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The most important thing to consider if you are concerned with rankings is what the search engines are going to see. By the sounds of it, there are going to be multiple versions of the same content all dependant on search query. Search engines will not be visiting your site through a search but most likely via a link from other sites. Once they come back to re index your site you need to be aware of what  they are going to be seeing. Is there any way of you checking the site in the same way a search engine would? Perhaps using a tool like www.seo-browser.com may be useful. It may be a bit of a grey area as it does have similarities to cloaking, but it is designed with improved user experience in mind. It would be worth trying to find someone who has experience with the same thing to advise further. Hope this has helped a bit.

Thanks Ryan for explaining things very clearly.

Hi Atul, As far as I am aware, Google will count all 50 of them, the only thing that changes is the way the PR is distributed. Even though you have nofollowed 20 of them, Google will still only pass on 1/50th of the PR to the followed links, meaning the PR that would have been sent to the nofollowed links vanishes. This means that the page will only pass on 3/5ths of the PR it would have done if all the links were followed. Hope this helps

Satchmo does this automatically - http://www.satchmoproject.com/docs/dev/configuration.html?highlight=trailing slash - however, as far as I can see from the documentation and forums there's no way to disable it I'm unfamiliar with Satchmo though, hit up the Google Group - http://groups.google.com/group/satchmo-users/topics -  and ask there.

You are right, these are &%*#(&d.  I don't see any usable pattern given the new URLs must use IDs from the new system (first example).  The second also needs new information (category) which no Regex will ever do. In that case you have a few options: Create a search function on the 404 page that will take the relevant part of the URL and perform a search on the new catalogue.  This won't be perfect but at least the visitors will get useful information to act on. If only a few 100 are important, write a individual rule for each page.  This can be done in a XSL file to speed up the process but it is a lot of work. After the top pages are finished, redirect the rest to catalogue home. Seriously consider upgrading to URL Rewrite 2 which can perform redirects against a databases of URLs.  This is more tedious and expensive but it allows you to add thousands of URL pairs – far more than any txt file should ever hold for performance reasons.  You can even write your own logic in the provider to do some of the search functions.  Then it behaves like #1 but redirect immediately to the best match. Good luck!

In my opinion the best solution is to automate the process. For any site with user generated content or where content is being added frequently, I set up a CRON job to create and submit a sitemap daily. It really is a one time, set it and forget it type of thing.

Its cool, your previous questions didn't really get answered... and my answer was posted twice so above is the edited one. Whoops!

One thing in addition to Ryan's answer, rather than implementing language meta tags, you can set the content-language in your HTTP headers, according to Bing: http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/03/01/how-to-tell-bing-your-website-s-country-and-language.aspx. I'm not sure if that's supported beyond Bing though.

Google sees the addition of a trademark symbol in a meta title tag as a separate keyword; I've never heard anything about how Google see's its use in content. I'd avoid doing this in cases where SEO is more important than usability (or legality). Hope this helps Mike

Thank you!

Yeah it would take me forever to get our tech people to do that though...I kind of thought it didn't matter, just good to have it confirmed. Thanks.

People may have been tweeting about only some of the pages, or linked to some of the pages, or maybe the bot just randomly decided to index some of them and not others?