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Great call, I hadn't thought of that. Will go that a go definitly. Cheers

Ahhhh...yes, this is a big help. We've been working to get some of the site wide exacts down for a while (a few still showing in OSE have already been changed) - but perhaps we need to push this further. Sometimes you stand too close to a project and you need some other eyes. If we can swap out some of these sitewides with something a little more sensible hopefully that does the trick. Sometimes you get into such a mode of link building you don't step back and take a look at the larger profile. Thank you, Mr. Mike Davis!

yes, of course, and thank you again for the reply. In this case it is hundreds of lawyers and paralegals specializing in personal injury. This is just a very technical question on which structure (longer or shorter, Option A or B in the above example) would lead to any possible, even if minute, advantages.

Hi TJ, I have actually made the switch to friendly URLs in DNN, so I know your pain. Best practice is to make the 301 redirect in one jump. So instead of going from oldsite > dnn > dnn-friendly, you should set up your redirects to perform oldsite > dnn-friendly and dnn > dnn-friendly. Redirecting with a chain A > B > C can slow your site down for users, as well as slow down the crawlers, which is bad. Does that answer your question? Mike

Open Site Explorer is great!  If you don't have a SEOMOZ pro membership I highly recommend it.  It's great for finding some cheap effective advertising that you're competitors already found too!

There's this Firefox Google Semantics tool add-on -- http://tinyurl.com/buybxq8 as well as this Google Synonym search tool -- http://www.synonymlab.com/index.php

Hmmmm...you shouldn't need the RewriteCond. The regex for the rule itself merely needs to end in ?$, indicating that the ? must be the last character on the line. And your rule looks to me like it will APPEND a question mark, not remove it! I haven't tested this, but this should work as a blanket rule for all files and folders: RewriteRule ^(.*)?$ /$1 [L,R=301]

Will do. many thanks for your help. Hope that's the problem!

Thanks - I'll do that!

There are many factor which influences a site's ranking in one region or another. Google is heading toward personalized results based on user location, but that's no panda or penguin issue. Some things to consider are: the location of your hosting server the tld of your site the location and tld of your linking sites the location you set up in your gwtools or in your buiness page the content of your site, if it's english it may be more british focused or american and other ranking factors which only google knows

Thanks Sara!

Hi Raymond, Good discussion going on here. In my opinion, first step with a client with a NAP consistency issue like this is to be sure that they do have at least one legit physical address and phone number. Not a P.O. Box or virtual address or what have you. Whatever the legit address is...that's the one to go with on all platforms. Then be sure that address is consistently implemented everywhere and clean up all citations that do not match. This can take some doing! Hang in there and hopefully you can put in the work to get this client to the primary goal of having a clean, consistent record. Good luck!

hi there, wonder if i can ask my question here to you Tom -- I found your post helpful and have been reading that blog entry you linked to. I'm working on a couple wordpress blogs grandfathered into the company I work for and am trying to clean them up. They are providing something like a combined 800 links to my company's domain and we have a manual penalty with Google currently so I'd really like our backlink profile to be cleaned up. So basically... I can't seem to install the Yoast plugins. Is that only for those who are hosting their wordpress offsite? Or how does that work... because basically, i go to wordpress.com and login and I can't upload files to directories or anything like that. I guess I'm a wordpress noob, but proud to be. Because my experience with wordpress so far has been far from positive. (backstory: when I got here, our company website had been developed in a Wordpress format and was a pain in the ass to work on. Nay, impossible to work on. I spent a month completely redesigning the site in HTML and have been happy as a clam since. But that is unrelated to the wordpress blogs we are running...) Anyway, thanks

Further update to this. Ran into a problem with option 3... this solution works really well when navigating the site internally, however a user landing on one of these URL's directly (bookmark, social share etc) would have a slow loading page as (for non-default product variations) the page will load after the 1st request, then a 2nd request to the server is needed to pull in the image via AJAX. Loading the other images, stock information, prices, copy etc into an array and doing the work on the client side wasn't an option as the page would get too heavy. So option 3 ruled out. Ultimately the goal was to reduce duplicate content of product pages and none of the 3 options above do this whilst not affecting page loading times. I did look to fall back on using canonical tags however I've just now found that Facebook are using this tag, so if a user wanted to share a 'red apple' when the canonical is 'green apple' - Facebook would show an image of the 'green apple'.... so at the moment that is ruled out also. I'll start a new thread on product page duplicates and the best solution - but if anyone has any ideas then please do let me know. Thanks Dean

