Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Will,

The advice already given here is solid.

In addition to that, a little personal experience I will share.

I had a client who accepted the offer you have received when the service first came out a couple of years or so ago. They told me that they saw a significant loss of indexed pages and traffic to their site within a short time.

I cannot say that what happened to their site was a direct result of using the service as I was not in control of the site at that time. However, I do know that once they decided they wanted to remove the service it took me almost 8 months to get the company to do so!

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi threebiz,

First, welcome to the community! Look forward to seeing you around in the future

Since there is a small loss of "link juice" when you apply a 301 redirect, you should pay attention to which domain you choose to redirect and which you keep as the primary domain.

Your choice may be influenced by suitability for branding, but if there is no real branding advantage in using one or the other, then I would make sure that I redirect the site with the lesser Domain Authority to the one with the greater.

You can use Open Site Explorer to check Domain Authority (DA) for both domains. You can learn more about DA under Metrics, Link Counts and Data Points.

If for example, you have Site A with a DA of 30 and Site B with a DA of 20, then I would redirect Site B to Site A, since this allows you to maintain the full domain strength of the site with the greater prospect of ranking.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi again,

I think the line of code below will create the 301 Redirect that you need:

RewriteRule ^/dir$ / [R=301,L]

Let me know if you come across any more problems with it.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi kat2,

Hmmm...clearly, I should have slept before answering this , as I completely overlooked the fact that your second URL is actually a directory, so please ignore the first part of my original response (now removed), which would only work if you have a specific file to edit.

Now to mod rewrite. I'm getting a sense that something else might be in play here, as your question suggests you have already tried to create a redirect and had problems.

A couple of questions we need answered in order to get this answer right for you:

• Is your site built on a CMS such as Joomla? Some CMS use their own redirect rules to rewrite URL's and these will overwrite the rules you write in .htaccess

• Are you using a 301 Redirect rule, or just URL rewriting?

  • To create a 301 Redirect, your rewrite rule must end with [R=301] or [R=301,L] if it is the last.

If you can answer these questions we will be better able to help sort the problem for you.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Terrie,

Don't feel bad about asking the question at all - this is a tough topic to get your head around!

In fact, rather than butcher an explanation and confuse you more, I would recommend you read this excellent post from Rand How to Solve Keyword Cannibalization. The post is from 2007, but still the best and simplest explanation of how to fix the problem that I have seen so far. I would suggest you read the comments as well - Rand has dropped a whole lot more excellent information in his answers.

The key to seeing the difference here is not just about the keywords, but the anchor text and which pages the links are pointed to.

Once you follow the structure illustrated in Rand's post, it should become much easier to understand, and also much easier to spot the problem when you look at the pages on your site.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Jeff,

First of all, you are probably already aware of this, but Yahoo search is now powered by Bing, so any change that affects one will also affect the other.

So, there are a few things I would look at if I were you.

1. Duane Forrester from Bing has made it clear that Bing may use the meta keywords tag to identify sites that are attempting to gain rankings by spamming. Danny Sullivan wrote an article on this at Search Engine Land a while ago - The Meta Keywords Tag Lives At Bing And Why Only Spammers Should Use It.

   On checking your source code I see that the meta keywords tag has been fairly heavily keyword stuffed on all pages, so this will not be winning any Brownie points from Bing. If you want to use the tag, then you should limit it to just a few relevant terms (that are actually included in the page text).

2. I have recently seen evidence with sites I am working on that good, basic optimization improvements, paying attention to fundamentals like keyword placement in Titles and improving the usefulness and readability of page content has brought across the board ranking improvements in Yahoo & Bing. Whatever you do with your content, make sure that the language is natural and not keyword stuffed.

   If you are wanting to get a good handle on your on-page optimization, you can use the On-page Keyword Analysis Tool to check your pages. You have access to the same tool from within your Pro campaigns, but in there you need to have already added the keyword you want to check into your campaign keyword list. With the version I have linked to (which you can access through Research Tools in your Pro Dashboard), you can check any URL for any keyword.

