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Thank you! Yeah, even if Google links to "the wrong one," either page is still relevant, or it wouldn't have the text in the first place.

Hi, Since an iframe is just a window into your site, it cannot harm your site and it doesn’t put you in a spammy neighbourhood as all of the links to your page are from within your own site. It will be registering views and visits on your analytics too, so you’re still getting some extra traffic. If you feel this Iranian traffic is unwanted, not converting or are simply just annoyed that this site is using your content as their own, you can actually block iframe calls quite easily. There are a couple of things you could do: .htaccess Simply add this line to enable iframe calls from your own domain, but block them from external sites: Header always append X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN Or disable iframe calls entirely with: Header set X-Frame-Options DENY These directives will only work if you have enabled mod_headers in apache. Another way to deal with it would be to use a javascript redirect when the top url does not match the page URL like this: if(top != self) { top.location = self.location; } Hope this helps, Tom

I feel very silly for posting this question. Looking at the Pubmed source: Doh!

Can you 301 from the DNS in HTTP or would you do an .htaccess

as someone who does a lot of auditing, I need to say I'm confused by this somewhat. "The link to "http://www.xxxx.com/old-page/" has resulted in HTTP redirection to "http://www.xxxx.com/new-page" That's only one hop. Which is perfectly valid.  So where are the "unnecessary redirects" that report is referring to? By all means, if you have problems on the site, fixing them is always the proper course of action.  I only wonder whether you really do have a problem. Also, for the record, the claim "Search engines can only pass page rankings and other relevant data through a single redirection hop" is NOT true.  While more than one hop can be harmful due to slowing Googlebot's crawl, and where multiple hops can slow user experience, which are OTHER, related possible problems for SEO, as long as the hops are kept to one, two, or perhaps three at most, you are sill going to be able to get the full individual page SEO value passed. Note that this is true only if the new destination page has all of the same SEO signals the original page had.  Because you can't magically pass SEO value from page A to page x just by using a redirect.  Even if its just one redirect. If page x is significantly different than page A, that's going to change the trust score for the passed value. Also here's a video from Matt Cutts regarding multiple hop redirects: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA

Thanks for this Travis, I took your advice and tracked the appropriate pages in Crazy Egg. The results confirmed my thinking, a very small number of visitors use the social links. Around 1%. Regardless however, i've decided to keep them in the header for that 1%. Best,

Agree with that, one of our sites has 10 million 404 errors as we deal with a lot of changing content over tens of millions of pages. It doesn't look an increase in 404 errors caused any trouble.

Ok thanks alot. I know its important to maintain good rich, rather than thin content on posts (listings). I was intending on using categories and tag them with regions - so the content is more like an actual post rather than like a telephone book. Cheers

Thanks so much Ray. I am going to do that...! And I will certainly stop using 'web geek' ... I thought it was a cute term, did't mean to offend!

Hi, All good points I hadn't considered. I'll try just that. Thanks

You will need to check the server error log files for the new site in order to pick these up, if this hasn't been detected in WMT.

Hi Tom, Thanks so much for the thorough answer. Very, very helpful. And thank you for the article about execution order... I've been looking for something like that for a while!

Thanks Tom. This answers it.

Hi there! It looks like both these tags are present on the same URL, your desktop version. The rel="canonical" tag should be implemented on the mobile version of the page instead, and only the rel="alternate" tag should be kept on the desktop versions. This is how you signal the bidirectional, or two-way, relationship to Google. Hope that helps!

The correct answer is: yes, but it is  not a major factor anymore.  Please refer to the another similar  post herehere http://moz.com/community/q/can-geographic-location-of-web-server-affect-in-seo " Server location (through the IP address of the server) is frequently near your users. However, some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so we try not to rely on the server location alone. Said that, a best practice is to follow one of these options: hosting the site in the country targeted; using an IP assigned to the targeted country and operate via proxy " - @gfiorelli1 Thanks Rashesh

I concur with the Dr. of Cleverness.

What we run into often is that on larger sites there 1) still are internal links to those pages from old blog posts etc.  You have to really scrub your site to find those and manually update.  I am only mentioning this as unless you used a tool to crawl the site and looked at it with a fine toothed comb, you might be surprised to find the links you missed  2) there are still external links to those pages.    That said, even if 1 and 2 are not met, Google will still recrawl (although not as often).  Google assumes that any initial 404 or even 301 may be a temporary error and so checks back.  I have seen urls that we removed over a year ago, Google will still ping them.  They really hang onto stuff.  I have not gone as far as the 301 to a directory that I deindex, but generally just watch to see them show up and then fall out of Webmaster Tools and then I move on.

I would look into finding a method to redirect via your server rather than with javascript. This will ensure that bots can properly crawl your site. I would also add hreflang tags which should help Google with the multiple language versions of the site. Also in the short term you may want to do something like add a link or a delayed meta refresh just in case someone either has javascript disabled or is using script blocking extensions. This will make sure they at least see something instead of a blank page.

Cheers

Thanks so much! I really appreciate it.