Hi Brian I understand why you're asking this, as site architecture is very important in passing the link equity/authority of pages and the domain throughout the site. However, unless your site is navigated differently as well, a change in URL structure like the one you have given won't make much of an SEO difference if the page still takes the same amount of clicks through the site navigation. It may have some effect for the user - you may want to use the second structure if you believe it gives the user a more accurate URL to read (I'm undecided on this). It could also have some slight positive SEO effect - it looks as though you'll be getting the targeted keywords in the URL.  There is evidence to suggest a very slight correlation with keywords in URLs and higher rankings, but it's certainly not a huge influence. I'd be more inclined to optimise for the user, rather than the search engines, when it comes to URL structure. You'll notice as well that the SEOMoz report for your site recommends URLs with less than 75 characters and definitely less than 200. Not sure if there is any SEO to this, but certainly from a user perspective being concise can help. Going back to site architecture, I'm reminded of this great SEOMoz blog post - it summarises that your important pages should never be more than 3 clicks away, for a user or a search engine. This is more about navigation structure than file/URL appearance, but worth reading and noting. If you wish to change to URL appearance, I'd always bear in mind what looks best for your user rather than the search engine. Provided that the page can be reached in the sitemap and in 3 clicks or less, your site architecture will be fine. Separating the consistency between the architecture and URL appearance is fine and won't negatively effect you, but I'd always do it for the user in mind. Hope these links and this advice helps you out.

Actually, before you redirect ALL errors to the homepage, please do some reading on that tactic: http://www.rimmkaufman.com/blog/seo-and-404-pages/01022013/ http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93641 http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2409439 http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html And in this: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf Google specifically says (page 13) Avoid not having a 404 page at all. Finally: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105 Use a 301 Redirect to permanently redirect all pages on your old site to your new site. This tells search engines and users that your site has permanently moved. We recommend that you move and redirect a section or directory first, and then test to make sure that your redirects are working correctly before moving all your content. Don't do a single redirect directing all traffic from your old site to your new home page. This will avoid 404 errors, but it's not a good user experience. It's more work, but a page-to-page redirect will help preserve your site's ranking in Google while providing a consistent and transparent experience for your users. If there won't be a 1:1 match between pages on your old site and your new site (recommended), try to make sure that every page on your old site is at least redirected to a new page with similar content. Google does not recommend this tactic and says "Avoid."  That's enough for me.  I don't know how to help you with the Mod Rewrite but I wouldn't 301 your 404.

Just came across a terrific resource that reminded me you'd asked about further reading, Ben. Check out BrowserDiet for a huge collection of resources about tuning front-end performance of websites. (You'll see #6 talks about exactly your original question) I can also recommend reading Steve Souder's two books - High Performance Websites and Even Faster Websites - both from O'Reilly. Souders is pretty much the leading specialist in this area. He's the creator of YSlow, one of the primary tools for measuring/analyzing site speed, and is now Head Performance Engineer at Google. His website is SteveSouders.com That'll be more than enough to get you started. Lemme know if you're still hungry for more! Paul P.S. The report details from tests at webpagetest.org can also teach you a huge amount, and there's a forum there run by Patrick Meenan (who built webpagetest) which is just excellent. Patrick frequently answers questions personally.

And when you look at the final URLs in the address bar of your browser, do these URLs that return 404 errors correspond to the URLs you set up with the Redirect rule? Usually when your redirects are messed up you get 500 Internal Server errors, not 404 errors. Maybe the problem is not in how you defined the redirects in the .htaccess file, but you are choosing the incorrect URLs to redirect to.

Hard to say how much Google rank mobile friendly website more, it depends on intent mostly. Mobile does differ based on localised results.

No, it would not be problematic. Exact match anchor text is very usual on the homepage.