3. I also noticed that you have multiple instances of instructions in the head of your pages due to having used  different SEO plugins to edit the site. Bing's crawlers have a reputation for being quite sensitive to errors and code issues, so this is something that I would also clean up if I were you.

You can also find useful information on optimization in the Beginner's Guide to SEO and this video on the SEOmoz Ranking Factors 2011 Pro Webinar. There is also lots of great information amongst the Whiteboard Friday videos and posts in both the Daily SEO Blog and YouMoz.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi applesofgold,

Some good advice here. I would agree with EGOL that the best approach is to find people who are already open to guest bloggers.

The easiest and most productive way of doing this is to use a service whose aim is to provide connections between those producing content or leads and those who need them.

Some of these are mentioned in Mike Scanlin's blog post How To Get The Equivalent Of $100K In PPC Ads For Free  (and the comments). Those mentioned in the post include Blogger Link Up, My Blog Guest and Haro. I also like Source Bottle and find it really convenient that calls for articles and sources are easily accessible via their Twitter feed.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi sanchez1960

Ryan is absolutely correct.

There are many more ways for Google to recognize the relationship between sites - especially given that the aim is for Googlebot to crawl every page you want accessible on each site. The classic tie between sites is the use of commonly named css files.

I get a sense that your question comes from a concern that the footer links may bring some negative effect upon your site. This is unlikely if you are simply placing a single link in the page footer. Spamming hundreds of links with exact match anchor text in the footer might be a different matter!

As Ryan explained, the reality is that the links just won't provide extra "juice" for your domain.

Funnily enough, we web designers were placing footer links long before the world at large ever heard the terms "SEO" or "link juice". Obviously the reason is that they allow site visitors who are impressed by our work to find out more about us and perhaps engage us to work for them

In my view, this is still a good idea and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. In fact, I would rather a click to our site from a prospective customer who already loves our work than a click from a vaguely interested "SERP browser" any day.

If Google is smart enough to recognize the links between sites, it is also smart enough to know that linking back to a web designer's site makes good marketing sense. After all, it was not us who decided to make links the basic currency of web rankings

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Dave,

I believe there would be two answers to your question

1.  If Googlebot finds the page via the external link, then YES:

• the link will pass PageRank
• Googlebot will crawl
• both the page and the domain will get juice, because Googlebot hasn't seen the robots.txt

2.  If Googlebot comes to the site via the root (assuming that it obeys the command to block), then NO:

• None of the above would happen because the page would never be seen by Googlebot, so the incoming link would never be seen.

If, on the other hand, Googlebot comes to the page via the root and ignores the command to block, then it should be reasonable to assume that means the page would be crawled & links attributed as though there were no robots.txt, but that is only an assumption, so I guess your question would remain open.

Don't suppose that helped much

Sha

Hey Cyrus!

Nice to bump into you in Q&A

I have to say I actually agree with Adam's view specifically in ensuring that pages have nice relevant page Titles that speak to the user. Even though I may not want a page indexed by a search engine, if users can see it then I should use everything at my disposal to offer good information & encourage conversion. Identifying pages with missing or duplicate information is part of this.

The "ignore" feature will just give me the best of both worlds!

Sha

Hi callassist,

You are correct in assuming that the SEOmoz crawler does not distinguish pages that are noindexed.

There is a simple explanation of the reason for this in a response to this thread by Daniel Deceuster.

As you will see there, a feature request is already in play for a feature to allow users to "turn off" the pages they wish to ignore in their reports (and this would be an example of where that will be very useful). If you follow the link in the previous thread, you will be able to keep updated on progress with the feature request.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hey Robert,

It's all good & a whole lot hotter down here

Hi Ryan,

All great advice here (wearing out my thumb up guys!).

Just wanted to suggest that you try running the keyword terms it help and computer help. I just ran them in the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (exact match) and it returned some related terms with decent search and low/medium competition that could work for you.

