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http://moz.com/learn/seo/url says:

http://www.example.com/category-keyword/subcategory-keyword/primary-keyword.html

However I am wondering about structuring things this a little backwards from that:

http://www.example.com/primary-keyword/ (this would be an introduction and overview of the topic described by the primary keyword)
http://www.example.com/primary-keyword/secondary/ (this would be a category landing page with snippets from articles within the niche described by the secondary keyword, which is itself a niche of the primary keyword)
http://www.example.com/primary-keyword/secondary/article-title/ (in-depth article on a topic within the scope of the secondary, which is within the scope of the primary)

Where http://www.example.com/primary-keyword/ is the most important page targeting the most important URL.

Thoughts?

This concern is not lost on me, but it prompts two questions. 1. How big a risk is it? 2. What other technical factors could be at play here?

Here is an example of a site that uses a directory for its homepage, whose SERP snippet shows its full path:

https://www.google.com/search?q=skype

The full URL of a particular site's homepage is something like http://www.example.com/directory/.
The canonical and og URLs match.
The root domain 301 redirects to it using the absolute path.

And yet the SERP (and the cached version of the page) lists it simply as http://www.example.com/.

What gives? Could the problem be found at some deeper technical level (.htaccess or DirectoryIndex or something?)

We fiddled with things a bit this week, and while our most recent changes appear to have been crawled (and cached), I am wondering whether I should give it some more time before I proceed as if the SERP won't ever reflect the correct URL. If so, how long?

[EDIT: From the comments, see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8QKIweOzH4#t=2838]

I am doubting it. Seems like an either/or thing. I'll probably do rel=canonical to the view-all.

Thanks everybody.

Now I just want to know if that usage of rel=canonical can coexist with rel=next & rel=prev.

"rel=”canonical” can specify the superset of content" -http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html

Consolidating for usability - I want to provide access to both formats. I hate the idea of noindexing a page that could be the target of inbound links.

Using rel=prev and rel=next would do the trick if it's still cool to point the rel=canonical to the view-all page. Anyone know?

Well, the individual articles are entries in a blog while the consolidated article is a separate page altogether. I could 301 the individual article URLs all over to the consolidated article I suppose, but I'd rather not for usability reasons. For the end users I think the ideal really is to have all the individual blog posts as they are, but provide access to the consolidated article.

Should I make the consolidated article a PDF download? Let them all be indexed without canonicals or 301s? I just don't know the best practice here.

Yes, Xenu Link Sleuth is supposed to be able do this. Here is a helpful post that includes a section on redirects.

It looks like the Yahoo Site Explorer and Open Site Explorer also report the 301s they are aware of as backlinks.

I'd love for someone else on here to confirm.

Like you I've also seen 301's significantly positively impact rankings.

Good luck with your research!

Basically www. is just a subdomain that people used to use to host their web-facing content, as domain names were not used for hosting web-facing websites by default. They were used for tons of other junk. Now almost every domain name has web-facing content, and people host it randomly at either the www subdomain or on the root domain. For marketing purposes a lot of people intentionally redirect to the www subdomain because people are used to seeing it.

Is this a real thing?

There's a ton of directories. Has anyone had success with a program that will take your info for a site and submit it to all of them at once? Bonus points if you can vary the anchor text and description.

Paid or free.

And whether there is anything like that, which actually works, I am wondering if there is some relatively authoritative, relatively comprehensive list of non-spammy directories.

Any other directory advice would be awesome!

Thanks!

I do not think it is still entirely true that sites who sell links will not themselves be penalized (cf. Forbes). On the other hand I recently saw Graywolf joke about how the paid links from this high PR site pass PageRank. I would be curious to know whether anyone out there could demonstrate that paid link penalties for either the linking site or the site being linked to were algorithmic. And if they're not, we should expect them to be sporadic and inconsistent. In which case, if you are trying to be squeaky clean, it seems you should nofollow the links, and it seems that such would necessarily put you at a disadvantage to your competitors who are not. However, some of them, if successful enough, could get hand penalized by Google.

It makes no difference for SEO, though it is a best practice to redirect either the WWW version or the non-WWW version to the other one, to keep things clean. You can do this with a mod rewrite in your htaccess, and in your Google Webmasters account.

"In order to successfully crawl your site, Google needs to be able to crawl your content without filling out a registration form. The easiest way to do this is to configure your webservers not to serve the registration page to our crawlers (when the user-agent is "Googlebot") so that Googlebot can crawl these pages successfully. You can choose to allow Googlebot access to some restricted pages but not others. More information about technical requirements."

-http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=74536

Any harm in doing this while not implementing the rest of First Click Free??

So one of my client's wants to know why he shouldn't just hire GoDaddy to "do SEO" for him! He found this page: http://www.godaddy.com/search-engine/seo-services.aspx

Without actually trying it, It looks like a bunch of stuff I already do (rank tracking, PR tracking, traffic tracking, ROI projections), stuff I shouldn't do (site submissions to search engines), and stuff I probably don't need ("keyword wizard").

That said, I am intrigued by: the dedicated phone number with track and monitor (is it better than Hosted Numbers?), the business listing (is it a link worth the $6/mo?), site analysis and optimization, and ROI dashboard.

Does anyone have any experience with this? Does any piece of it have any value?

Do you need to control access to the site beyond the SERPS? I would not rely on robots.txt to shield any sensitive data.

For a breakdown of robots.txt and robots meta-tags checkout: http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html and http://www.searchtools.com/robots/robots-meta.html/, and for a great post on using these standards in SEO check out: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/serious-robotstxt-misuse-high-impact-solutions

I am also concerned that you are unable to control your robots.txt! If your CMS doesn't let you do that and overwrites it when you change it manually, you have some major control problems on your hands that you should remedy.

Thanks. Figured out a workaround.