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You might possibly have to detail the white-space explicitly with \s RewriteEngine On RewriteRule ^old\sfoldr/(.*) /newfolder/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

Hi there, thanks for your question! You've received some excellent responses. Did any of them help you resolve your issue? We'd love a status update, thanks! Christy

I checked out your site. You are right, the brand dropdown is a rough experience for the user. Can you create a columned navigation that spaces out the choices? Something similar to that would be what Dicks Sporting Goods has on their homepage : http://www.dickssportinggoods.com/ They have a lot of choices, but they are spaced across columns in the nav drop down.

Hi Joey, I would definitely keep that as the homepage. It looks much more appealing and interesting than the guides page! You should think on other ways to keep the visitors in your site, perhaps some little design changes that could help. I would start with the header, it is FAR too large. The main content is moved far away to the bottom. Although it is a responsive design, the header remains always too large. I have a 1920x1080 and I can barely see the main content, but look what happens with a smaller screen, you can't see anything but the header. gNUxeJo.png x5g7QhP.png

Doesn't Apache mod_rewrite do the trick?

Thanks Federico for the detailed response and quick feedback!  I was not 100% sure how subdomains were treated, so thank you for clearing that up. I definitely needed to pick some expert brains on this one. Looks like we will go with a separate WP install under a /learning/ directory just to provide our root domain with better authority from all this good content:)

Hi Shaycw, Sounds good to me...just make sure the font is a regular size (not too small!). So glad to have helped.

Hi Casey, It sounds like you're using dynamic serving, rather than pure responsive design. The difference is that, while both approaches keep a single URL for mobile and desktop users, a responsive approach also keeps the same HTML and simply uses CSS to rearrange content on the page to fit a smaller screen; dynamic serving allows you to actually serve different HTML based on user agent. The main thing to do for dynamic serving is to make sure you use a Vary HTTP User Agent header, to indicate to Google that you are not cloaking but rather are serving different content based on user agent to provide a mobile-friendly experience. You can find more info on this here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details

I agree with Frederico everything he said is completely right on the money. If you are removing photographs and things that would not work well on a small screen then that is of course all right. You're removing content is in words even video then that is not okay. PS Frederico I owe you an apology your right on the 301/https redirect question sincerely, Thomas

Google always takes a while to update.  Check a few of the 404 errors Google is reporting and see if they are still erroneous pages.  If so, you may have some pages to redirect.  Of course, if the page was simply removed and you don't have anything to redirect it to, then a 404 is what is supposed to be returned.  If everything looks fine, the it's just the delay of Google updating its info.  It should resolve itself when they get around to updating it.

Bradley, That's what I was looking for - thank you very much for taking the time to respond! Matthew

That would seem to be reasonable, with the information you've given. Best of luck!

schema is a method that all 3 takes search engines Google Yahoo and Bing use to better understand the content in your site. & make your data  "machine readable" to search engines. HTML 5 incorporates schema into the code natively so it is something that Google and every other search engine is using as part of their algorithm so is important that it is implemented correctly. There are different types of schema For instance I can use schema to easily tell a search engine that I am a local business and where they can find me this would result in the site that had the correct local schema on it coming up in universal search results for whatever keywords my site was relevant to. I could use a tool like this Below its website is great as well with a lot of information on schema that's easy to understand. http://www.feedthebot.com/tools/address/ An excellent place to get information about schema and a company that builds the fantastic WordPress plug-in http://schema-creator.org/ another excellent places the Google FAQ page https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1211158 want to use rel=author download Yoast  WordPress SEO plug-in then followed the instructions given here you can use these instructions to do this on other similar plug-ins as well. http://yoast.com/push-rel-author-head/ & read http://yoast.com/wordpress-rel-author-rel-me/ If you're authorship is set up correctly and the  Google Structured Data  test shows it working correctly it should work. However one quick thing you should check is to make sure there is a checkmark next to your home pages URL on your Google + page there could be a number of reasons why a just not showing up I would check the instructions above and make sure that everything is done correctly. I hope this is not of hope to you sincerely, Thomas FgFb6Y-UJUI

