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You need to point the site to one option or the other, there is no benefit one over the other, but people are used to saying www. In addition to that SEOmoz use www, and for this sort of question I tend to use this site as a rule of thumb guide I hope this helps Sean

Thanks David! Great information and I appreciate you sharing. ron

ask them what their website is and then check their rankings. if they can't get their own site ranked how are they going to get yours?

Thanks, That's what I was looking for.

As I have seen somewhere that underscore "_" unites the names and Google looks at it like one word with no spaces. Wouldn't it be bad for long product names? example.com/2010_chrysler_grand_voyager_2l would be the same as write example.com/2010chryslergrandvoyager2l ?

Hi Kirstaian As you point out in your question there is more value to a link than just the link juice passed, there is also the credibility factor. Being seen on a page with other respected sites in your industry builds brand awareness and credibility for your site.

Could you add links back to the homepage for the keyword term the category outranks you for. This self cannilbilsation of the keyword could give google a clue on how you see your pages. I've read that some people have suffered a penalty from sites that rel-can links to one page that are not at all duplicate. I have just inherited an ecommerce site that rel-can almost everything (all the products) to the brand name pages. I undid this and the rankings dropped like a stone so it looks like sometimes you can get away with rel-can no similar content.

That is exactly what I was looking for. Thank You.

OK thanks for that, Some of these things are already in motion. I'm still hoping someone can throw some light on the missing keyword thing as I believe it may be significant.

You can use, Screaming Frog. It's a free program you should include in your website audit. Very powerful and produces reports to csv you can study in Microsoft Excel.

What you are doing seems proper - and it sounds like you're only doing one hop, you just don't want to daisy chain 301's or you'll lose some page rank being passed.

If I were you I would add the new content and put a plan in place to build up your links then use the disavow tool to cover yourself with Google

Is this it http://www.seomoz.org/blog/new-guide-release-the-professionals-guide-to-advanced-search-operators Sean

Thanks Shane. My syntax wasn't perfect, but after messing about with a few different ones, and closing with [RP], I managed to get it to work. Many thanks!

If the domain is has an extremely high authority (80+), I would consider it due to potential to dominate the SERPs by getting the www.web version and state.web version both to rank high. Thanks, the domains authority is 43, it is not so high. _Yes, stick with folders. It's much simpler and much better organization (states correct as Atlanta a city). _ Yes, it is true, thank you! Next, I second everyone else, subfolders are much more organized, subfolders look better, and subdomains are an old SEO strategy (a little spammy, especially for a new domain) It is an old domain (registered 1994). What guys you mean by better structured? Sorry if it is a simple question, I just want to be sure if it is what I think. Also if a web site is in subdomain, does the main domain still pass some authority to the subdomain or not much?

I've cracked it with the following: <filesmatch "="" is-finance-in-the-uk-too-london-centric="" $"=""></filesmatch> Header set Link "<http://frugal-father.com/>; rel="canonical"" <filesmatch "="" charity-skydiving-at-a-uk-parachute-centre="" $"=""></filesmatch> Header set Link "<http://frugal-father.com/>; rel="canonical"" I can now add as many files matches and header sets as I like within the IfModule, and the canonical tags appear in the HTTP header. For anyone else reading this, it may need tweaking depending on which version of Apache you're using. i.e. 'FilesMatch' and 'Head set Link' could be 'Files' or 'Header add Link'.