Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Anyone else have any other suggestion? Thank you

Don't get me started on trying to contact Yahoo re their directory listings! They sent us an invoice for a listing I wanted to cancel, when I replied to their email I received a reply saying the emails don't get checked and another email to try. That one also failed. They also supplied a link in the email to edit the listing - the link was broken. I found a support page, the captcha for the email for was broken. etc etc Agree with Broadbeach on this one, "Waste of money and time."

Actually the methodology you have described is correct. Just two tips/reminders: the correct use of the rel="alternate" previews that in the .com pages (for instance) you indicate the other 13 country targeting URLs of your site. That is needed to not seeing, for instance, your .com pages outranking your Spanish ones in Google.es because of a better link profile (or Page Authority); for that reason I do really suggest you to implement the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" in your sitemaps.xml more than into the code of every single page of your site (you don't want to slow your page speed, don't you?). About what bnspak write, the correct tip is this: create the new site, with the new country level subcarpet arquitecture; implement cross domain canonical tags in your old ccTld domains cancel your ccTlds sitemaps.xml files in GWT and resubmit them... doing so you are explicitly asking Google to recrawl them asap Googlebot crawls the ccTlds and discover the rel="canonical" Do the 301 page by page Finally, ccTld or Subcarpet. The decision should be just based on SEO, but on business. Yes, you're going to loose the geotargeting strenght of the ccTlds, but you acquire a stronger domain authority for those sites which were maybe struggling alone. Then, if you plan a correct and effective Content Marketing/Link Building strategy, you can add links to those country targeting subcarpets, links which will benefits all the site as an all.

Hi, You don't need to make a separate mobile site map for a mobile design. It can help indexing your mobile sites and improve visibility of your product by search engine. They will allow search engines to better serve search requests from mobile devices and lead them to your relevant mobile pages.

Hi Vitaly A good question.  There are usually 2 main considerations when it comes to cross-linking sites: To benefit the visitor from pointing to a useful related site To try and aid SEO/Search efforts. Your goal of trying to improve rankings of the newer sites by linking your hotel booking sites together could be counter-productive. Cross-linking sites with the intention of trying to improve search rankings (through the passing of link juice through the said links) usually has a short-term gain, then either neutral or negative. It's a risky game in trying to 'manipulate' search rankings by linking a load of sites together, which being honest is just what this would be. With regards to the other reason for doing so, providing links that visitors could find useful, that's a sound and credible reason to link the sites together, just play it safe and NoFollow the links as Ben suggests. This would be playing it by the rules and keep the search engines happy whilst also benefiting your visitors. Have you considered migrating your websites into one large site to serve all cities? Done properly, always with the visitor experience & offering in mind, it can benefit everyone.  You'd only have the one website to create content for and get links into, whilst providing one more in-depth offering and experience to your visitors.  Worth considering anyway, local search can still be catered for with one large website. Kind regards Simon

Google looks at URLs, and not pages. It's the same content, but on different URLs. If Google delivered mail, it would think the following were all different houses: 123 Main Street, Los Angeles, California 90210 123 Main St., Los Angeles, California 90210 123 Main Street, Los Angeles, CA 90210 123 Main Street, Los Angeles, CA 90210-1234 If you're able to use a canonical tag in your custom CMS, you can effectively tell Google that one specific URL is the "right" one, and that all of the others should be treated as if they were the "right" one.

I have a question for someone about blogs.  I have two - one on my website and one at Wordpress.  How long are blog posts supposed to be and is it okay to have links pointing from my WP blog to my website?  I'm not sure how that looks in the eyes of Panda.

Hi, I have good links for you. Few days ago John Doherty has written two nice blog post on it. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday http://www.seomoz.org/blog/internal-linking-strategies-for-2012-and-beyond Hope below links help...

I have read a lot and it is not good idea to take domain brand name in it.even Amazon affiliate program not allowing it .Thank you all for ur advices

Thanks for the advice. This was quite a while ago. I wound up going with domain/product-category/product Works very well - every product I add gets indexed.

I think most is covered in the above answers, but will add my thoughts on this element. Yes, you should have "unique" and good content in your meta-descriptions, as well as in any content element. There is no short cuts for good SEO. Meta-description is not a ranking element by it self, but its a big factor for SERP CTR and driving business. With that said, I don't think there is no need not to be as smart as possible and here is when CMS with auto-generation rules comes into play. I recommend any site to use preamble as a content element as it will be a short descriptive keyword rich text that is selling and should get the user to quickly understand the content on the page and get them to move down the page or into a conversion funnel. For me this is exactly the same as the function of a meta-description. We allways set up our clients CMS's to autogenerate meta-description from the preamble text, as this saves times. But, we also creates an override rule with a field for meta-description that we code that if meta-description contains content, then it overrides the preamble (as a meta-description). That way you get the best of both worlds. The possibility to write good "on-page" SEO as well as saving time.

Well I would not go down the route of sub-domains if you were bringing all your sites under one for SEO purposes. I personally would consider putting each of the sites in a sub-folder on your corporate site and then 301 each domain to that folder. You need to remember that sub-domains are often viewed by Google as separate domains, which means any links pointing to the sub-domains pass little benefit onto the root domain (in this case the corporate site). This in my opinion defeats the object of raising the domain authority!!

It's very important if you plan on doing any advertising at all, whether it's Google Adwords, Facebook or anywhere else. Aside from the fact that shorter domain names are just easier for your visitors to remember, many advertising networks have character limitations on display URLs. For example, Google Adwords has a 35 character limit for display URLs. You can have a longer URL, but it will be truncated in the ad, which isn't really what any advertiser wants to happen. I'd say 35 characters or less for your domain name, counting characters like this: MyDomainName.com Don't count the "http://www."  part  in your character count because you can omit that from a display URL in an ad and people will still understand it and be able to navigate to your site.

Great points Dr Pete.

Thought I'd throw in my 2 cents and experience... My experience: Built a network of about 50 microsites, SEOed them to the max, built some strong links to them and boom, week later was getting some real traffic. Time goes by, new algorithms released and the sites start to lose their rankings. In fact, the only thing they rank for is their EMD terms (which you don't have). Granted, you seem to have a better upkeep of them but the SERPs trend is not in your favor. I agree with the others, you should focus on building 1 powerful site vs many microsites. Microsites were the shit back in the day several months back, but today its the big dogs that rank. First page results are filled with brands (usually multiple listings per domain) and microsites are trending down. Quality > quantity, for both links and sites. My suggestion is to combine all those microsites into one super site that is most easily branded + contains all or a portion of your target keyword in the URL. Just copy/paste all the articles from the microsites to the one site and 301 redirect to the new respective pages. Also, make sure you do a search before you jump to conclusions about keyword traffic. "life quotes" returns results about life related quotations. Trying to rank for insurance with that keyword is an uphill battle. If you go through with the transferring all content to one site and 301ing the pages, be sure to post your results here! Cheers, Oleg

Hi Chandana Rand covered microsites in 2009 on a whiteboard Friday. You can review his original thoughts here He also followed up on this topic here I had the same basic question earlier this year when I was trying to decide what to do with the 100+ domains my company owns. A couple experts replied to my question and advised me to only work on 1 or 2 domains as far as SEO. The thought was dividing time up on multiple domains would show less results then spending all the time on 1 or 2 domains. You may view my question here. Hope that helps

Guess, those are just backups of the htaccess file...