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Hello, I optimize for a fashion, eCommerce site which has catalogue pages and product pages. http://www.zando.co.za/ We're currently working on a large "blog" which tons of great content designed to attract readers, links and tons of long tail traffic. We'll be doing how-to videos, celeb interviews, top-tens, etc. etc. We'll even have a UGC community section eventually. Really great. Now, I want to use the links generated by this section to rank for generics like this: For example: I want to rank for "Lingerie" and I have this page set up as the target: http://www.zando.co.za/women/clothing/lingerie/ I create some amazing content that generates lots of links containing the word "lingerie" . That awesome content lives in:(hypothetical URL:) http://www.zando.co.za/fashion/magazine/how-lingerie-has-changed-over-50-years/ I want to (and this is where you come in 😉 get people linking to my catalogue page (http://www.zando.co.za/women/clothing/lingerie/) where they can find a banner or something alluding to that piece of link bait (the /fashion/magazine/ url). Perhaps similar to the Wordpress style  <read more="">page break on posts?</read> Reason is, I want my "Money-Page" to get the links with "Lingerie" in it. Problem is, it'll be another click to the thing they want to find. Also, say I decide a few months later that I want to do another piece, like "lingerie in films" and do the same. My 'banner' idea would get very crowded or, it would mean that I bump the 50-years piece, which then makes for bad UX for readers clicking through looking for the old piece. Or perhaps this can all be solved with good design? Here's a WBF talking about mixing content: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mixing-viral-content-with-business-content-whiteboard-friday Does anyone have an example of someone doing this well? PS. Was also thinking that on my "archive'' url, in between the content, I'll query for the top products that, that piece speaks to and make it possible for people to add to cart as they're reading the link bait content that is relevant to the product. Cheers Paul.

http://www.zando.co.za/women/shoes/  (for example) Hello, I'm concerned that WMT is reporting a large spike in blocked URLs - now reporting more blocked URLs  than good URLs. Our product recommendations get generated via an Ajax call and these autogenerated, unique, URLs are rendered in the /recommendations/ folder which sits in the root of our site: http://www.zando.co.za/recommendations/ I can't see how I can prevent Google from calling the Ajax - I can only assume that's what's happening.This is what the code typically looks like:

Hi, I have several subdomains that present no real SEO value, but are being indexed. They don't earn any backlinks either. What's the best way of cleaning them up? I was thinking the following: 1. Verify them all in Webmaster Tools. 2. Remove all URLs from the index via the Removal Tool in WMT 3. Add site-wide no-index, follow directive. Also, to remove the URLs in WMT, you usually have to block the URLs via /robots.txt. If I'd like to keep Google crawling through the subdomains and remove their URLs, is there a way to do so?

Hi there, We currently make use of a 301 rule to always return the trailing slash version of any URL on the site. Recently, it seems that the canonical tag was implemented incorrectly. Here's an example: http://www.zando.co.za/women/shoes    is redirected to http://www.zando.co.za/women/shoes/  (trailing slash) However, our canonical tags, across the site, are going to the non-slash version, as follows: I'm right in saying this really damaging? Also, if I instruct the Dev team to implement a site-wide fix by adding the trailing slash in all cases, can I expect any weird side affects on my current rankings/indexation? If so, I can only imagine it being a short-term thing as Google re-aligns it's index of our site? I treat canonical tags with plenty of caution. 😉 Any insights appreciated. Cheers, P.

Hi, We had a coding update and a side-effect of that was that our directive was emptied, in other words it now reads as: on all of the site. I've since noticed that Google's cache date on all of the pages - at least, the ones I tested - have a Cached date of no later than 17 December '12 - that's the Monday after the directive was removed on mass. So, A, does anyone have solid evidence of an empty directive causing problems? Past experience, Matt Cutts, Fishkin quote, etc. And then B - It seems fairly well correlated but, does my entire site's homogenous Cached date point to this tag removal? Or is it fairly normal to have a particular cache date across a large site (we're a large ecommerce site). Our site: http://www.zando.co.za/ I'm having the directive reinstated as soon as Dev permitting. And then, for extra credit, is there a way with Google's API, or perhaps some other tool, to run an arbitrary list and retrieve Cached dates? I'd want to do this for diagnosis purposes and preferably in a way that OK with Google. I'd avoid CURLing for the cached URL and scraping out that dates with BASH, or any such kind of thing. Cheers,