Also, any time you are struggling to come up with the right terms for a site, try just asking people you know what they would search for if they needed ".................". Sometimes the bleedingly obvious can be the last thing we think of and other times people come up with what I think are the weirdest terms that are frighteningly common!

Once you have chosen some terms that might be suitable, you can also use the Keyword Difficulty & SERP Analysis Tool to help identify the strengths & weaknesses of sites already ranking in the Top 10 for that term. If you have not used the tool before, Rand's post The Best Kept Secret in the SEOmoz Toolset gives a good explanation of how you can use it.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Glad to help

Hope it's an easy fix.

and apparently in unison!

Hey Jake,

SNAP!

Sha

Hi Gajendra,

The Pro App identifies two types of duplicate Errors (the red button in your Crawl Diagnostics Summary). These are Duplicate Page Content **(**a significant amount of content on the page has been identified as duplicate) and Duplicate Page Title (page title only has been identified as duplicate).

Duplicate Page Title errors are most often an internal issue, where many pages in the site have been given the same page title.

Duplicate Page Content errors can be either an internal and/or external issue. It may be that identical pages within the site are visible via multiple URL's, AND/OR the content on pages may be a duplicate of content on other websites. This happens a lot with sites that use product descriptions, content feeds etc from other sites.

To identify the actual URLs where duplicated content has been detected, click the Red error button in the Diagnostics Summary and you will see a list of pages where the error has been identified. In the second column, you will see a blue link which tells you how many duplicates there are for that particular item. When you click the link you will see a full list of URLs which are duplicates.

There are a number of things which can cause duplicate content errors on a site - many are due to the way the site is structured or functions. To really understand what is happening and how to deal with it, you should read Dr Pete Meyers' landmark post Duplicate Content in a Post-Panda World.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Jeff,

The 301 Redirect is not reported as an Error in the Pro App, but a Notice.

You can see this in the Crawl Diagnostics Summary where you see the big Red, Blue & Yellow buttons.

Notices are listed in the yellow section.

For each of the sections there is a short explanation and the Notices section reads as follows:

Notices are interesting facts about your pages we found while crawling.

So what this means is that items listed in the Notices section are simply highlighted to ensure that you are aware they exist. The 301 redirect from the non www root domain to the www sub-domain is normal practice to ensure that the pages in your site are not seen as duplicates of each other by search engines. So, there is no need to be concerned about the 301 redirect highlighted in your Pro App Report.

The Errors(red)  and Warnings(blue) are the issues that can have an impact on the SEO health of your site.

The explanatory notes explain this:

Errors - Pages with crawl errors are often difficult for search engines to crawl, index and rank.

Issues listed as Errors should be dealt with and eliminated as quickly as possible.

Warnings - Pages with crawl warnings are often penalized by search engines.

Issues listed as Warnings may be a problem for your site, but in some cases (for example where you know that you have added 302 Redirects for a specific purpose) you may just say to yourself, "yes, that is the way I want it to be" and choose to ignore them.

When you are looking at each individual page in the Pro App reports, you will find a tiny blue Help link  at the top right of each page (directly above the export link) which will take you to an in-depth explanation of that particular Pro App feature.

Also, if you are ever concerned about something in your reports, you can always ask a question here in Q&A or email the Help team direct at help@seomoz.org. Those guys are awesome and always happy to help out, as are the many members & Associates who lend a hand here in Q&A.

Staff also cruise through Q&A from time to time, but with so many questions posted each day, if you have an issue that needs staff input it is a good idea to email the help team and make them aware of it as soon as possible.

I hope that helps.

Sha

Hi Ralzaider,

Some great recommendations & info here already, especially from Kane, but just wanted to add:

When I hear "online ecommerce sales" I start worrying about duplicated product descriptions fed from manufacturers.

