Heck yes! Very grateful. Thank you!!

Thank you! Last follow-up (promise): If we do it that way, there's no associated anchor text. But if we use alt-text on the image, that's less authoritative than the

and

tags we are using, plus it's duplicate content... Do you think that's a problem?

Thanks for the reply, Takeshi! That's pretty much what we are doing, I think... Can you help me understand better?

We are using CSS and a table structure to float the text and the CTA button on top of the image. Then the entire block is wrapped in an anchor so it's clickable. If only the image is inside the anchor, doesn't that mean the rest of the block won't click through to the destination?

Would rather not make the whole thing an image because that hurts our text/image ratio and makes our homepage even less SEO-friendly. But we still want the entire area to go to the destination URL.

Our homepage (here) has four large promotional sections taking up most of the real estate. Each promo section has an image and styled text.

We want each promo section to link to the appropriate page, so we created the promo sections as and wrapped each

in an anchor. That works fine for users but I tried viewing our site in a text-only browser (Lynx) and couldn't follow those links! My fear is that GoogleBot can't follow them either and doesn't know what anchor text to pull.

So, my question: What's the best way to make this entire block clickable, but still have it crawlable by robots? Or is our current implementation ok?

For reference, here's a simplified version of the relevant code block:

| |

All Diamonds

Extra 20% Off

|

• [| |

  Jessica Simspon

  Extra 20% Off

  |](http://jessicasimpson.jewelry.com/shop/)

       

Hi All,

Anyone got a definitive answer on this one? I wish I could use dashes but can't. Any more advice on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Hey George,

Problem is that I can't use hyphens (-) and need an alternative... Unless you mean dashes like mdash and ndash? (i.e. – and —) Wasn't sure if those characters were okay for URLs and whether they are recognized as separators by google...

Thanks, Davinia. Didn't want to introduce too much complexity to the problem but the issue is that our devs already have a series of rules in place where the hyphen carries special meaning, so I'm gonna have to work under those constraints...

Hi There,

We are in the process of revamping our URL structure and my devs tell me they have a technical problem using a hyphen as a word separator. There's a whole lot of competing recommendations out there and at this point I'm just confused.

Does anyone have any idea what character would be next-best to the hyphen for separating words in a URL? Any reason to prefer one over another?

Some links I've found discussing the topic:

• This page says that "__Google has confirmed that the point (.), the comma (,) and the hyphen (-) are valid word separators in URL’s.": http://www.internetofficer.com/seo/google-word-separator/
• This page suggests the plus (+) symbol would be best: http://labs.phurix.net/posts/word-separators-in-urls
• This guy says he's tested and there's a whole bunch of symbols that will work as word separators: http://www.webproguide.com/articles/Symbols-as-word-separators-a-look-inside-the-search-engine-logic/

I'm leaning towards the tilde (~) or the plus (+) sign. Usage would be like so: http://www.domain.com/shop/sterling~silver OR /shop/sterling+silver etc...

Thanks in advance for your help!

Quick follow-up question: Does google treat the phrases "half" and "1/2" as the same?

Hi There,

We're in the process of changing our URL structure to be more SEO friendly. Right now I'm struggling to find a good way to handle slashes that are part of a targeted keyword.

For example, if I have a product page and my product title is "1/2 ct Diamond Earrings in 14K Gold" which of the following URLs is the right way to go if I'm targeting the product title as the search keyword?

1. example.com/jewelry/1-2-ct-diamond-earrings-in-14k-gold
2. example.com/jewelry/12-ct-diamond-earrings-in-14k-gold
3. example.com/jewelry/1_2-ct-diamond-earrings-in-14k-gold
4. example.com/jewelry/1%2F2-ct-diamond-earrings-in-14k-gold

Thanks!

That's really helpful info. Wasn't aware of the Enterprise option. Thanks, Adam!

Hi There,

Just signed up for PRO and I love it! We have a particularly large website (tons of content) and the 10,000 page limit is holding us back from getting really exhaustive analysis. Is there any way to up the limit for a single crawl?

Thanks!