Hi Prince The local-based URL you have suggested is good, but the issue is not so much with the URL but how you can effectively target these searches without local offices - at least it would seem by the fact that you don't show any addresses of offices on your site that there are not any. Is that correct? There is an excellent set of tips from Miriam Ellis on optimising for local searches on this post: https://moz.com/community/q/what-is-the-best-way-to-optimise-the-website-of-a-service-area-business-websites-for-local-search The essential thing if you want to optimise for local searches is to show local citations of an office in that area. As Miriam says: The most important thing for SABs (Service Area Businesses) to understand is that Google is heavily biased toward physical location. SABs must have at least one physical location in order to seek inclusion in Google's local index. This can be a home address - that's just fine! But it cannot be a virtual address, P.O. box, etc. And it should not be shared by any other business. Is this site for a company who operate totally online or from just one phone number which could for anyone knows be offshore? If it is, you are not going to be successful with this strategy if you have no local offices that someone can walk into and buy the service. If it is an online only service being operated then your whole site should reflect that and you should market the site along those lines - with quality unique content being on the site answering the questions people may be searching for - based on the service you are offering. The Title tag you suggest is OK for a home page yes although it's a little diluted and the "As low as 1%" would be of more value in the Description meta tag. No one will be searching for that key phrase. I don't think these days there is much difference with using pipe, hyphen or comma. Sorry again to sound like I am being harsh on what you are trying to do. I think you are genuine guy trying to do their best, but with all the hard work you are putting in to this site you are better to direct it at making the site work well for you and your client. Peter

Your descriptions is a 150 character commercial/call to action for the information on that page. Since some or all of it will likely show up in the search results snippet, it's job is to incite a click through. It should contain some form of the keyword or wording that is very, very similar to it but since the words used in the meta description don't assist with algorithmic ranking, it's not imperative. It's a good practice that your header contain the following meta data:  Title, description meta tag, rel=canonical directive, robots meta tag (kind of optional . Also, you have two robots meta tags--you need to remove one--I'd remove the first one.

Hey There Peter really gave you a great answer, but just wanted to add a few things. If you want to see things how a search engine might see theme there's a few options; <a>browseo.net</a> is an SEO browser, just plug in the URL of the sample theme for an SEO view use the web developer plugin - shut off javascript and CSS and look at the sample site. whatever you can see Google is 100% able to see. you can view Google's text only cache of a page by typing cache:http://www.example.com/sample-theme/ and click "text only" - this is very similar to the web developer plugin. if you own the site you can use something like "fetch as googlebot" within webmaster tools and examine the code it returns back. look for the text etc you want to be visible to google. Basically, of those methods fail to show you the content (text mainly) you'd want Google to see, the javascript is being used incorrectly or too heavily. -Dan

"Our language really is a series of bullet points which explain a new concept to most and why you should use us." Sounds like his repeating text are bullet points highlighting his services. Not something that would be marked up.

Thanks for the advice.

Michael - I don't see any major SEO issues with forcing an SSL session, other than: SSL is usually a bit slower, due to the encryption overhead.  You might want to benchmark this to make sure it's not affecting your site load speed times.  If things are slow, more hardware and caching might help. Make sure that all of your content is being served from secure links.  For example, if you are displaying a graphic on the home page of the site, use relative paths (../images/super-impressive-graphic.png).  If you have content that uses absolute links, such as: (img src="http://www.1099pro.com/images/super-impressive-graphic.png), this will throw an SSL warning and tell users that the site is not secure.  This is important with CSS, as well as Facebook, Twitter and other plugins. Looking at the site, it looks like your Google and LiveZilla tracking codes are set properly to auto-switch to https, but I'd try to test this. Also, if you're changing the URLs, you'll want to make sure that older pages with the non-www are 301 redirected to the secure pages properly, too. Hope this helps! Thanks, Jeff

You are looking at site structure. You want it to make sense and you want to link from the broad subject down to the specifics. Example:  Shoes > Women's Shoes > High Heels > Brand Name High Heel Shoe The reciprocal linking in the content of each page can become confusing if your Shoes page is linking anchor text "High Heel shoes" to the High Heels page, while the High Heels page is linking to anchor text "shoes" back to the  shoes page. I believe that the best way to establish your pyramid is through breadcrumb links, and URL structure. Folders can be useful for defining hierarchy. The pages you cross link must make sense to users. Dropping in a "Children's Toy" link on a High Heels page doesn't usually make sense. Whenever you consider doing something for "keyword optimization" or "ranking" you need to consider how does this benefit a user.