Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Christoph,

No worries, yes anything pre 8am is a risk (coffee depending)!

Look forward to your next deep post 8am comment

Cheers

Mark

Hey Christoph,

Glad our needs can spring you into action

Appreciate that very much, will test it out in the morning and post my findings.

Thanks again, thats great.

Mark

Hi Guys,

I have a website that has plenty of links with parameters. For example:
http://www.domainname.co.uk/index.php?app=ecom&ns=catshow&ref=Brandname-Golf-Shorts&sid=201v04gxs2hlozv161tfo43qk98583el

I want to place a wildcard redirect on the .htaccess but don't know what exactly code for this. Ideally I want the URLs above to be:

http://www.domainname.co.uk/Category/Brandname-Golf-Shorts

Any help pls.

Thanks,
Brucz

Hey Tom,

Thanks again, hope you are enjoying some sun in the City today!

We have established that the attribute breadcrumbs are causing duplicate content issues, as when a category has 2 or more items it's rewriting them!  Taken this to the developers and the answer was "it's just how it works".  So we are disabling them for now, which is a bit crap but it really has to be done.

Examples of this

http://www.golfclothingdirect.co.uk/Category/Under-Armour-Sale-Items

http://www.golfclothingdirect.co.uk/index.php?app=ecom&ns=catshow&ref=Under-Armour-Sale-Items&prodsort=NAMEUP

The latter may be gone by the time you read this, but that's the issue there.  Also have had a nightmare with the /robot.text but it seems to be fine now.

Yeah it's a pure organic site, a little bit of FB and mailing to existing customers (funny as I was just reading your article on that earlier today).  Not seeing any link worries in GWMT, the site was upgraded from an old site in August last year where they did lose a lot, a hell of a lot of traffic.  they had some real bad links in there which we stripped out!

I'm kind of limited by budget on this one, but trying to make it as clean as possible and also getting some real good content written to give it a genuine boost.

Thanks again for the input, it's very much appreciated.

mark

Hi guys,

ok, i'm at the end of my line with this one, my site www.golfclothingdirect.co.uk has taken a pounding since 4th April and i'm blowed if i can find a real reason for it.  Traffic has been increasing slowly in line with budget, sales were picking up, and coming into season should have been better - 24th & 25th robot had an access issue - host contacted and said there had been a site issue, but resolved and now all A OK.  Sales are terrible and traffic is grinding.

All comments greatly taken on board!

Thanks

Mark

Thanks Keri,

Yes the domains I gave were examples not the real domains, to demonstrate a service industry.

That was in my thinking, however, as it's a service and that service being "cake baking in London" and not www.smithscakes.com and my client buying "www.smithscakes.net, i was a tad unsure but after some research i "think" that should be fine as there are no TM infringements. Also the .com owner leads the visitor not by saying welcome to "domain name" but welcome to "brand name".

So they would be competing on service not brand.

Hope that helps shed a bit more light on it for you.  Lesson there to structure my inital post with more meat on the bones.

Thanks

Mark

Still reading and blown away with the speed and quality of advice, it's excellent and I can see the talent pool is worth keeping in touch with.  I hope I can help you guys out with content or design related questions sometime.

Thanks again

Mark

Thanks for that.

They are quite realistic really and know it will bring fewer clicks but more targeted visits based on the theory of EMD vs Searchers queries.  I was really not too sure of the value of the .net myself so thanks for that.

More food for thought

Cheers

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the really good reply there.  It's very much an echo of my gut feeling.

I think i'm going to plump for, picking up the domain name, creating the clients site, putting 80% of SEO efforts into the branded site and the other 20% at keeping the exact match on the go as almost a side project, as they will hoover up some clicks based on the search term.

Thanks again for the welcome and the advice, it's much appreciated.

Mark

With the resources you seem to have with "employees" writing unique and relevent content that has value to your visitors, then you should already have a fantastic & comprehensive blog to showcase on.  If you don't then you need to put your efforts into building your blog and turning the tables so it's an engaging place that people will want to comment on, link to and all the other blog benefits.

Stay well away from article submission sites, as Brad says, he ignores requests full of remorse everyday.  it's organic search karma, what we do today, impacts on our future!  Don't make your future, writing to people like Brad begging for the links to be removed.  Ain't gonna happen!

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the really good reply there.  It's very much an echo of my gut feeling.

I think i'm going to plump for, picking up the domain name, creating the clients site, putting 80% of SEO efforts into the branded site and the other 20% at keeping the exact match on the go as almost a side project, as they will hoover up some clicks based on the search term.

Thanks again for the welcome and the advice, it's much appreciated.

Mark

Still reading and blown away with the speed and quality of advice, it's excellent and I can see the talent pool is worth keeping in touch with.  I hope I can help you guys out with content or design related questions sometime.

Thanks again

Mark

Hey Christoph,

Glad our needs can spring you into action

Appreciate that very much, will test it out in the morning and post my findings.

Thanks again, thats great.

Mark