So, if this is an issue for your site, I would put your person to work on writing interesting unique product descriptions for every item in your online catalog. Since you are lucky enough to be paying a tiny hourly rate for their services, I would even consider an investment in product to give to them as samples so that they can actually see, touch and feel the products, try them out etc before writing about them. If you have hundreds or thousands of products, perhaps just identify the most important ones to provide as samples.

If unique content isn't an issue for your site, then I would go with the other recommendations in this thread first.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Henning,

There is an issue in play from the latest Linkscape update which was released today. The issue is affecting PA & DA in Open Site Explorer.

The Moz team are working on the problem now.

If you want to keep updated and find out when the issue has been resolved you can follow @SEOmoz on Twitter (or check the SEOmoz Twitter stream from time to time).

If you have issues at any time and think there may be a problem, you can also email the Help team direct at help@seomoz.org

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi blocker0408,

There is an issue that has been identified with the Linkscape update which occurred earlier today. This means that Page Authority & Domain Authority in Open Site Explorer are off at the moment.

The engineering team at SEOmoz are working on the problem and will update as soon as the issue is rectified.

You can follow @SEOmoz on Twitter to keep up to date on what is happening with the issue and that way you will know when things are back on track.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Leigh,

On-page report summaries in all of my campaigns are functioning normally.

If you are seeing no results at all in the summary for on-page, then there may be a problem with the campaign itself.

You will need to email the Help team directly and ask them to check on the campaign for you. It might help to attach a screenshot of what you are seeing to help them identify the issue.

Email address for the Help team is help@seomoz.org.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi,

It is quite possible for Page Authority to be higher than Domain Authority as the two are independent of each other. PA is essentially a measure of how likely an individual page is to rank, while DA applies across entire domains & sub domains.

To understand how PA & DA are calculated and what they actually mean, take a look at these resources Page Authority and Domain Authority.

SEOmoz recently introduced an update to the calculation of PA & DA which has brought a higher level of accuracy. You can read this post about the improvement - Introducing SEOmoz Updated Page Authority & Domain Authority. This one goes into some depth as to the reasons & methods used in calculating both.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Hitesh,

Are you by any chance using the Google Analytics plugin for Wordpress from Yoast?

Your problem sounds quite similar to that described by Joe in this recent Q&A thread

After a great deal of investigation, Joe reported that he was using this plugin and this was a known issue.

If you can rule out the plugin first, then we can investigate further.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Elke,

An initial Pro campaign will take up to 7 days to complete and will crawl up to a maximum 10,000 URLs for the root domain or sub domain that you choose to set it up for.

The Crawl Test tool is intended to provide a "quick start " option, which will report against the same diagnostic information, but for a limited number of URLs (3,000 & max of 2 domains per day). This allows you to get started on tidying up site issues while waiting for the full crawl to complete.

Since the Crawl Test tool allows you to run the quick crawl for any subdomain, it can also be useful for taking a look at the health of established sites you may be quoting on etc.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Gary,

Great answer from Daniel.

One thing that you can do is to create a list of noindexed pages in excel, then add all pages identified by SEOmoz as duplicates and run a simple comparison in excel. This will identify any pages that do not match. You will easily see whether the new pages in the report can be ignored.

There is already a feature request in the works with the SEOmoz engineering team which will enable us to "turn off" pages that can be ignored (like those that are already noindexed). In the meantime, keeping track of the pages you can ignore is probably the best option.

You can keep track of progress by following updates on the Feature Request here.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Garry,

I can vouch for the fact that Rand even responds to people who email him weird & crazy questions & requests...and when I say responds, I don't mean "thanks very much for your input & have a nice day".

From my own experience I can say that where warranted, it has been more like "Holy response from the whole Company Batman!" 8D

Modest as he is about his own accomplishments, there are a lot of CEO's who would do well to take a few lessons from Rand on dealing with clients.

Sha

Hi,

Your example doesn't look out of the ordinary.

Submitting a sitemap doesn't automatically result in indexing of all pages. There are a number of factors that will influence which pages are indexed. These include predetermined allocations of crawl resources by the search engine, relevance/quality of content on the pages, accessibility etc.

