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Hi Michelleh, There's no need to block RSS feeds as they are used for discovery (Gbot). Here's a quirky fact: RSS feeds actually combat the scraper sites as they have absolute URLs which clearly link back to your site They're going to scrape your content anyhow, let's hope they choose RSS! How does G know it's an RSS feed? Let's look at some of the markup on RSS pages: <rss <span="">version</rss>="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel></channel> Either this or something similar will be in the HTML that defines an XML/RSS/Atom/XSL document/markup - this is easily read by Google. Not going to get too far into it but you can start reading more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS Does Google index the XML file type? **Yes. ** http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=1366&bih=667&q=inurl%3Asitemap.xml&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq= Does that help?

Thanks Ryan

Before adding new expenses purely for a speed boost, I would suggest looking at your site with PageSpeed. It is a free add-on in FireFox and is also available for Chrome. The results will let you know what opportunities you have to improve your page load optimization. Some changes offer a noticeable and immediate difference. Don't try to get a perfect score. Generally speaking, anything 90+ is fine. If you are purely looking at speed, VPS + Cloud would probably be the ideal solution. I would specifically use Amazon's cloud service to start, as they charge you on your exact usage with no minimum. If you ever get up to $100/month in usage, you can then began to examine other services to compare pricing. If you use a cloud, I recommend not only offering your images and video files, but all your CSS and Javascript files. Your users will notice the speed difference. I also want to be clear you may be able to keep your existing shared server and make other adjustments, or change hosts, and be absolutely fine. A shared server often costs less then $100/yr, where a dedicated server or VPS + Cloud will probably be $150+ per month. It's a big difference.

Hi Eric, I'm so sorry you haven't gotten an answer by now, I'm not sure how this slipped by everyone. In my understanding, yes, it would be like moving to a new domain. If you're still in need of an answer, go ahead and create a new question and I'm sure you'll get commentary (and I'll go ahead and close this question if you do so).

Have you looked at the Wikipedia article that is a list of search engines, broken out by categories and countries? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines

Is there anyway that I could be able to target "Driving Lessons" alone for the home page and "Driving lessons+ city" for the others?

Is your site verified in Google Webmaster Tools, and Bing's Webmaster Tools? If not, get it verified, then look at your account. There's a wealth of information there, including any notices from the search engines about anything they find that might be suspect (Google now even sends a note for buying/selling links), and you can get some better statistics about your site when it's verified. I would first look in your webmaster tools, and see if the engines have flagged anything for you. If so, then you know what to work on first. Second, step back and think about what purpose your website has for your business, is it meeting that purpose, and what are useful metrics for you. In May, Matt Cutts did a video response to a person asking why toolbar PR isn't updated more frequently (available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZ9pFUSVG9g) and mentioned that while they internally keep a close eye on correct PR, they're not as worried about what shows up in the toolbar. They have some flags if something with super-high PR goes down to super-low PR in the toolbar, but a move from 4 to 3 doesn't fall under that. So, it's probably good to be thinking about your site, but think beyond the toolbar PR.

Plus - look around! Check out other companies Robots.txt file http://edition.cnn.com/robots.txt http://www.nytimes.com/robots.txt You can see what they do not think is relevant for search engines to be looking at.

I have a couple of friends who started on blogspot and when their blogs became successful moved them to a new domain.  I think that they did the right thing because they will be running those blogs for years into the future. They moved all of their content but made very obvious annoucement on every page of the old blog about the move and made links to help visitors get there easily.

I asked them and got a bit confused. I thought it was a list of anchor keywords but apparently its something to do with distributing your Page Rank amongst the links on that page?

Thanks for that, but as we have multiple pages for a given article the drop down menu option needs to be there just wondering how we can make this search friendly, maybe have the links linkable...would that work?

While your robots.txt file is not the best means to control search engines, it does have a purpose. To respond to your questions: the file does not "attract" any robots, but robots who do visit can learn a bit about your site and understand what content you don't wish to be crawled you can block parts of your site that you feel have no value for indexing such as Keri mentioned your "print" version of pages, or overlays pages, or login pages, etc. The idea is that you own the website, and you can have a measure of control over it. You can disallow specific crawlers, etc. although it's up to each crawler whether they actually respect your wishes. More details can be read at: http://www.robotstxt.org/

Eu usaria .com.br, porque as pessoas tendem a digitar o dominio algumas vezes direto na URL e essas pessoas tentar por .com.br. Eu tambem pensaria em outro dominio mais curto, pela minha experiencia dominio grande tende a ser dificil de gravar na cabeca do ser humano. Eu usaria .com.br , ate porque o dominio esta em portugues entao ngm fora do brasil buscara por isso. Faz sentido?

I agree with 3 amigos