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Yes, a visit to example.com/dir should now return a 404 error (if you haven't done any redirecting/canonicalizing). This will increase your 404 count in Web Master tools but it's far preferable to the alternative. If you're not redirecting the robots.txt will eventually work and hopefully the links will just fall out of WMT.

Looks good.  A few things.  I would add links to your XML sitemaps in your robots.txt file.  And I would try to get rid of the"?click=srclick" in the urls.

I dont fully understand, but it sounds like you're trying to rank for specific keywords and rank for long tails of those keywords for each state?  I'd categorize by state, then tag with the keyword.

Hi Andy and Peter, thanks for your response. @Andy: the rel=next and rel=prev markup won't really help in solving the problem we had. We will use it though because it's very helpful. @Peter: yeah it's been something we've been struggling with for a while but we've finally made a decision on it. The /current solution wasn't really a good solution because at the start of a season all the gameweeks are planned and created so it would become quite complex. We've done some calculations on how much duplicate content we would have if we would not use any of the redirects of canonical tags and the percentage of DC is very small (below 1%) so we're going to put our faith in Google's hands and let them figure it out. It's a good quality website with loads of links we're talking about so I don't expect to much issues. We'll monitor it closely though and stand by to interfere when needed. Anyways, thanks for your suggestions. Although it didn't solve my problem 1:1 it did make me think and make a decision. Bye, Steven

IMO I would keep all of the content on one page, that way you are creating one (hopefully) great, unique content filled product page, instead of watering it down with a number of weaker pages per product.

Do you mean in the search results? You may not be able to control that, but some sites handle this by detecting mobile browsers and redirecting to the mobile version of the site.

Hi Goedekers, I have to agree with Shane on this one. There may be legitamite reasons for wanting to run both websites at once, but the potential to send confusing signals to the search engines is so great that I would highly recommend to "rip the band aid." The biggest risk is mass duplicate content - which might take a hit on your rankings for weeks or months. Yes, you can solve this with either canonical tags or meta robots or redirects, but usually the best solution is the simplest. Sounds like you've done your homework. If you haven't already, I highly recommend the following articles. Whether  you do everything by the book or not is up to you. https://seogadget.co.uk/domain-migration/ http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos Good luck!

Hello Noamflint, Getting the "likes" seems to be not as important as getting "shares". Having shares over likes correlates with higher rankings in the top 30 results. I believe that having more on-page likes or tweets could motivate a person to like/tweet/share the content. Visually seeing that a page has hundreds or thousands of people liking an piece of content usually I am a bit more interested in reading more. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/facebook-twitters-influence-google-search-rankings

thanks for taking the time, excellent response. what we are hoping to do is to provide a SEO lite version of our content out for syndication that has the ability to rank but not out rank us. the partners we are speaking with only want to do business with us if these pages can be indexed in Google and have the chance of ranking. cookstr seems to be accomplishing this with stronger SEO on their page and weaker syndicated content on partner sites ensuring that cookstr comes up first in searches.

To clarify (hopefully).  When Mozscape (previously Linkscape), the links shown are ones that it found months ago - it then takes large amounts of processing power to then bring you the simplicity of what you see on Open Site Explorer.  The links shown current are those found up to the end of February... Rands comment here... http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mozscape-update-our-largest-index-yet-159-billion-urls#jtc178931 ... shows this. So the next update (due 27th May I think) will have data (links) up to the end of March. This is why your site is not showing in OSE.

Good answer, also we have seen that sometimes bots come directly to your site via a link and do not always visit the robots.txt file and will therefore index the first page they come to. Matt Cutts has said before that the only 100% fail safe way of blocking search engines indexing something will be to have it password protected

Not knowing the nature of the blog, so mine is simply a "common sense" suggestion: would not be possible to schedule the posts with few days of anticipation respect the day of their previewed publication, so to to have them translated and so publish both the English and Spanish version at the same time? Or... isn't it possible for you to take care of the translation of the posts. Finally... if nothing of these solutions are possible, then I suggest you to put as canonical URL of the Spanish version the URL of the English one, at least until the translated version is not ready. Doing so you won't have any duplicate content issue.

High PR alone does not mean much, so don't waste your time. Evidence for this is the fact that you can buy expired high-PR domains, and they will give no juice. mozMetrics (PA & DA) are far more telling. To build up your credibility, it all boils down to 1) original content and 2) how well you are able to distribute this content on the net.

It's always tough to tell without seeing the site, but I agree with Nakul that you should be ok - we have a "notice" level message that sometimes gets overzealous about canonical tags. It's really just a heads up - not an error, per se. We're actually re-evaluating whether that's a good way to handle the situation.