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Hi We have a website selling cellphones. They are available in different colors and with various data capacity, which slightly changes the URL. For instance: Black iphone, 16GB: www.site.com/iphone(black,16,000000000010204783).html White iphone, 16GB: www.site.com/iphone(white,16,000000000010204783).html White iphone, 24GB: www.site.com/iphone(white,24,000000000010204783).html Now, the canonical URL indicates a standard URL: But this URL is never physically available. Instead, a user gets 301 redirected to one of the above URLs. Is this a problem? Does a URL have to be "physically" available if it is indicated as canonical?

We recently changed our domain from http to https. When a user enters any URL on http, there is an global 301 redirect to the same page on https. I cannot find instructions about what to do with robots.txt. Now that https is the canonical version, should I block the http-Version with robots.txt? Strangely, I cannot find a single ressource about this...

Hi This subdomain has about 4'000 URLs indexed in Google, although it's blocked via robots.txt: https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=site%3Awww1.swisscom.ch&oq=site%3Awww1.swisscom.ch This has been the case for almost a year now, and it does not look like Google tends to respect the blocking in http://www1.swisscom.ch/robots.txt Any clues why this is or what I could do to resolve it? Thanks!

Hi. We had some URLs that were indexed in Google from a www1-subdomain. We have now disabled the URLs (returning a 404 - for other reasons we cannot do a redirect from www1 to www) and blocked via robots.txt. But the amount of indexed pages keeps increasing (for 2 weeks now). Unfortunately, I cannot install Webmaster Tools for this subdomain to tell Google to back off... Any ideas why this could be and whether it's normal? I can send you more domain infos by personal message if you want to have a look at it.

We have a site offering a voip app in 4 languages. Users are currently 302 redirected from the root page to /language subpages, depending on their browser language. Discussions about the sense of this aside: Is it correct to use a 302 redirect here or should users be 301 redirected to their respective languages? I don't find any guideline on this whatsoever...

Hi We need to block some www1-pages from being indexed. Now IT has resolved this but pages like http://www1.swisscom.ch/fr/business/pme.html return a 405 status instead of a 404. The pages are currently still indexed in Google. Must the status be changed to 404 or should I just wait and see if Google de-indexes them anyhow?

Hi I've two questions about indexing Tabs. 1. Let's say I have tabs, or an accordion that is triggered with Jquery. That means that all HTML is accessible and indexed by search engines. But let's say a search query is relevant to the content in Tab#3, while Tab#1 is the one that's open by default. Is there any way that Tab#3 would be open directly if it's more relevant to the search query? 2. AJAX Tabs: We have pages that have Tabs triggered by AJAX (example: http://www.swisscom.ch/en/residential/help/loesung/entfernen-sie-sim-lock.html). I'm wondering about the current best practice. Google recommends HTML Snapshots. A newer SEOMoz Article talks about pushState(). What's the way to go here? Or in other words: How to get Tabs & Accordion content indexed and allow users to navigate directly to it?

Hi When I import an OSE Site Crawl .csv to Excel, the lines get messed up. This is due to commas within the crawled site: For instance, when there is a comma in the Meta Description field, it gets separated into two fields. Is there any way to escape this so that only the correct fields get separated? Thanks!

Howdyho I'm SEOing a daily deals site that mostly runs on https Versions. (only the home page is on http). I'm wondering what to do for canonicalization. IMO it would be easiest to run all pages on https. But the scarce resources I find are not so clear. For instance, this Youmoz blog post claims that https is only for humans, not for bots! That doesn't really apply anymore, right?

Hi everybody! We have an ecommerce site with product overview pages, where sometimes there are hundreds of products listed. Usually, we just display 30 and have a button where users can click to see 30 more - or all products listed at once. This is the overview page (as indexed in google): http://www.geschenkidee.ch/aussergewoehnliches.html
And this is the view-all page: http://www.geschenkidee.ch/aussergewoehnliches.html#all What should I do here? The product overview page will hardly generate more traffic by listing all products (because the overview page will rank for generic keywords, while the product keyword searches will be referred to the specific product pages themselves). I was originally thinking of using rel=canonical pointing to the view-all page. But this would just lead to longer load time. Should we just leave those overview pages or is there a best practice for how to deal with such pages? Thanks for your thoughts on this!

I'm optimizing a pet supplies site (http://www.qualipet.ch/) and have a question about the best practice for expired product pages. We have thousands of products and hundreds of our offers just exist for a few months. Currently, when a product is no longer available, the site just returns a 404. Now I'm wondering what a better solution could be: 1. When a product disappears, a 301 redirect is established to the category page it in (i.e. leash would redirect to dog accessories). 2. After a product disappers, a customized 404 page appears, listing similar products (but the server returns a 404) I prefer solution 1, but am afraid that having hundreds of new redirects each month might look strange. But then again, returning lots of 404s to search engines is also not the best option. Do you know the best practice for large ecommerce sites where they have hundreds or even thousands of products that appear/disappear on a frequent basis? What should be done with those obsolete URLs?

