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It's the same thing the rewrite is a 301 it's just using Apaches mod_rewrite to achieve it. You can use either option, after you have setup the 301 you can check the Apache status code, If you have shell access you can tail the access log file. If you don't have shell access I am sure their are Chrome / Firefox plugins that will verify your 301 code, or you could use Screaming Frog.

Oops. Sorry for looking at the wrong site Alex. Some quick opportunities I noticed for your site: improve your HTML and CSS validation add some unique content to the page. As far as I can tell, there is not any unique content on the entire page. add more social engagement provide more engaging content. What content would visitors find helpful? Your page is about The Shins. Perhaps their next tour dates where people can meet up? Band News? etc. I would recommend examining every Shins fan page you can find. Take a look at what is being offered on those pages. Incorporate any additional cool ideas into your page. Perhaps a poll or asking users to share their favorite songs or band stories. replace the "+" in the URL with a hyphen. http://tastebuds.fm/artists/the+shins the ALT text is mainly numbers. Replace the text with helpful descriptions. Also provide more helpful image file names. Those are just a few initial ideas I noticed.

Thank you again for your comments, Istvan. Although, I can't take everything you suggested, I understand your point, and will initiate some changes based on that. András

Brent and Syed are correct - nofollow no longer preserves link-juice. As for the 100-links "rule", it's really just a guideline. I discuss it in depth here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many It's really a balancing act - the more links you have, the less love each link gets. It's not just SEOs - it's true for visitors, too (as Ryan pointed out). More options isn't always a good thing. The trick is that the balance really depends a lot on the site. I've seen sites with 160 links that were well-designed with ample authority to make that work. I've seen others with 80 links where it was a complete mess. It's also important to note that links to the same Page B on any Page A are discounted by Google - so, if you have a link in the navigation and then a link to that same page in the content and footer, the 2nd and 3rd links are basically ignored. We still count them as part of the 100, but Google doesn't in most cases. It's a little tricky, since Google probably views navigation links differently from contextual (in-page) links, but the rule still generally holds. Only one link to any Page B from Page A is going to get counted.

Hi Ryan, A lot of people have gotten much more worried about dates since they heard about the "Freshness Update" late last year. Unfortunately a lot of people assume that it is a factor for all keyword terms & niches, but that is not the case. It is quite easy to find out whether it is a factor for your keywords. I gave a detailed explanation of this in this Q&A thread in November. As is mentioned in the Quora thread you quoted, there are much more reliable ways for search engines to determine freshness (timestamps & previous crawl data). I would agree with Brent and EGOL that the significance of year to your user base makes it reasonable (more likely expected) to include the year. However, I would take it a step further and suggest that you consider leveraging the intelligence of the bots a little. We know that  bots are now smart enough to help assess relevance. In fact it has become the centerpiece of their day to day work.  For me, that should mean that using words like "wine" or "vintage" would signal to the search engine that this URL and its content might reasonably include date references in the form of 4 digit and/or 2 digit year information That decided, I would build my site infrastructure accordingly, placing individual pages within directories using a reasonable and natural naming structure that includes the appropriate words. Depending how you prefer to approach it, a couple of possible examples might be  grapesinyourtoesexample.com/07-vintage/2007-cellar-pod-viognier-adelaide-hills/ or grapesinyourtoesexample.com/red-wines/2007-cellar-pod-viognier-adelaide-hills/. Hope that helps, Sha

Interesting post there Brent, I would say in the case outlined there, it appears that apostrophes are not needed. Google Keyword tool does in fact return no results for the correct spelling for "boy's clothing". Other keywords I would not say that holds true. An example from my industry is an o-ring If you use Google Key Word Tool you'll see (all possible spellings) o'ring o ring o-ring oring all have the same global monthly searches which to me means they are all being treated as the same word. Now take the word o-rings If you use Google Key Word Tool (all possible spellings) o'rings o rings o-rings   are the same BUT orings   is different All this tells me is before I decide on the keyword and spelling of such keyword you should probably look it up. As for the OP question, it is very interesting and I'm sure nobody can say for sure which is correct. Here in the past we tried to optimize for both variants, but I feel this runs the risk of being potentially spammy. So, we decided to spell the word correctly, and let the search engines decide if they wish to return us on SERP's to grammatically challenged searchers. I would also urge you to look at the Google insta results, if you type in boy's clothing you get the "showing results for boys clothing" search for "boy's clothing" instead? message. Though both keywords will give you the same company as #1.

