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_Though email marketing is a legitimate way to reach out to potential customers, spamming inboxes of people in the sheer hope of getting them converted as customer is the height of stupidity. If you would ask my humble opinion, I would not care a fig of them. They are just another bunch of spammers and what I feel is that spammers are not doers.   _

Yes i used the tools and i got the same results you did.  My question is if I use some anchor text and point them to the second page from the first page and other relevant pages on the site will it help with the rankings? Real example: I want to have it rank for motorcycle tires, however, gogole is ranking http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/cl/50/Tires-and-Wheels the highest and also it puts http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/d/12/Motorcycle-Tires and http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/t/49/-/181/750/Motorcycle-Tires-All before http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/49/-/181/Motorcycle-Tires and this is the one they wan to rank.  I started working here about 1 month ago and I am looking at ways I can get the target page to rank.  Right now it is now where and the non target page is ranking on page three.  Why does google pick that page over the target one?

Hi Matt, Thanks so much for your answer.  I also believe the best rule of thumb is"if the redirect works for a human, it will work for a bot." Your answer helps greatly! Thank you for your time!

I added your suggestion to robots.txt and requested a crawl again. I only have 3 pages with dublicate page content now So your suggestion seemes to have worked. Thanks for your reply.. it worked!

As all 3 of us have said here, Pioneer, there is no issue with setting things up the way you are proposing. Can't make it any clearer than that. To answer your specific point - /sitemap and /sitemap.xml are categorically NOT seen as the same URL by search engines. They are absolutely considered two different pages. Your statement "...two items with the same url, but different file extensions..." is a non-sequitur. If the URLs have different file extensions, they are by definition NOT the same URL. The file extension (or lack thereof) is an integral part of the URL. Since 3 different people have given you the same answer and you still don't believe us, why not simply test for yourself? Implement the two files as above, then use Google Webmaster Tools to report your XML sitemap location, and confirm that it's finding and recognizing it correctly. Then use your browser to go to the URL of the regular sitemap and you'll see that it renders the html version of your sitemap map just fine. Paul

It certainly does help, many thanks Paul - hugely appreciated.

Or another possible solution would be to create a 301 redirect for www.home.com/index.html -> www.home.com/ Would be the preferred method, if not available then use the Canonical option. Here is a great SEOMoz blog post Here is a quote pertaining to your issue: "Multiple Versions of the Homepage This is another common mistake.  Potentially a homepage URL could be access through the following means, depending on how it has been built - http://seomoz.org http://www.seomoz.org/home.html http://www.seomoz.org/index.html If the homepage can be accessed via these type of URLs, they should 301 to the correct URL which in this case would be www.seomoz.org. Quick caveat - the only exception would be if these multiple versions of the homepage served a unique purpose, such as being shown to users who are logged in or have cookies dropped.  In this case, you'd be better to use rel=canonical instead of a 301." Hope it helps.

thanks for this, i have read about the brand but never really understood it as some people say it works and other people say it does not work. My brand is in2town which would not bring me traffic, the keywords that would bring me traffic is lifestyle news, online magazine, lifestyle magazine etc i have about 2000 old links pointing to different sections in my site, these have been put in my htaccess file, i have about another 2000 that are not pointing anywhere. I lost around 4,000 links because of the problem upgrading, long story but it is on the forum of what happened. should i be pointing the other links that are doing nothing to my home page or put them in the correct sections. if i point them all the the home page then the home page will have around 2000 links with so many different anchor text as a lot of the old links are story articles. many thanks for the advice

Always happy to contribute to cardiac health I've had to talk down many clients for the same reason. I've tried to get through to Google about adding a notification about this to the page, but I just don't have the juice. I look for GA team members at every conference just in case Go forth and kick butt. Paul

Hi, Can not really reconsider another domain as primary MEDICARE with correct spelling is restricted to Government entities (.gov,.com,.net) my only chance to get it with exact spelling was to opt for .md extention. But will for sure  utilize Geo targeting. Thanks S.H

Hi Alan, From the sounds of it, I believe you are missing the crucial element of adding the reference before the -site: operator. For example I want to search for all references of [seomoz] minus results from the actual site (seomoz.org). Therefore, my search would look something like this: seomoz -site:seomoz.org Hope that helps.

Hi Antonee, There are many, many different reasons for duplicate content and while Darin's comments about Roger not discounting pages with noindex tags are spot on, my recommendation would be to read Dr Pete's epic post Duplicate Content in a Post Panda World before going any further. You might also find some value in this overview video about the Pro Tool with Adam Feldstein. There is also a great deal of information in the Help Hub, but if you are unsure of what your Pro Tools report is telling you, you can contact the Help Team from there.They will be able to take a look at the specific campaign for you and clarify anything that is difficult to understand. Hope that helps Sha

Hi Daniel, You're right with the micro stuff, I'll give the translators a map with the URLs and the main keyword (because of the importance of the keyword in the URL and a structure of the Title, description, etc like "main keyword | Brand Name" or something similar. It'll be easier for the traductors to foollow up all and the best way to verify the kw that you want to optimize. Hope it helps. Cheers

Hi Joe, Welcome to the community. In my opinion, be very careful of using this plugin especially with Google going aggressive with their over optimization penalty. It does not look very aesthetically appealing to have visitors looking at a bunch of search terms at the end of your blog posts.

Great point. Not something that could give the client confidence.

Hello, Firts of all, you can do some fix on site optimization. i.e You have the same keyword repeated twice in the title, Design Miami, second you have two H1 Tag, one for Web Design Miami and another for Graphics Design Miami, you got some inline style, else try to do nofollow footer links, and another suggestion, configure your server (HOST) for gzip. Cuz the sitespeed is another big issue last time. I have made this changes for one of my clients site, which he had a lot of good linkings but on site optimization was a really mess, and this little mistakes helped me a lot to take higher positions on SERP. Just my opinion, you can try this and see changes for some of your acctually positions.

I'd personally be worried about this. I'd do this: Publish a few articles just on your site Note how long it takes Google to find them If this is a long time (ie more than 24 hours), maybe do a few social bookmarks - drop the link on Stumbleupon, Twitter, Facebook etc when you publish them. If using wordpress, you can get it to do this automatically. Now see what the time is for Google to index your pages Set up your RSS feed so it updates 24 hours or 48 hours after your site content is added, whatever it takes to get the post indexed on your site before their site. You could even control this individual feed's delay using http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/1397/delaying-one-rss-feed-in-wordpress-but-not-the-others This way, you haven't got to get them to do anything at their end