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I would go for the nice product URL's with (sub)categories in it. That way users and search engines will understand your website better imho. You should of course think well about your website structure before you launch. If you do that well and you're quite sure you're doing the right thing you should be good.

I'm very interested in why David chose the /product system. Did that give your better results in the SERPS?

Hey guys,

I'm actually looking for the same answer: should I choose to use RDFa or Microformats?

I've searched if any of my competitors are getting rich results in the SERPs but their not so it's kinda hard to figure out what to use.

Supporting Schema.org is an obvious one because, as Peter states, the SE's are pushing it. Even though they're not using it extensively yet there's a good chance they will make much more use of it in the future.

Anyway, also I would greatly appreciate some more input.

Thanks in advance!

Yep, I also spotted them. And are all the canonical tags point to the right pages?

If all is in place and is configured correctly, it should be a matter of time yes. I would however try to speed up the process by doing some linkbuilding, for instance using social media.

I would recommend reading the Google Help section on this. It's quite complete: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&hlrm=nl&answer=139394.

Hey Robbie,

Of course you're never entirely sure what Google will do, but if you're only changing host - nothing else - you should have no problem.

Do not:

• Change ownership of the domain;
• Make any major content changes (such as titles);
• Add large chunks of content - keep it to a minimum;
• Make any website template changes;

It's very important that all that's changing is the host. And of course keep an eye on your rankings while doing the migration. Perhaps use a SEOmoz campaign for that. They also do crawl tests so that should be good.

Good luck!

Yes, even with new posts. How are the search engines supposed to find it?

If you don't have the measures I stated in place it will take them longer to find and index the content. The way it's now you want the search engines to find the content (new and old). When having the sitemaps and proper canonicals you're handing it to them.

Good luck!

Hi Abdel,

As CleverPhD already pointed out: shutting down and relaunched (with a changed information architecture) can search engines to take a while until they're up to speed with indexing your website again. It will take some time, and quite some content and links to speed up that process. In the meantime you can of course help the search engines by:

• Having a HTML sitemap
• Having a XML sitemap (be sure to link the XML sitemap in the HTML sitemap, add the XML sitemap to the robots.txt and submit the XML sitemap and RSS feed in Google Webmaster Tools)
• Having proper canonical tagging and 301-redirects (if possible)

It's important to get crawled, but it also important to let the search engines crawl the right pages. Why are you linking to those tag pages in the bottom right of your website? Perhaps it's better to create category pages for that (better URL structure).

Good luck and keep us posted!

Thanks for your response Mat! How big is a big site in your case? 10.000+ pages?

Is there any way you could use 301-redirects instead of canonical tags? Honestly, when I get the chance to use a 301-redirect (when the page I'm trying to de-indexed is not usefull for a user) I choose to use a 301-redirect.

Honestly Billy, I do not remember precisely. I noticed it like 4 weeks back. I think it was something like a WordPress category page which was created some DC. When I do remember or when I see it again I'll let you know!

Hey Georg,

I was just reading this thread and was wondering if you're back on top again.

Is there any change since the end of april?

Bye, Steven

Hi Andy and Peter, thanks for your response.

@Andy: the rel=next and rel=prev markup won't really help in solving the problem we had. We will use it though because it's very helpful.

@Peter: yeah it's been something we've been struggling with for a while but we've finally made a decision on it.

The /current solution wasn't really a good solution because at the start of a season all the gameweeks are planned and created so it would become quite complex. We've done some calculations on how much duplicate content we would have if we would not use any of the redirects of canonical tags and the percentage of DC is very small (below 1%) so we're going to put our faith in Google's hands and let them figure it out. It's a good quality website with loads of links we're talking about so I don't expect to much issues. We'll monitor it closely though and stand by to interfere when needed.

Anyways, thanks for your suggestions. Although it didn't solve my problem 1:1 it did make me think and make a decision.

Bye, Steven