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Yes, you can use the following two rules, in this exact order, in your .htaccess file. I'm assuming you've got mod_rewrite on. RewriteRule ^([^]*)([^]*.) $1-$2 [N] RewriteRule ^([^_])([^]*)$ /$1-$2 [L,R=301] The first bracketed group in each rule -- ([^_]*) -- matches every group of characters that isn't an underscore. The first rule rewrites every underscore in the URL to a hyphen, until there's only one underscore left. At this point, control passes to the second rule, which replaces that final underscore with a hyphen, and 301 redirects to that page.

No problem, happy to help. If you actually sell the various types of shoes as well and the repairs/cleaning are almost a side-service then yes, your original example is ok since the "dress shoes" nav item would presumably take you to a landing page about dress shoes. Unless you're getting a large volume of targetted searches for things like "dress shoe repairs", I'd probably just have "Repairs" and "Cleaning" as their own top-level nav items that lead to a single landing page each that covers all 3 types of shoes. This would be sufficient for the more general terms like "shoe repairs". The nav would look more like: Shoes   |   Boots   |   Sandals   |   Shoe Cleaning   |   Repairs With the relevant drop-downs under the first 3 items only.

Thanks Russ! This reaffirms what I was thinking as well. Didn't know if someone else would find another issue.

Hi there. It's recommended that you have only one H1 and H2 per page. It won't "break" your website or SEO, but it won't help it either if you have multiple same level h-tags. So, here you go - don't use h-tags in nav. It's weird anyway

Interesting - hopefully it's all fixed, but definitely let us know if it changes again.

Hi Oleg & Chris, Thanks for the answers. This is exactly what I've been thinking, but wanted to sanity check it... just to make sure I wasn't just having an initial negative reaction to someone else's idea. Best... Mike

Thanks Peter, I appreciate you tracking that down!

This is a good answer, but the pages that the bigcommerce tags appear on with the blog posts, isn't editable , it's just aggregating the blog posts based on tags like you said, not sure how to place that nofollow tag on just those tag pages. Almost seems like they shouldn't be an issue but are because of how bigcommerce is handling this tag process. I don't want to put the nofollow tag on the blog posts themselves, since I want that content index so it can rank, so still kinda stuck between a tag and a hard place.

All of them except Ahrefs comes with "free" versions and you can export almost everything.

You can use Screaming Frog for this (and much more). It's not free but is great tool to check the SEO health of your site as well. Trial is free (up to 500 url's). To generate the sitemap - crawl  your site with following settings: Configuration > Spider > Advanced tab: select: always follow redirects respect noindex respect canonical After crawl - under the Sitemaps you can create the XML & image sitemaps. Dirk

Hi Rodrigo, Ah I didn't realise we're using XLST so you're not seeing the source code but only the marked up versions for the stye sheets. I would recommend to check the source code of this URL for example: http://thenextweb.com/post-sitemap71.xml it will show you the image:loc tags for almost every URL.

OK, I can't imagine that the duplicate content across the two sites is causing Google to miscategorize the page<>keyword relationship. They deal with that all the time on ecommerce sites that all share product descriptions, and typically have no problem ranking a variety of ecommerce sites for the correct keywords. Assuming there's no major duplicate content onsite, then my next thought would turn to the actual onpage targeting. EG - is the title tag stuffed or very clearly written, is there more than a few variations of the core keyword on that page in non-duplicated text, are images optimized at a basic level, etc. Perhaps try adding unique product descriptions to a handful of the pages that Google is having trouble with, and test to see whether that 'resets' how the pages are getting ranked? The other thing that comes to mind is the custom CMS - that can very easily screw up a bunch of stuff. So - this may or may not be a moot issue by February.

Just in case someone lands here via a search I thought I'd add a solution/hack.  I found and just tested the method at http://www.richmcpharlin.com/seo/scalable-link-disavow-with-bing-free-tool/.  It works like a charm.

Hope this helps : https://developers.google.com/app-indexing/introduction?hl=en

Hi There I would question if that's the best setup/solution for an architecture issue? What's the issue exactly? Google might index the hello.html page, but you also risk confusing Google. How many URLs are being redirect / canonicolized in this manner? Are we talking about 10 or 100's? I take it Google has not indexed any hello.html URLs yet? How long have they been live and accessible?

Hi Faye, It sounds like you are working hard to do good things for the business, but it could be that, if you're seeing this client floundering many pages deep in the SERPs, there could be other negative issues at play. Nothing can replace a formal audit in a case like this, but here are some suggestions: Go through this post, bit by bit: https://moz.com/blog/ultimate-local-seo-audit This one from me is a year old, and due to changes in Google, some of the methodology and terminology is outdated, but the problem concepts remain accurate: https://moz.com/blog/troubleshooting-local-ranking-failures Pay very, very close attention to duplicates. In the dental arena, practitioner duplicates are a very common problem. I recommend you read anything Linda Buquet has written about dental duplicates at her localsearchforum.com. You might also consider starting a thread there, as well as your one here, in hopes that she will turn her expert eyes on your case. Linda has more experience in Local SEO for dentists than any other pro I know. I hope these will be a start.

Thanks so much for the quick response. I will pass along the information. Have a great day.

Why would you create landing page if you are already ranking high for the certain keyword? Usually home pages have the most backlinks and are most likely to rank highest. I would recommend you to re-design you home page with certain call-to-action button. Maybe a good slider in top would do the job. Hope it helps... Dusan

Hi, There is no right and wrong answer on your question. I would definitely recommended to use brand name in meta tittles for brand recognition. If potential visitors start seeing your brand name in search results, than see it somewhere across social networks or PPC ads, there is high possibility for them to remember your brand and eventually click to see what is it all about. Ofcourse you should concentrate more on relevant keywords, but if you have enough space i don't see a reason not to include it on the end of a string. If your brand is well known or stand for quality, than including the brand name in meta tittle adds value to your search snippet. But, if it is not well known, you are on a good track for it to become well known f.x  Black leather jackets for woman | Brand Name Regards, Dusan meaning if you sell pencils and your brand name is XYZ

@Seoman10 - don't really agree with your answer: 1. Targeting the us market with a .com.au extension doesn't make sense (source https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399) "If your site has a generic top-level domain, such as .com or .org, you can help us determine which countries are most important to you. If your site has a country-coded top-level domain (such as .ie or .fr) it is already associated with a geographic region (in this example, Ireland or France). If you use a country-coded domain, you won't be able to specify a geographic location. " 2. Duplicate content on different TLD's if they target different countries / languages can be handled using hreflang tags (check https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077) in combination with geotargeting (check https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en#2) Dirk