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Thanks for the feedback. I personally don't think any SEO Question is Naive, there are so many permutations and possibilities. And if you work with a large company and Large Dev Teams with Legacy Systems you are often put in scenarios that little questions like this are important and can dictate how entire scope may or may not be realised. I am compiling a comprehensive URL guidelines for my Devs (which I will certainly share with the SEOmoz community when complete.) A little sideline note: Someone once told me Pipe Characters "|" won't impact a URL string. However, they actually frequently break, get truncated or double encoded  when being crawled from Google/Bing with little rhyme or reason. The question about Brackets/Braces Stemmed from this link from Coke.  http://www.cokeunleashed.com.au/wagsallowance.jsp?mkwid={ifsearch:s}{ifcontent:c}WVnyieg7&pcrid=13521527730

Antonio, Ryan has explained this perfectly. For a more detailed explanation of methods for controlling page indexing, you could read this post on Restricting Robot Access for Improved SEO It seems from your comments and questions about 301 redirects, that there is some confusion on how they work and why we use them. A 301 redirect is an instruction to the server which is most commonly done by adding a .htaccess file (if you are using an Apache server). The .htaccess file is read by the server when it receives a request to serve any page on the site. The server reads each rule in the file and checks to see if the rule matches the existing situation. When a rule matches, the server carries out the action required. If no rule matches, then the server proceeds to serve the reqested page. So, in Ryan's first example above, there would be a line of code in the .htaccess file that basically says to the server IF the page requested is /apples, send the request to /granny-smith-apples using a 301 (Permanent) Redirect. The intent of using a 301 Redirect is to achieve two things: To prevent loss of traffic and offer the visitor an alternative landing page. To send a signal to Search Engines that the old page should be removed from the index and replaced with the new page. The 301 Redirect is referred to as Permanent for this reason. Once the 301 Redirect is recognized and acted upon by the search engine, the page will be permanently removed from the index. In contrast, the request to remove a page via Google WMT is a "moment in time" option. The page can possibly be re-indexed because it is accessible to crawlers via an external link from another site (unless you use the noindex meta tag instead of robots.txt). Then you would need to resubmit a removal request. I hope this makes clearer the reasons for my response - basically, the methods you have used are not "closing the door" on the issue, but leaving the possibility open for it to occur again. Sha

Thanks. Got your point. You suggest it should be same as the format used in your site not what Google indexed. Hopefully, Google is taking care of silly canonicalization !!

To specifically answer your question about the differences between WordTracker and the AdWords keyword tool, I examined the WordTracker site. I performed a keyword search for the phrase "depression and bipolar link". It showed 34 searches. To better understand what that result meant, I searched the site and located the following explanation: "For the Wordtracker data, the Search count is the number of times each keyword appears in our database of searches over the past 365 days. This constitutes just under 1% of all US search, and the data is gathered from metacrawler.com and dogpile.com." There are two key differences between AdWords data and WordTracker. AdWords clearly has a much larger data source so it should be more accurate. Also, AdWords data is presented based upon monthly searches, where WordTracker uses yearly searches. The AdWords result for "depression and bipolar link" would be 3 monthly searches. Since the result is less then 100, Google rounds the result to 0. You are reaching for very long tail phrases. You will capture other keywords and shorter phrases in the process. For example, while Adwords shows no traffic on "depression and bipolar link" the phrase "depression and bipolar" shows 165k monthly searches with medium competition. If I were to create a page, I would focus the article on "depression and bipolar". If you really wish to keep the focus on "depression and bipolar link", you can do such knowing you will capture traffic from other versions of the phrase.

I don't know that there is one best answer for this. For a given site, I'd try a couple of things. If I'm using a CMS for shopping cart, look at the documentation and see if it references parameters used. A shopping cart often uses parameters, as does anything that involves sorting results in different orders. I'd do a site:domain.com search on the site and look at the URLs that are indexed and see if any are indexed with parameters, and determine if those need to be indexed or should be excluded.

301 redirects can easily be reversed as needed. Think of it as call forwarding. You can cancel call forwarding or even re-forward a number. Depending on the importance (i.e. PR) of the particular page which is being redirected, search engines may update their records in 1 hour or it may take several weeks. Sometimes the redirect goes smoothly, and other times there could be some bounce experienced, but things should settle in after a month. 301 redirects are a very natural part of the internet. Search engines are designed to handle them well.

Ive seen from £350 for content and design to £1200 for just design (was awesome design tho) S

Hi Dale, Really stupid question, how do I look at the CSS to identify that? I've viewed source but cant see that information anywhere on the page. If you wouldn't mind, could you point me in the right direction of some information about this issue, I would be interested in understanding it better, but until you brought it to my attention, I had no idea even to look for it J

Have the same issue.  Exact match domain (www.baseplates.com), but single doorway page with links to the owners site, www.adventurerv.net.  What up?

Ha! I've seen those far too often. I don't know the process that led a company to get a contract by building links like that. Frankly I'd be interested to see their proposal. I was given the opportunity to look at competitor proposals on several occasions. Most bank on giving an informational overload to show that they have top-secret SEO tools and knowledge of the industry. I saw a 40-page PDF spitting out data from what seemed like a normal SEOmoz account. I think they get the deal-maker to focus on data and "wow" them instead of putting focus on case studies and guarantees. I just can't imagine why a proposal would ever be over five pages. I think Alan Weiss also states that all proposals should be under three pages. Harder to do sometimes given large projects, but still a good rule to follow. Cheers to tasteful back linking.

Thank you!

Thanks for the reply. The content on the root domain would match the original URL, so I would be good there. In theory, would redirecting to the root domain also strengthen domain authority?

Hi As far as Facebook, make sure you have the Open Graph meta tags in place on your website.  It not, any clicks of the like button on your website might not count as a "share". Documentation here -Dan

I have developed multiple XML site maps for my eCommerce website (Lamps Lighting and More) and submitted to Google webmaster tools. You can see attached image to know more about it. I measured that, Google is not crawling effectively after it. Please, check image and let me know regarding issue. 6194756364_fb82efbbca_b.jpg

Even though I've never used it myself, I've heard really good stories about Yoast SEO plugin for Wordpress (http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/) to solve problems with canonicalization. You might want to have a look at that.

mmmm - maybe but I suspect there is paid linking and deliberate sculpting going on - Garden Beet is more active on social forums relating to gardens than one of its main competitiors however in support of your argument  I recently witnessed Garden Beet shoot from the dark unseen ranks of 54 to number 8/9 following a tv campagin on a related term - but yawn yawn - the page is now hovering around 20  -

Well it wouldn't effect smartphones since they get the same results. Not sure how it effects mobile search still relevant to old style cell phones.

Just wanted to leave a quick note saying that SEOmoz has upgraded our Link Directory! You can view a post Cyrus wrote with more information about the directory update and link building via directories at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-link-directory-best-practices

Just wanted to leave a quick note saying that SEOmoz has upgraded the Link Directory! You can view a post Cyrus wrote with more information at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-link-directory-best-practices.