Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you all for your help and answers!  Barry, we re-created the Sitemap via FTP and it easily took it!  Also, we noticed that Chrome will not display the actual XML Sitemap...so we checked it in IE....works perfectly.  Again, thank you all for your help! Jay

Is the site aimed locally or globally? The only reason I ask is because it will affect the keywords you are trying to hit, and that's really what you need to bear in mind, the main keywords should be in the URL, and the rest can likely be cut. Also how attached are you to /local-info/ it's not particularly descriptive, and if you could change it to /italy-info/ or simply /restaurants/ that cuts an entire level off the string. I'm in the UK and if I was searching for the content you've described I'd probably just type "restaurants in central milan", Americans would probably use something more like "restaurants in milan italy" which would indicate URLs along the lines of: www.example.com/restaurants/italy/milan/ www.example.com/restaurants/italy/milan-central Neither would really think about putting Northern Italy nor Lombardia because they are much broader. You could still account for those just by adding them on the same level despite the hierarchical discrepancy. www.example.com/restaurants/italy/lombardia/ www.example.com/restaurants/italy/northern-italy/ If you're catering to Italians you could just cut things down to: www.example.com/restaurants/lombardia/milano/ They aren't going to specify Italy or Northern Italy as part of their searches. So basically think about what your audience will search for and include those items in the URL, it doesn't have to make absolute hierarchical sense so long as it makes sense to your customers.

Please let us know if this asnwered your question by clicking on answered or if not letting us know sothat we can improve this thread for future users.

Hi Chris, Since the 404's don't appear to originate from the landing site you mentioned (I ran a quick check), there obviously are (or have been) links out there that point to those URL's. They could be links from another site, URL's that have been indexed in search engines or even old browser bookmarks. Since you have no way of knowing where they might all come from, the 301 Redirect is the only complete solution. Philip is correct in suggesting that getting the links fixed at the source would be the ideal, but on its own this would still leave open the possibility of traffic coming from other sources. Since the 301 Redirect serves the dual purpose of preserving the traffic AND sending a signal to the Search engines to deindex the old URL and replace it with the new target URL, source is eliminated as a factor. Hope that helps, Sha

I've never used blog categories as I've never had a use for a page that just automatically lists all the posts in a topic. Typically I use a plugin to make my category pages noindex, and then I roll my own category page. So I at least say nay.

If you 301ed last week there may be some normal instability in your rankings... but should recover soon. Just to be sure that you didn't screw up go out and look at some of your old URLs to be sure that redirects are working properly.

thanks very much for the clarification

Hi Erik, I'm not sure there's a way to get those shares back. I do know however that Twitter follows the rel=canonical on a page so you might want to try that instead as a test to see if Facebook will honor it as well. Hope this helps a bit! Jen

Thanks very much. Makes sense and I had not thought of this.

It's baaaaack Don't know why. By in any case. If you come across this again. First check if the page is even indexed and try to find out why the page isn't indexed. Usually because of duplicate content or excluding it somewhere in robots.txt or putting a noindex nofollow in the head.

I suspect this as well but cannot find a source to confirm it

Thanks for suggestions, appreciated!

Another advantage of not having a technology extension is that if you change technologies and go from .html to .asp, you don't have to change all of your URLs and worry about redirects and lost link juice.

Are these links on your web site or are they in a newsletter sent out via email? anyhow, there is nothing wrong with the canonical tag, if its used for the right reasons, but often a 301 redirect is better. Not understanding your situation fuilly, my advice is. first, will a 301 do the job? if not can i use a canonical