As a site gains in popularity, adds and improves content etc then allocations and indexed pages can increase over time. If you see a sudden or significant decrease in the number of pages indexed (without any action by you to remove them) then you would need to start investigating what might be causing it.

If there are specific "money pages" that you are particularly concerned about you can manually check for them in search engines. If they are not returned in the result pages, that would indicate that they are not indexed. In this situation you can use manual indexing features to add individual URLs to both Google & Bing through WMT & Webmaster Central. To do this in Google, use "fetch as Googlebot" and once the URL is successfully fetched, you will be offered the option to add the URL to the index. There are monthly & daily limits on the number of URL's you can add this way.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Gary,

If the two pages are identical (or close to identical), you could add a canonical link element to one of them as an alternative. Just choose the one that you wish to be seen as the preferred page and add the code in the HEAD of the other to identify it. Here is an example of the code you might use to identify your new page as the preferred page:

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi D4,

Rankings are affected by a host of factors, not the least of which are personalization and localization. Given that different people search for different things in the normal course of things, it is quite likely that two different people searching on different computers will get different results.

I would be very cautious about conducting repetitive searches every few minutes as you have described, because in the end, it could be you and your helpers that are influencing what you see in the rankings!

It is important to remember that Google and Bing both utilize click through data from the SERPs to inform rankings. Every time your site is returned in the results, but not clicked-through and every time a searcher clicks through, but quickly returns to the search engine, Google and Bing are gathering information that suggests your site is not seen as relevant or helpful by searchers. Constantly running redundant searches like this could eventually have a negative impact for your site.

I would say that you might be better served by conducting an in depth analysis of the pages concerned and putting the focus on improving them. If you get this aspect right, rankings and traffic will improve naturally over time.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Yes, I think we need this clarified as there are two things to be considered with Analytics - depending which method you want to use to verify your site you may need Googlebot to have access. There is another option in this case though - you could simply turn off the firewall, verify the site and then turn the firewall back on.

Of course Keri is quite right in that there is no need for crawlers to access the site for Analytics to work once verification has been completed as it uses javascript to send information from the browser.

The other question to be addressed though is "do you want any of the pages behind the firewall to be indexed?". If the answer is no, then the question will have been answered by the previous comments.

If the answer is yes, then you would need to whitelist the entire range to give googlebot(s) ongoing access.

Sha

Hi There,

Another nifty little SEOmoz Tool to play with

Historical Pagerank Checker reports the Google (toolbar) Pagerank of a URL and shows a historical view of previous PR scores. Remember that PR is page based, not site wide.

Hats off to Roger & the Moz team once again!

Hope that helps,

Sha

Snap!

Hi Bondtana,

I believe when Rand first started what was then a blog intended to share his own experiments in SEO, it was never intended to be commercial, and so the .org.

Obviously, it grew into a blog with a massive following and resulted in the company becoming what it is today.

Actually, I happen to think that the .org is still appropriate...it would be hard to argue that the site is not home to one of the most information rich, industry leading, generous & sharing communities on the Net. Not just in SEO.

Also hard to argue that there is a more authoritative information source in the Inbound marketing space.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Socialdude,

A look at that code suggests that the most likely point of access has to be a file that is more than just regular HTML somewhere on your site. This means that somewhere, there must be at least one php file.

My first guess would be that there is a page with a PHP driven contact form which has been used to inject code into the site and propogate the malicious javascript into the other pages.

If you have a clean backup copy of all pages in the site (either with your friend or their developer), then the quickest fix is to upload your backup version.

If you don't have a backup, then you could try checking the Wayback Machine and see if there is a clean copy archived there which you can grab and upload to replace the hacked site.

If neither of those is an option, then the first thing to do is to find any pages in the site with the .php extension.

