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Hi Rachel, There is no reason, rather than just personal preference (to an extent). I'd like my customers to share a product with their friends on Facebook etc. so I like to get straight to the point in the URL. Maybe having domain.com/department/category/subcategory may be a better option for you, depending on how keyword friendly your categories are. For example, my DJ company ranks number 1 on Google in the UK for "disco speakers" and this is how I have the URL structured: http://www.electromarket.co.uk/speakers-audio-equipment/dj-pa-speakers/active-powered-pa-speakers/ That is just for a specific type of speaker. This has worked best for us, but it completely depends on how deep your categories go. We try to make all of our most popular categories as closely linked to the homepage as possible. Hope this helps! Tom

Hi Vliegtickets.nl, For targeting keywords, this is a good start. Putting your keywords near the beginning of your meta titles and descriptions is proper format and will help your click-through rate. However, as stated previously, make sure not to use the same word repeatedly throughout the tags. By using more varied text while focusing on variations of your keywords, you can optimize your keyword use and not have your text read like spam. Also, make sure not to waste characters on smaller, unnecessary words; instead, create short phrases emphasizing your keywords. As well, make sure your keywords are used within the first 100 words of visible text on your site. This will help your keyword ranking even more than emphasizing the keywords in the meta description. If you are inquiring about overall page building, then also be sure your site design is static, organized and has lots of relevant information pertaining to your keywords on the main page. A clear call-to-action and contact form in the upper right hand corner is also an essential component.

Andrew, How long have you used hittail.com?

Glad to help. If you're happy with the response could you mark it as answered? Unless you have other questions?

Hello, I have a another problem here, I used http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs.html instead of http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs. Hence, http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs will be caused 404 page. My question is should I change from faqs.html to faqs (no .html)? Thanks in advance any advice?

Hi Christy, Thanks for responding!  Actually I did check out that list, but no one really jumped out at me as having specific expertise related to this area + available for just a bit of hourly consulting so we can do the work in house versus a big time contract or a few weeks of analysis, etc. etc. I'll take another look though. Thanks! Craig

Thanks for your advice. I may be not try to fix them. It is to be hard to fix

Let me add, though - if you're already 301ing a ton of expired listings at large scale (in the thousands), I'd try to ease this in gradually. Maybe just 404 new ones and then start switching the back-log. I'm always hesitant to switch signals on thousands of pages at once.

I have to disagree a bit regarding the risks. In general, the main problem is dilution - you're spreading the authority across more pages (as David said). Unfortunately, though, there are worse possibilities - including filtering (Google won't let certain pages rank, or lets the wrong page rank) and even Panda-scale penalties that could impact the broader site. The risks of duplicate content are a lot higher than they were even 3-4 years ago. It depends a lot on scope, and there's always a trade-off. If you use rel=canonical or NOINDEX the photo pages, then they won't be eligible for ranking. On the other hand, if you spin out hundreds of photo pages, it could negatively impact your overall ranking ability, even for other pages. If you're talking about a few photo pages here and there, I wouldn't worry about it. If your site has a 500-page index, and 400 of those are photo gallery pages (or something equally extreme), then I'd definitely be proactive. In most cases, I think using rel=canonical from the individual photos back up to the gallery is a solid solution, but it does depend a bit on the site.

If you want to check who "copied" your content you can use - as told by the others - Copyscape. Or, you can use Google itself. Pro Tip: set search in order to show you 100 search result per time; tell Google to show you also the results it may have filtered out for being "substantially identical" to the ones it is showing you already; use the scraper extension for Chrome and scrape the Google results and export them in Google Docs, so to start analyzing the site that are scraping your content if the content you write is copyrighted, you can ask Google to deindex the site scraping it in order to defend your rights as the original Author.

Thanks for sharing that. I have thought about opening our news to visitor submissions.  Right now we do it all ourselves (about eight to ten items per day). I worry that visitors will submit a lot of spam and self-promotion that will decrease our quality.   If weeding takes a few hours per day then we are better off doing it inhouse. Thanks again for sharing.

Thanks! We were of course definitely going to fix it - I was just wondering if anyone had ever tested out a quantifiable answer for how much it would help. But as you pointed out, it's usually just one small change among many, so it's slightly hard to tell exactly. Much appreciate your thorough explanation!

You can use the product name and remove it if the technical sheets start to cannibalize rankings for the product name, which is highly doubtful. If you think that "Download PRODNAME technical sheet" is the best anchor text to describe to users what they're going to get when they click that link then use it.

'Links to your Site' feature shows who is linking and how they are linking to your site. 'How is your data is linked' gives an overview on anchor text distribution within your link profile from both types of links.  You can see a basic overview here. Chances are, you'll rely on a Open Site Explorer to get a better, more in-depth overview on how your anchor text breakdown looks.

Thank you, i created an Custom 404 Error Page already. ! But i just want to know if that will work fine. Thanks for the suggestion ! Will not redirect all the pages to the homepage !

I want to know ! how we can find Keyword usage in old article. For new Article I use very less same keyword in an article or post. ! any tools or we have read one by one !

I would use a canonical link as well on every page, just to add to what you guys are talking about. Have a great day.

I agree that you shouldn't try to get search pages indexed. Google loves clean URL's and "?course=starter" is not really a clean URL. One of the reasons why Google doesn't like this is because it's not good for the user experience. Nobody is gonna remember a url with ? and = in it. My recommendation would definitely be to change the structure of the website that every recipe has it's own page and that these recipes are sorted into categories. Then you can still use the search function so that people will be able to search and they will find their recipes. Trying to get these pages higher in Google may help in some ways, but i think it will serve you better to focus on getting pages with a clean URL structure higher in Google.This should also improve your CTR (Click Through Rate) because people trust websites more if they understand the URL. About the duplicate content issues. Search pages are not really meant to be indexed by search engines in my experience. I always no-index the search pages because of the possible duplicate content issues and they are custom pages which appear bases on what a user does. Not something i would want to get found on in the search engines. I hope I helped, if anything is unclear or you need more advice or have a different question than please let me know.

Hi John, Ah, thanks for the reassurance and Google article, very helpful. Thanks for the feedback re my site too. Cheers...

I would be willing to bet that they just not have their poor backlinks penalized or removed from ranking them. Give it time and keep doing things the right way