Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi, It depends on the platform or Content Management System (CMS) you're using. If you're simply applying a new theme or template to a site, like in Wordpress or Magento, then the URL Structure and content should still stay the same. If you're completely redesigning the site, i.e. clearing the server and starting over from scratch, then I wouldn't optimize the pages if they'll be deleted. If you'll let me know what platform or CMS you're using I'd be glad to help more. Thanks, Anthony

No problem at all. Glad I could help and good luck!

I've got a fairly large site, so I'm going to need to use an index for the individual sitemap files. Do you think it's ok to just include my mobile sitemaps on my regular sitemap index file? Or should the two be completely separate?

Thank you Dan for the advice. I will do that and see what is happening by Monday. Have a good weekend.

Dr. Pete, thanks! Think here multiple "link" headers is the answer.

If it's done correctly and Google sees it as if it lives in the subfolder, then yes - it's perfectly fine for SEO. This is a technically tricky solution, though, and would really depend on the capabilities of your hosting provider.

i have certainly done so, but its hard to say what affect it has had, but i would say it heps search engines decide what is what on your page.

Thank you Miriam.

is there a tool that will allow you to enter all the ping sites that are availabe and then enter the details like pingomatic and enter the url that you want to ping which will then ping all the ping site that you want.

Thanks Matt, This is what i suggested and needed a bit of confirmation because i didn't know if this was the same with location based redirects.

Could you not just have the new domain name redirecting to the original site? Personally I don't think its a good idea to have canonical links pointing to another domain, you might want to reword some of the content and headings on site 2 and re-arrange the content on the page (Add in different images with different alt text) or maybe even amend the site URL structure if possible. This would make that site different in the eyes of Google. It would be a good way of targeting different keywords for different domains, but I agree with Phil, we would need more information to be able to provide a comprehensive answer.

Hi Anthony - thanks. I wasn't aware of the inallurl command. I'll give that a try.

Thank you Alan, My only thoughts are that if a visitor needed to contact the company the first place they would look is the main navigation and if there is none they would be forced to select an option to continue, 'residential' or 'commercial' which may confuse or annoy site visitors.

You may likely need to have the URL the ads link to first go through a tracking page that then automatically passes through to the destination -  it's not the cleanest solution, and would cause a short delay in the user's experience, however its the only way I know of that will allow you to trap the action.

Sounds like you're doing it right! You want your URLs to end in a trailing slash, and for the URLs that don't, you want a training slash added. If that's what's showing up in your reports and in your spot checks, you're doing great! You may want to write a code that does this automatically -- e.g. that adds a trailing slash to any URL that doesn't have one, if that url doesn't inclue a filetype (to exclude bad things like /image.png becoming /image.png/) Note: If you're on Wordpress, you might try a plugin like http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/smart-404/ to catch any bad urls that might rear their heads later -- it or something like it (if you're not on WordPress) would also likely take care of the redirection issue you're having altogether.