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You can't use a redirect with .htaccess now? or block the crawlers with a robots.txt for this folders?

You should be able to do that with a single index.php file in the root folder and mod-rewrite. If you're not sure how to do that, a good developer should be able to help.

Agreed.  You said have more 404s than you have pages indexed, that is not good even if your ranks did not drop.  That would mean that while you are being found in the SERPs you are now showing 404s to users.  It is the equivalent of a bar running out of beer during Octoberfest.  Also those thirsty polka dancers with nothing to sell them to drink. Cheers!

Hi All, I have just altered my Google Webmaster tools in the Config (as per Geoff's advice above) and that appears to be fine for now. However, I have also updated my ".htaccess" file dong a 301 redirect, details below: Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine onRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC] RewriteRule ^ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301] I also have recently changed my pages from .html to .php do I redirect by using this code as I want all old links to now refer to the .php file: RewriteRule (.*).html$ /$1.php [R=301,L] Lastly, Thomas on the canonical side of things, is it necessary for me to implement this in the Head? How can I see if the work completed is correct or check that it works? Paul.

Thank you so much KLLC! I am sure that is it. Will see on the next crawl if they disappear...

This solved the problem Thank you Casey so much

Hi LW I agree with Mark re archiving products. Although our products don't expire as quickly as yours appear to do I use http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/standalone-google-sitemap-generator.html on a cron job to keep our sitemap fresh. I also exclude some of our over dynamic URLs using this tool from appearing in the sitemap. Dean

Nofollowing some of the links would not help. Google changed the algorithm awhile back, so the PageRank allotted to nofollow links simply disappears, instead of being allocated to other links on the page.

how can i check for negative links

Howdy, Depends on your definition of self-referencing links, as there are several degrees. Internal links, pointing from one page to another On page anchor links, simply pointing to another part of the same page, usually for navigation purposes Truly self-referencing, where a link simply points to it's own page in an attempt to trick a search engine. Normal internal links (1) are an important part of any website and give search engines important clues about relevance, site structure, and how to flow signals like PageRank. Internal links are very important for SEO, but also the most easy to abuse, so you can get yourself in trouble if you overdo it with aggressive over linking or over-optimized anchor text. And keep in mind that while internal links are important, they don't pack near the punch as authoritative external links. Internal anchors (2) such as http://example.com#football are also important for navigation, and Google does use them often for clues about content and structure. You'll often see internal anchors show up in search results, especially for sites like Wikipedia. Finally, I don't see any value in the truly self-referencing link (3). A page that points to itself seems like a mistake, and using it to game a search engine is most likely a bad idea. As for authoritative sources, you could look at the 2011 Ranking Factors, which shows that the # of internal links on the page is fairly correlated with high rankings. (and notice the anchor in that link, as well Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!

I want to address this question from a couple of perspectives.... USERS:  As Dana said... Users prefer single long pages.   These long pages with lots of content, lots of subtopics and lots of images are impressive when a person lands on them.  That immediately shows them the depth and richness of your content and they can quickly scan your subheadings to see what you have to offer.  These will more readily produce likes, tweets, links, etc. when compared to broken pages. SEO:  I have experimented with long and multiple short pages.  I get more traffic from long pages because of the diversity of words that they contain.  This brings in LOTS more long tail traffic.  And, if visitors are liking, tweeting and linking you might get more search traffic. MONETIZATION:  This is a downside if you are showing ads.  You get fewer impressions and if there is a limit on the number of ads you can display per page your ad density will be lower and thus less income.  However, if your traffic is higher from the increased long tail and better rankings then you might recover the lost impressions per visitor with more visitors.

Hi Kyle, Your main consideration here is are your images generating traffic through Google/Yahoo/Bing image searches? If you do then it's something you'll need to address. If they are, you can always 301 redirect old image paths to the new ones. If not I wouldn't worry about it. Hope the site migration goes well. Iain - Reload Media

BloomReach's technology has been live on websites since August of 2009. The goal of our product is to create a limited number of new high quality pages that are well liked by users, have a compelling user experience and drive increased purchases on our customers sites. To do this, we use web-wide and site data to identify and predict demand that the website should get, but isn't. We then evaluate the relevance of a customers products/content for this demand as expressed by a theme/query. We only create a page if that relevance is very high and there is no existing competitive or duplicative page. We QA these pages and then monitor the quality of these pages over time. For example, we will identify if these pages become more duplicative (using our DDR technology recently covered by Search Engine Land) over time due to product inventory changes or if users are not liking these pages as measured by metrics like bounce rate. If a page does not do well on some of these quality and user happiness dimensions then we will add a noindex tag to those pages. The net result is that BloomReach pages tend to perform equally or better than a customers existing "category-like" pages. These existing pages tend to be automatically created based on a defined ontology database and faceted search technologies. Other than a limited number of high profile pages, which are manually reviewed, these pages do not have any technology that is constantly analyzing the quality or user experience metrics of these pages and making constant changes to improve their quality.  BloomReach pages do this and that is why over time we tend to see BloomReach pages perform better than the comparable pages on the site for metrics like bounce rate. We'd be happy to answer any follow up questions and share with you what we've seen on the 90+ sites on which we are currently deployed.  If interested, please email ashutosh@bloomreach.com.

Thanks, it worked

Thank you, I will go through all my links again and make sure there are no .index.php url's left I also installed a Joomla plugin called SEO Canonicalisation Plugin Plugin in the meantime. I will read through the link you supplied... I really appreciate it! - I will post again if the matter is not resolved in a couple of days...

Michael, do you have any further questions or concerns we can help with?

By part of the navigation I was referring to a primary page on your site. For SEOmoz, navigation pages would be Campaigns, Research Tools, Q&A Forums, etc.

I'd go for &. I optimized a page for "Canada & New England Cruises" some years back. The results were: canada and new england cruises = 24th of 6,300,000 results canada & new england cruises = 32nd of 7,660,000 results This indicates to me that Google probably knows the difference.

Its best to noindex either your tags or your categories. I know I have taken the view that it is best to noindex my tags to avoid duplicate content issues as duplicate content will have an adverse effect on your site. You can noindex them through the Yoast Plugin on the Tiltles & Metas / Taxonomies tab.