not maintain their double byte structure and instead convert to ugly URLs like this: mydomain.com/hk/hotels/asia-pacific/-中國-重慶-579-重慶-Sofitel-2-1-晚優惠-連早餐-1025557/

We are doing some optimisation on sites in the APAC region, namely China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan.

We have set the url generator to automatically use the heading of the page in the URL which works fine for countries using Latin characters, but is causing problems, particularly in IE, when it comes to the double byte countries.

For some reason, IE struggles with double byte and displays URLs in their rather ugly, coded form.

Anybody got any suggestions on whether we should persist with the keyword URLs or revert to the non-descriptive URLs for the double byte countries?

The reason I ask is it's a balance of SEO benefit vs not scaring IE users off with ugly URLs that look dreadful and spammy.

I just experienced something VERY odd and wondered if any of you had an idea of what it might be.

• When I did a search on Google and clicked the top SEO listing I was taken to a competitor of the number 1 listed site i.e. NOT the site I clicked on.
• When I clicked the back button and clicked it again, I was taken to the correct site.
• This happened with two different searches and I was taken to two different sites.

Could this be a clever/sinister cookie implemented by the competitor; a site I frequent regularly?

Could this be malware implemented by an affiliate?

Could this be a Google glitch?

Hosting on a US server is not as much of a problem as it used to be because the search engines have worked this one out.

Where it appears you may have a problem is that the site is already established in the US which will make it more difficult to establish a UK site unless you go for the uk tld.

If you want to make sure UK visitors to the .com are sent to the right site, then a lightbox generated using JavaScript for non-US IP users would do the trick e.g. www.travelzoo.com

Once the user has selected UK then a cookie is dropped and they will always be sent to the UK site.

Make sure your country select page includes a no index, follow tag so that it doesn't get indexed, but does pass any link juice it happens to acquire.

If you are going for other markets with the same language e.g. UK (English) then I would go with a separate local TLD because a .com with a /uk will struggle to establish itself in a new market like the UK.

Believe me when I say that it is not as simple as indicating in webmaster tools which markets you wish to target, especially if you already have an established site in the US on a .com

Go separate. Go local tld.

Thanks. We've decided not to go down the no index route because although these pages don't have significant rankings and therefore don't drive much in the way of SEO traffic, they do contribute to the overall authority status of the site and the directories in which they sit.

For example, a hotel deal will sit within the hotels directory/sub folder so to no index all these details we fear would undermine the overall authority of this directory.

I think we are going to go with making the first paragraph visible to the users and search engines... and probably look at combining that with First Click Free

One of my clients is an email subscriber-led business offering deals that are time sensitive and which expire after a limited, but varied, time period.

Each deal is published on its own URL and in order to drive subscriptions to the email, an overlay was implemented that would appear over the individual deal page so that the user was forced to subscribe if they wished to view the details of the deal.

Needless to say, this led to the threat of a Google penalty which _appears (fingers crossed) _to have been narrowly avoided as a result of a quick response on our part to remove the offending overlay.

What I would like to ask you is whether you have any safe and approved methods for capturing email subscribers without revealing the premium content to users before they subscribe?

We are considering the following approaches:

First Click Free for Web Search - This is an opt in service by Google which is widely used for this sort of approach and which stipulates that you have to let the user see the first item they click on from the listings, but can put up the subscriber only overlay afterwards.

No Index, No follow - if we simply no index, no follow the individual deal pages where the overlay is situated, will this remove the "cloaking offense" and therefore the risk of a penalty?

Partial View - If we show one or two paragraphs of text from the deal page with the rest being covered up by the subscribe now lock up, will this still be cloaking?

I will write up my first SEOMoz post on this once we have decided on the way forward and monitored the effects, but in the meantime, I welcome any input from you guys.

Thanks Damion... I have got Google looking at it now so fingers crossed they can find the fault.

When I have "organic only" segmenting on i.e. non paid search traffic, it is showing that the top organic keywords are keywords that i have no top 30 rankings in organic, yet my ppc ad is number one.

Biggest traffic driver - cheap flights - no rankings for this domain, but the sister domain is on page 2
Second biggest - cheap hotels - pos 15-16

I have a bastard of a problem... Google Analytics is incorrectly tracking PPC traffic as SEO which is screwing up all my reporting .

I don't care for rankings, I care for actual SEO traffic and I can't be sure that what i am seeing is correct which is driving me nuts.

Any ideas?