Rename the files by changing the file extension from .php to .txt. (If you are unsure of how to change the file extension, you can just open the files, save a copy with a .txt extension and then delete the .php version from the server)

You can now look at the file(s) that were PHP, see what has been added to the code and clean it up. You will then need to individually edit the HTML files and remove all of the bad javascript code. Now that you have everything cleaned up, create a complete backup of the site just in case you need it again in the future. Upload your clean copy and you should be good to go.

I would also go to Google Webmaster Tools & use "fetch as googlebot" to fetch and add the index page so that Google knows you are now OK to crawl again.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi again Joe,

After a more detailed look at your site (which has no obvious search box available to users) I was curious as to why all of the things that you are doing on the site seem to have no effect upon the issues you are trying to resolve...and why your site is generating thousands of search queries without a search box!

This says to me "do you have control of all of the content?" ... and it appears that you are using an external service called Pictage to upload and display client portfolios.

So, are you pulling content into your site from Pictage? Is it some kind of white label add-on to your site?

If the pages from Pictage are being generated externally, then the yoast plugin cannot add the "noindex" tag to those pages...if this is the case then I would say you need to contact the Pictage help people and advise them that there is a problem they need to attend to.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Ruslan,

If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account, you can use the "fetch as googlebot" feature to notify Google of up to 50 URLs per month. The way it works is that you run "fetch as googlebot" and if the page is fetched successfully, you are given the option to add it to the Google index.

Obviously if it is not fetched successfully then you know that there is a problem with the URL that needs fixing.

Bing also has a similar feature which allows you to manually add up to 10 URLs per day with a maximum of 50 per month.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Brian,

The feature is not live as yet, but has been lodged as a feature request and a staff member recently confirmed that it is in the works.

Enjoy your Sunday,

Sha

Hi Joe,

A couple of things:

• If you have made the change to noindex search results recently, it may take some time for the errors to disappear from GWT. If the number of pages continues to grow, then clearly the noindex is not implemented as you expect.
• You could try using the parameter handling feature in GWT to tell googlebot to ignore all pages with the parameter in question. In your search string, the ? says "here come some parameters" and the "s" is the parameter that you want to ignore.

Incidentally, there is definitely something funky happening with the generation of those search strings which should be investigated and resolved as well.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Steven,

OK, having looked more closely at your question and done some more investigation, it seems there are two major issues.

The first is as I mentioned, the fact that the non www is broken. I believe that this is because you do not have a setting enabled to allow the www and the non www to share the same location. Unfortunately I cannot tell you what you need to do to fix this, but have reached out to one of the SEOmoz Associates and hope that he will be able to help out.

Secondly, the fact that you have both domains pointed at the same root directory means that:

1. Your domains are seen as exact duplicates of each other (a serious duplicate content issue)
2. None of the link value from the original domain or any external links pointing at it are being passed to the new site.

So, the two things you need to do are

1. Fix the non www /www issue
2. Create a 301 Redirect that will send each page of the old site to the corresponding page on the new domain.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Brian,

The key here is that it is a "warning" intended to alert you to the fact that the situation exists so that you have the ability to do something about it if you can.

While there are many sites (especially ecommerce sites) which are highlighted by the tool because they have extensive menus, it is also quite possible that some users have pages where the body text is full of plain text links which could be fixed.

As to whether they should be fixed, I would say definitely "yes" if they are the latter.  Pages that have way too many links in the text are detrimental to user experience. They are harder to read, look spammy and the message tends to get lost if people are constantly clicking a link and going to another page.

If, on the other hand, you have a site where the large number of links is the result of the menus it is a fairly simple thing to ignore the warning.

I should mention that there is a feature request in the works which would enable users to "switch off" items in the Pro App that can be ignored. When this is implemented you would be able to remove them from the report so you don't have to keep looking at them.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Steven,

Welcome to Q&A

I think there may actually be a few issues here which are not helping, so am going to take a little time and do a bit more analysis so we can try to eliminate all of the problems, but there is one thing that seems worrying:

The non www version of your domain http://easylawlookup.com/ returns a 404 (Not Found) Error, while the www version http://www.easylawlookup.com/ loads correctly. My first guess on why you have lost rankings so suddenly would be that  the other pages that were indexed in Google happened to be the non www version of the URLs - so when Googlebot tried to crawl and the site was down, then returned a 404 Error, those pages were dropped from the index.

