Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Just to add one other bit that might be helpful... you can use Browseo to get a quick and easy "SEO View" of most any site. SEO View for that theme Its basically seen by Google as just one giant page, and not all the content is even there in the source code. -Dan

In what context is the link being placed? What is the link linking to? The anchor text should make it clear to users what they should expect if they click on the link using natural / clear language. Don't just think about the SEO value of the link, but consider the value of qualified referrals too. If this is realistic (and if the linking site is relevant to your site then there should be a good chance that it is), can you treat your link as a mini call to action with a clear benefits/compelling offering? Donnie and William are right to say that you need to be careful about making sure your backlink profile is not full of blatant exact match anchor text.

Steve, First, I am not a .net expert and there are some here. As to the overall question though, when you 301 www.example.com/boss-man to www.example.com/big-boss-man, you do not need the canonical on the example.com/boss-man. The 301 is handling all for you. Best

great answer! More feedback from others is appreciated, but this answer is thorough and well thought out. Thanks!

A great answer from Matt in the first instance, well covered.

@Melanie - I would monitor both the traffic and rankings - just to make sure that there isn't a sudden change in any regard. I would create an Analytics alert should the traffic suddenly drop by X% so that I was notified immediately and I would use a Rank Checker like SEOmoz has, or WebCEO or whichever one you prefer. If often depends on the site in question though, but I'd just keep an eye on things and if the traffic drops or the ranks decrease, then I'd remove the redirect. Redirects are tricky and that guide that pasted above (perhaps use this: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/09/unifying-content-under-multilingual.html) covers quite a lot of what you're after. The redirection could mess with your rankings, so that's why I suggest monitoring those. If you're not tracking a fairly large keyword basket, then watch the organic traffic closely for fluctuations (or use the notification I mentioned above). This also depends on what countries you're taking into account and so forth.

What matters is the overall quality of the pages of your website and the number or quality of backlinks. The order that pages appear in the results of a search at a search engine are influenced by the number of pages that link to that page, and by rankings of the pages that link to that page. When a site is linked to by a popular and trusted domain, that link might provide more value than a link from a site that is less popular and trusted. Domain age may be a factor  but just a minor one. Think about the condition wherein someone would bought a domain and have just parked for last 10 years. Will putting a content on it will give any boost to its rank??

Hi Greg, That makes perfect sense and thank you. I have also been looking around at how and what our competitors are doing in terms of how the list the product, keywords they use etc so we can make sure we cover those as best as possible. Everyone does things slightly different so time to have a play and see what works best i think Thanks Again. Craig

I had this same conversation with someone yesterday about a very similar set-up. In a 2009 blog post, Matt Cutts said that the main reason not to include over 100 links was for user experience. It used to be for technical reasons, but those no longer apply.  Here is the post: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/ Lots of links can lead to lots of code, which slows things down. It will also be dividing up the page rank fairly heavily. However in the age of mega-menus I don't think that the number of links is, in itself, a problem. Just for reference (and the answers to your situation may be different) our conversation about this ended with the decision to reduce the number slightly - structuring to leak less page rank to unimportant pages. However overall we still have a LOT of links and are happy with that.

Hi there, the maximum URL length is around 2,000 characters. This is for browsers rather than Google. That said, shorter URLs are best practice for usability reasons. Neither of the examples you give seem overly long. While it's a good idea to avoid unnecessary folders or words or characters, it's good usability practice to reflect the site's structure and navigation in the URL. Good luck!

100's or redirects is no big deal from a server load point of view, so personally I would unless there was a good reason not too. Assuming you believe the ranking factors of the existing pages to be good, I would transfer those factors to the new url by using 301 redirects. Depending on the structure of the redirects you are doing, you may be able to use regular expressions to simplify the process. You may want to take a look at the SEOMoz best practices article on redirection if you haven't seen it http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

Thank you Keri. One worry down, unlimited to go. . .

Anyone else have any opinions on this?

Right On :). LOL

You could also try installing the SeoQuake toolbar.  It will give you a quick glimpse into any site's seo info.  Such as its page rank, number of pages indexed, whois and so much more. It also has a nifty compare feature.