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Hmmm..probably i misunderstood your "parent" question. No value will be passed if link points to the current page.

Automation of this has been problomatic because of the way our CMS paginates URL's, It was sending xml generators crazy. looks like I am still going to have to have some involvement with this on an ongoing basis. Thanks for mentioning BING..

The short answer to that question is that you can't make a flash site 'fully' SEO friendly. That's why so many companies that were counseled by agencies a few years ago to develop flash sites have now reverted back to more easily crawled platforms. Flash is pretty but not search engine friendly.

If your page content supports using UGC (reviews, comments, etc), this is an excellent way to get different spellings and vernacular of users into content organically. If it is written by users, then it's a very natural part of your content. As a member of the Bazaarvoice Advisory board, I see evidence of the great organic lift from reviews/customer posts over and over related to words and spellings that only UGC generates. Through this content, you optimize easily and have a chance to rank on numerous variations.

So even if the website is top 2 in google--For instance usually if you type in mma training in bergen county you will see www.njtraininggrounds.com listed at sometimes the first three spots---you would still say to take some page rank away from the index page and have a followed blog from there?

Hi Use the keywords that people use to describe what you're offering. It sounds like you might not have a keyword problem, but rather maybe you're not quite sure what exactly the site is offering, what the architecture is, and what products, services, functions etc you will be offering. What are people going to be able to do on your site?  Why would they want to come to your site?  What will it offer that's so engaging and attracts visitors?  What's your "unique selling proposition"? I hope I don't come across as trying to dodge your question, but I think if you can clearly answer these questions, it might make your keyword research much easier. Also - be sure you're using "exact" and "phrase" match in adwords tool, not "broard" - broad numbers are unrealistically high. 39% is not too high for competition, in my experience. Also, are you "branding" your website?  That's very important these days of course. Hopefully this gives you some ideas! -Dan

My experience with this is changing them in the IIS. I haven't moved out of a ASP.net environment, but I had to write mods for the handling of the parameters when we redesigned. I bet your hosting company can help with some mods to the htaccess file. Maybe this will help. http://www.phatz.com/301redirect.php

Thanks Ryan! Yes, our traffic and ranks for the roor domain have dropped after this new sub-domain was added.

Right. I hate Photobiz.

yes and no.. you have to keep bounce rate and stuff like that in mind (pandas are out there) the ideal situation. a site where clients visit a few pages there before heading to your main site.

I understand your situation and am sympathetic. I am simply trying to offer you the information you are seeking. If you are performing SEO work on a site, then it is your role to educate the owner / developer on the risks associated with the site in it's present condition and to make recommendations. I am in the fortunate position where I can turn down a client. I would turn away a client who was unwilling or unable to make changes which involved black hat methods. I would not want my name associated with such a site, nor the headaches that are involved with such sites. If you choose to continue working with the site, I would strongly recommend a written document where you advised the client of these issues along with the consequences and they have acknowledged (i.e. signed) the document. As far as making other changes, you are still breaking the rules but are fixing some of the violations. The changes may or may not help you avoid a penalty.

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable reported seeing this in April of this year at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-sitelinks-jumbo-13324.html. I think I've seen them on occasion, but not often.

Hey James - I am curious as to why you think a 'canonical tag' wouldn't be a "long term fix"?

The impact of the users interaction with the search results will be interesting to see. I'm certainly interested to see how the sub domain search plays out. It will be interesting to see how the search result pages perform in the  serps. If we go ahead i'll keep the mozers up to date with the effect.

Even when phrases have the same meaning, there can be different reasons to prefer one phrase over the other. An exact match will (and in my opinion should) be given preference. The phrase could be a name of a movie or book or be contained in a speech. Ultimately a decision needs to be made on how the results will be offered and this is what SEs (not just Google) have determined is most helpful to users. I would guess Google would offer a relevancy rating to each phrase. I can see how "Golf Holiday" and "Golf Break" could be used to refer to the same thing, but I would suggest the relevancy of those two particular phrases is a bit low. A person could work 4 hours in the morning, then take a "Golf Break" and hit 9 holes, then return to work. I wouldn't refer to that as a "Golf Holiday". An example of terms with higher relevancy would be "mobile phone" and "cell phone". I would suggest that 95%+ of the time these words mean exactly the same thing. But you still have to give people credit for exact name matches with domain names, titles, etc above those who use the second form of the phrase. There often is a reason a user chose the phrase they did and could prefer an exact match.

page 1 points to page 2 that points back to page 1.. this or simular situations will make fubar for Google you can actualy do the same with 301's but it's wayyyy easier to notice.. the rel is allot harder to notice if you do something wrong since it only affects google/bing