Hi there I need to optimize the website of a club/concert venue. The site isn't bad and has authority, but the event pages don't seem to rank and I'm unsure about the reason. There is an overview page of the events: http://www.kaufleuten.ch/events/ What happens currently when clicking on a specific event (on "WEITER", top right of each event) is that users get redirected to a hashtag page by jQuery. The href of "WEITER" itself links to another landing page (which is IMO the one we should see ranking for the specific event). Here is a concrete example: Look at the event "Tanz & Konzert: Andreas Vollenweider, Seven & ROKPA-KIDS" on /events by clicking on "WEITER", you get directed to http://www.kaufleuten.ch/events/#2790/andreas-vollenweider the actual "WEITER" link in the source code though, points to the landing page http://www.kaufleuten.ch/event/andreas-vollenweider/ This seems to be done by an AJAX load: jQuery loads a DIV with the ID "ajax-content". Apparently, this is the code responsible for it: $(„.link“, click(function() {
 
     el.find('.wrapper').load(target+' #ajax-content', function() {
 
});
return false;
}); I know the site has good authority and should rank well. however, the event landing pages never seem to appear, but only the page /events is ranking: SERP
(Strangely, when using the site command, the event page suddenly appears above: SERP. (But I have never seen this in a "normal search query", even though we are the organisers and should at least be among the top 5). Now my question: Does Google consider this AJAX load to be some sort of cloaking? (because the href in the code is different to you actually end up by clicking "WEITER"). Will the landing pages begin to rank if we disable this AJAX load? Or should we stick to hashtags and not even create landing pages? (but then, we will have no control over title tags of specific events, right?) Thanks for your help, I'm a bit lost here as my JS knowledge is meagre... Cheers,
Phil

Hi there I'm doing some SEO for a restaurant/bar/night club. Now I'm wondering whether I should create multiple entries on Google Places or one for all. I had in mind: one for the bar/night club and one for the restaurant, as the target audiences for those can be rather different. We have only one address (and one website), but several phone numbers, so it would be possible to have several entries. What's your opinion: One or several entries?

Hi We're relaunching a site with a Drupal 7 CMS. Our web agency has hidden content on it and they say it's for Accessibility (I don't see the use myself, though). Since they ask for more cash in order to remove it, the management is unsure. So I wanted to check if anyone knows whether this could hurt us in search engines. There is a field in the HTML where you can skip to the main content: Skip to main content The corresponding CSS comes here: .element-invisible{position:absolute !important;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);clip:rect(1px,1px,1px,1px);} #skip-link a,#skip-link a:visited{position:absolute;display:block;left:0;top:-500px;width:1px;height:1px;overflow:hidden;text-align:center;background-color:#666;color:#fff;} The crucial point is that they're hiding the text "skip to main content", using clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px), which shrinks the text to one pixel. So IMO this is hiding content. How bad is it? PS: Hope the source code is sufficient. Ask me if you need more. Thx!

hi we can get a valuable link with the desired anchor text from a news site. the destination url would be something like www.site.com/product. but in order to track conversions, our sales team would like to add an affiliate id to the url, so that it would look like this: www.site.com/product?sess_affiliate=ta how much link juice would a link to this affiliate url pass? would we be shooting our wad by linking to the ?sess-URL instead of the original URL?

I have to optimize some online Shops and after Panda I really don't know what to think about thin content on product overview pages anymore... used to be that we could improve our rankings easily just by adding 1-2 sentences on such a page. This always worked for non-overly competitive terms. Now It feels like it doesn't work any longer, but I couldn't put my finger on it and I don't have the resources to test. Here's an example of what I mean: http://www.geschenkidee.ch/wandtattoos/aus_aller_welt.html 
I would add max. 3 lines of text directly over the product thumbnails. What do you think? Is it worth adding some text on a product overview page or do I not even have to bother post-Panda?

Does anyone have experience on soft hyphenation and its effects on rankings? We are planning to use  ­ in our company blog to improve the layout. Currently, every word above 4 syllable will be soft hyphenated.
This seems to render okay in all browsers, but it might be a problem with IE9... In HTML 5, the "­" soft hyphenation seems to be replaced with the <wbr> Tag (http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_wbr.asp) and i don't find anything else about soft-hyphenation in the specs. Any experiences or opinions about this? Do you think it affects rankings if there are a lot of soft hyphens in the text? Does it still make sense to use ­ or would you switch to <wbr> already?

I followed the instructions here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/gettings-rankings-into-ga-using-custom-variables, but cannot see the report in Analytics under "Custom Variables". As I dont know JS syntax, I assume the code is wrong. I just added dohertyjf's code under my normal tracking code. Can someone tell me if and where the error is? | | Much obliged!

Wired Magazine has started to publish images under CC licence as reported here: http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/11/wired-releases-images-via-creative-commons-but-reopens-a-debate-on-what-noncommercial-means/ The images are found here http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2011/11/creative-commons/ They allow noncommercial use (though this is not clearly defined) and request to attribute to the original source and "ask for a link back to the original story where the photo first appeared". The latter does not seem to be compulsory, but of course is a great SEO tactic to generate deep links. What's your take on this? Does anyone have experience with providing image material with the request to attribute you as the original source?

How can i track image searches on google analytics? To filter the refferers by image.google or /imgres does not work in new google analytics (and brings an impossibly small number on old GA). also, this would not cover local google image refferers, that don't come from image.google.com. anyone knows how to find image search sources? i haven't found anything helpful in google's documentation or forums. thanks!