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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

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  • "theatermania.com/broadway/news/06-2014/[slug]" Sounds like you are using Wordpress for the site. I would set it as simple as possible, and not inlcude any info but what you want to rank. You can add broadway into the URL structure, since you can do custom URL's. No need for it to be its own category, unless that is a big category on your site. I personally like this one "holler-if-you-hear-me-opens-on-broadway" since it includes everything but tupacs name, which I would include

    | David-Kley
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  • Although the canonical should solve the issue, try adding a ? after your url and before your variables - that is the default way variables are declared and couple help solve problems. http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7636&category_id=270&sizes=12x15,12x18&click=sizes to http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7636**?**category_id=270&sizes=12x15,12x18&click=sizes You should also try Sam's suggestion.. although I too don't think should make a difference.

    | OlegKorneitchouk
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  • +'s in urls simply represent a space.  Dashes are also used as a space.  So, there would be no impact.  You can find thousands of sites doing well in the SERPS using +'s. That being said, if I was building it from scratch I'd use dashes.  Just easier to read for users, and there is a small possibility that it could trip up the search engines.  Super minor unrealistically small chance, but I put my tin foil hat on the same way many SEOs do.

    | WhoWuddaThunk
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  • On one URL. How I have always tried to explain it to people before. If you have two urls and a person is searching in google, you are leaving it upto Google to pick the correct page to display. Google isn't perfect and may show the user the wrong URL and not help the user. However if all the information is on one url, then you don't need to worry about this. Plus you don't need to build links into two pages, just one page (hopefully getting you a better page authority and ranking). Plus it adds fresh unqiue content onto otherwise product pages, which can be similar across the web If you worried about not ranking because of the word review missing from the URL, this is only a small issue but the benefits of the above IMO out weight the slight disadvantage. Great article by Econsultancy on benefits of Reviews on product pages: https://econsultancy.com/blog/9366-ecommerce-consumer-reviews-why-you-need-them-and-how-to-use-them#i.1mpjwvuml2epzz

    | Andy-Halliday
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  • Thanks for input everyone - much appreciated

    | McTaggart
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  • Just a very quick look for my penny's worth: The 'Read More' links on this page http://www.zulu.org.za/archive are then being 301 redirected rather than then new URL being used on the 'Read More' also some of the archive pages do not appear have any copy in such as http://www.zulu.org.za/index.php?view_page+180295 The sitemap link in the page footer 404's The contact us in the page footer (http://www.zulu.org.za/contact-us) is redirected to http://www.zulu.org.za/archive/contact-us-F30503

    | DeanAndrews
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  • Hi Samuel: Thanks so much for taking the time to respond to my post!! You make an excellent point about the necessity to create content useful for humans rather than search engines, a position my SEO firm has also taken. My site has received no manual penalty from Google. Besides launching an upgraded version that made mostly cosmetic changes, not much has changed on the site since February. But I should mention that in late April a link removal requests were made to about 100 toxic domains. About 30 web masters voluntarily removed their links. In mid May we filed a disavow request with Google for the other 70 domains. Could the removal of these links and the disavowal request have something to do with the fall in ranking and traffic? Please note the site only had about 280 domains linking to it in March and now there are even less. The quality of the incoming domains was pretty poor. Good suggestion regarding adding no-follows to the poorly performing building and listing pages. But we have a bit of a challenge with listing pages. They get rented quickly and it becomes unfeasible to add them to the site, and they are absolutely essential, if we need to add 300-400 words of content and write title and description tags. So how would you suggest we manage listings if we should not "no-index" them? Regarding our potentially spammy domain, we have used it for the site since 2006.  An alternative domain (www.metro-manhattan.com) exists that redirects to our primary domain (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). Do you think it would be better to redirect the site to the www.metro-manhattan.com domain? It better matches the brand "Metro Manhattan Office Space". But I have heard domain changes can be dangerous nightmares. You point out a potential issue with dashed in our domain. Do you think the single dash in Metro-Manhattan.com would also appear spammy?  Incidentally, I don't think the content on our site looks spammy at all, maybe there is some thin content but not spammy. Thanks for your assistance!!! Alan

    | Kingalan1
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  • Did you see the post authored by Cyrus Shepard earlier this week (http://moz.com/blog/bye-bye-author-pics)? He concludes there are still plenty of good reasons to use Google Authorship. Assess the quality of the publication you're considering writing for, and decide based on that. If it's a reputable site, I would set yourself up as an author. Look at the recent posts on Moz and other leading SEO blogs. They're still using authorship and follow links. Let that be your guide.

    | DonnaDuncan
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  • Great feedback! Thanks! Now I am thinking about moderating ALL comments and approve the ones that are quality, and delete the ones that aren't. The submit auto response could say "thank you for submitting your question, you will receive an email once an answer to your question is submitted. So, if their question is bad, then they won' t receive an answer (ever). So basically I filter out the bad from the good and build a high quality Q&A for future users to search through, and eliminate the "thin" and "spam" issue. So, I won't have to delete bad questions, they will never even make it on the site. I just probably won't get much repeat activity from the users who posted bad content that never make it to the forum. But this is not intended to be an online community, it's going to just be a place for quick questions on a specific topic. Thanks for your time in responding to me! I appreciate it! BB

    | BBuck
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  • Thumbed up for being a great response! Wish I had thought of that.

    | SamuelScott
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  • Thanks for the input SamuelScott.  Generally, I plan to keep the external links well under 100 per page, by breaking them into sub-categories.  I agree with your assessment that if it's good for the viewer, then it's good with Google because all they're suggestions on site design is geared towards the end user. My main concern, as you've stated, is that by leading users off the site, would I not reduce the page rank, and ultimately ranking.  I appreciate that you seem to think, not.

    | alrockn
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  • Moz shows many of my other clients with local keywords like that. I see vonderhaar in the map listings but not organic results

    | Atomicx
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  • Thanks for your thoughtful response! Cheers!

    | BBuck
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  • Looked over it briefly, looks fine. Point more internal links to that page though.. currently only have them from all "fundraising supplies" categories/products. Add to blog, link from text in other categories, special offers, etc.

    | OlegKorneitchouk
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  • Thanks for the input! We are probably going to just run 2 different sites rather than the redirect because it probably makes more sense as we get different kinds of clients from each sub-domain.  But, we wanted to know should we ever have to or need to redirect in the future. Thank you again!

    | DJ123
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  • Two solutions: 1. Redirect all indexed pages to the proper pages on your new site using a 301. Resubmit sitemap, and do a fetch as google on all the new pages to get them showing up asap. 2. Make sure all the old pages return a 404 error. (home page will not be an issue). Once they are returning a 404, submit a url removal request for each old url. IMO, option 2 takes a lot longer, and you are at Google's mercy on how long they take to get to them all. Option 1 would be your best bet, as you will retain some page rank and weight from the old URL.

    | David-Kley
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  • There's a pretty rich discussion of how our near-duplicate detection works on this thread, but the short answer is 'yes.' The more unique content you have on a page, the less likely it is to be identified as a duplicate. Our duplicate detection for campaign crawl does not strip out headers, footers, sidebars, etc., and so if the unique content of the page is very small, the common elements will dominate our consideration of two pages as duplicates.

    | dan.lecocq
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  • Thanks FCBM! I hadn't considered the reformatting Google tends to do anyway.At this point, I haven't seen any where this is the case 'in the wild' for our brand (maybe they've recognized that it doesn't affect the clickthrough on our stuff?). They simply just let it cut off since they're mostly over the 55 or so limit. I think a test is in order as well. Thanks!

    | Blenny
    0