It is also possible that the majority of your external links were set to point to the non www URLs.

If this was the case and your changes took down the server, then returned it with the non www no longer accessible, then all of your incoming link value would have also disappeared overnight.

I cannot say at this point exactly why the non www is broken and since ours is a LAMP Shop, I am not about to hazard a guess on what might be happening in your Windows setup to make this happen. There are definitely some IIS ninjas around the SEOmoz community though, so I'm sure someone will be able to jump in on the thread and provide some guidance on that.

General practice is to 301 either of the non www or www to the other (choose the one you prefer and redirect the other to it). This ensures that all of the incoming link value and traffic benefits a single domain. It also eliminates any possibility of the two being seen as duplicates of each other. There is no point trying to set a 301 though if there is something fundamentally wrong in the system.

So, the first task is to work out why the non www is returning a 404 and to fix the problem.

In the meantime, I would leave the old domain as is - I'll do a little more digging and get back to you soon.

Hope that helps

Sha

Hey Robert,

I'm still waiting for that app that allows me to respond with a great big hand that comes out of their screen, grabs them by the shirt and bangs their head against the monitor! 8D

Unfortunately it seems a long time in coming.

Sha

That's great! Glad to help anytime. Sha

Sorry that my answer appears to have lost all line breaks...seems to be some css issues at the moment.

Hoping you can copy it out and separate the lines ....I will try to reformat it as soon as I can, but right now it just keeps loading funky.

Sha

Hi kundrotas, The problem you have is that the code used for .htaccess functions is not terribly "intelligent". It does not allow for the use of "IF" statements etc. This being the case, the better option is to move the action to within the actual code. This is the rule at question RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] The easiest thing to do is in index.php add a check for par1 // If par1 is 1 and everything else is blank send it to the root. if( $par1 == '1' && $par2 == '' && $par3 == '' && $par4 == '' && $par5 == '' && $par6 == '' ) { $location = "/$lang/$idr/"; header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently'); header ('Location: '.$location); } Hope that helps, Sha

Good point Keri,

Perhaps most important of all would be a nice big visible link to the product from the home page

Sha

Hi Randy,

Basically, the crawler is not configured to remove pages with the "noindex" tag. Given that removing them would create a situation where you may have pages visible to users that might not contain information in other places like Titles, then leaving them in there is probably a reasonable choice.

However, there is a feature request in the works at SEOmoz which would provide the option to turn off the pages that you know can be ignored because they are "noindexed". This feature will allow us to have the best of both worlds - see all the deficiencies of the page IF we wish to, and turn them off so that they are eliminated from reports if we wish to ignore them.

For now, yes, you can ignore them.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi again Gary,

There appears to be various opinions out there suggesting as eunaneunan has said here, that Analytics will not register page loads via URL Redirects.

However, I personally work on a client site with more that 11,000 pages indexed in Google that are generated exclusively through the use of URL rewriting. Traffic on this site is reported in Analytics as with any other site. With this knowledge I would suggest that there should be no problem in tracking your page traffic through Analytics.

However, the obvious thing to do is to test it. Since the addition of a URL rewrite requires nothing more than the addition of a few lines of code in your .htaccess file you can put it in place, ask some people to click the link, wait 24 hours for the information to appear in Analytics if you don't have realtime analytics enabled and see the traffic is visible.

The other option you have available to you is to use a 302 (Temporary) Redirect. Once again, this requires the addition of some lines of code in the .htaccess file. The major difference is that a 302 redirect will be seen by search engines and also by the user - the URL will change in the browser when the Redirect occurs. Search engines will also see any change you make to the redirect in the future (for example if you choose to point it to a different product).

Hope that helps,

Sha