Thanks Valery. Your code is working too. I can start with the campaign now. Regards, Thomas

unfortunately the content has to be the same is there any other way around this? They do currently rank well for some parts but I don't want them to be penalised for those pages.

Here's a post from Dr. Pete on SEOmoz about the 100 link warning and the subject in general. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

haha, check out mine www.pickupline.co thanks alan!

thanks

Next step: Check your backlinks for unnatural anchor text distribution.

Thanks!  You've confirmed my fears.  The first link redirects to the 404 page because that game was deleted - thus demonstrating the severity of the problem. Here is a link for a game that wasn't deleted.  I'm torn on possibly nofollowing all of these pages unless a conversation has been started like here, because they don't contain much content.  In fact, I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of somebody searching for a game result, and find that I may be more likely to bounce from a matchup page than a 404 page.  Oh, the decisions we face!

Hi Derek, I think kjay, Harald & Will have all pretty much covered removal (or correction) of links that are being called from within the pages on your site and using 301 redirects to capture traffic from external links. I would also make sure that you have a well designed custom 404 page set up for your site so that any link that isn't covered by the work you have done on the above will still provide an opportunity for the visitor to get to the content they are looking for. You should make sure that your custom 404 page contains some well written text that invites the visitor to explore the site to find other content that will help them and a menu that will allow them to click through to other parts of your site. Hope that helps, Sha

Hi Alexander, I should have read your additional information first. My original answer is below. The correct way to deal with those pages is to make sure they redirect somewhere via a 301. (if you can't implement a 301, adding rel=canonical pointing to a relevant page would be your 2nd choice). Do this before you add nofollow links, or before blocking robots from crawling via robots.txt) This will not only solve your SEOmoz errors, but preserve link juice and improve your SEO health from a search engine point of view. How to implement the 301s depends on your site configuration, but best practice is to redirect each page individually to the appropriate landing page, instead of mass-redirecting everything to a single page (such as your homepage) -------------- (as promised, here is my original answer below)---------------------------- This is completely normal. You are most likely correct that many of these links are coming internally from inside your own site. Yes, Linkscape will count every page with a navigation link to your homepage as a link. (As a rule, OSE only counts one link target per page. So if on a page you have 1 navigation link pointing to your homepage, and another link in the text body also pointing to your homepage, OSE will only count the first link) There is nothing wrong with this... in fact in most cases it indicates a healthy internal link structure. So there's no need to "fix" it. On the other hand, if you simply want to filter your results in Open Site Explorer to exclude these links, to make your reports more manageable, there's a simple way to do this. From the 2nd drop-down menu, select to show links from "Only External" pages. This will filter out all of your self-referencing internal links. Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO.

You could also share it on Google+. I plus oned a site of mine yesterday, and today it's indexred. It doesn't have any other links pointing to it.

None of those is there anything else we should avoid?

Yeah, unfortunately, on a CMS or template-driven site, it's really easy to put a canonical tag in place that impacts the wrong pages. Hopefully, you caught it in time. The 270 notices in are system are just telling you that 270 URLs we crawled had a canonical tag pointing to a different page. In this particular case, it was a problem, but it isn't always an issue. Unfortunately, with the bad canonical tag in place, it's tough to tell why they were there before. This is usually just a notice, and non-critical, but once the bad canonicals clear out, let us know if you're still getting the notice (it may take a couple of weeks to go away).