Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Add this to your htaccess file (remove the .txt extension from the file in order to use it) Remove index.php or index.htm/html from URL requests RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /(([^/]+/)*)index.(php|html?)\ HTTP/ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/administrator RewriteRule ^([^/]+/)*index.(html?|php)$ http://your_site_URL/$1 [R=301,L] Obviously change the your_site_url to the your domain in   http://your_site_URL/$1 Also remove the # before RewriteEngine On to make these changes work.

These are all great pieces of advice. You might also want to check out Moz's list of recommended companies. A lot of these companies offer link development services and should prove reliable.

Thanks for your help Christy

Thanks for the response and I appreciate the information.

I hear what you're saying.  I think it all comes down to motive.  For some widgets, if someone uses your widget, they're recommending your site and it's possible the link may be ok.  But, let's say I have a car insurance site and I make a widget that is a hit counter and thousands of people embed it with a link that says, "Widget provided by carinsurancesite.com".  Should Google really rank me higher for car insurance because I made a hit counter that people really liked?  No. There are also many cases that are debatable whether or not they are ok, but ultimately we don't know how Google decides whether widget links are acceptable or not. The best way to talk with a Google employee about questions like this is to ask a question in a webmaster central hangout with John Mueller: https://plus.google.com/events/castmn1nmp3o0r3lgkc4djmhvl4

Hosting these pages as subfolders instead of subdomains should be fine, and is the "traditional" way of presenting new content with the highest likelihood that the content will inherit authority from its parent domain from an SEO point of view. They should rank just as well as if they were on subdomains or separate domains. Separate installations and themes should not make a difference; Google will be absolutely clear in its understanding that these sub-brands are related to the main brand and to each other, so assuming you are fine with this, different design and CMS installations will not make a difference.

Hi there, The first question, as the others have stated, is whether the content has been duplicated. If so, that's a problem no matter where the websites are located. However, if you have two totally different websites from a content point of view on the same topic, hosting them together should not be a big problem. The only issue would be Google's understanding that the two resources were owned by the same entity, and therefore ranking them together might not constitute the most diverse user experience for people searching on the topic. Google reads registration information as well, and also understands that some servers / hosting services host hundreds of thousands of websites so some topic cross-over is natural without the sites being owned by the same person or company. If you had two sites selling pet food on the same dedicated server for the sole purpose of having two sites rank for the same pet food queries, I'm not 100% sure Google would ignore their hosting though.

Hi Fred, Sorry to hear about your problems, you're not the first and certainly won't be the last. In my opinion, your backlinks are looking quite spammy. When I look at your profile using Open Site Explorer there are quite a few directories in there and press release websites, both of which have been hit recently, devaluing the links from them. It does sound like you've been hit with a algorithm penalty (because Google will tell you about any manual penalties in Webmaster Tools). Your anchor text isn't too bad as you've got the brand in almost all of them the websites that you have links on have very little authority and won't be helping you to rank at all. You need a content strategy implementing and to find some bloggers/website with real connections to talk to, that way you will get some brand exposure, put your service in front of real people who may actually use Martha's and in turn, help you rank better.

The ideas above are all great. I would add that local addresses for branches / outlets are great if you have them. Being able to supply local addresses definitely indicates that you are not solely located in one town.

Hi there, This is an incredibly broad question that you'd really need to hire a freelance consultant or agency to work on for an extended period for best results The issue of how and where to promote a new website is pretty much a cornerstone of online marketing. As far as link development goes, I would start with the link building category here on the Moz blog. There is link development and promotion content on there dating back almost ten years (clearly the older stuff might be quite outdated now).

You should check out Prestashop. It has a catalog mode and can be flipped to ecommerce with the click of a button.

Search for remove base category in Woo-commerce you will find the plugin you are looking for i have also used it but i have forgot the name...

Thanks.   I submitted a feature request: https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/49105990-Make-email-address-an-optional-field-for-Moz-Local

You were almost there buddy. It looks like you have regex characters that need to be escaped with . Plus, most seem to prefer rewriting index before messing with www. Give this at try. I took a look at the site before the loop and it doesn't appear to use any CMS per se. If it were a WordPress site, you would want to place the code before the WordPress rewrites. P.S. You don't need the last comment in the example.

Here's a necessary step to take to get a verified check mark next to your website URL on Google Plus. This is especially important if you're a local business. https://support.google.com/business/answer/4569085?hl=en

A great weekend to you too, Patrick !

"If I wanted to change my home page URL, (currently along the lines of "http://example.com/home") would it be a good idea to change it to "http://example.com/dallas-auto-repair"?" I have to say no to this particular example. Realistically, your home page probably shouldn't sit on an internal URL like this anyway; is there a reason why the home page is not sitting on the root? If you were to follow this exact example, it sounds like your home page targets "Dallas auto repair", but that there is an internal page targeting "Dallas auto services" as well, which sounds like a good recipe for having internal pages compete against each other for the same type of rankings. We advise caution when implementing redirects: if there is no good reason besides "this would get a keyword into the URL", it's usually not a great idea. If you need to change the URL for a number of reasons, putting keywords in the new URL is a good idea. Say you have long, complicated dynamic URLs that a CMS has created: you'd be best to make these static URLs for a number of reasons. However, if you have a URL like www.example.com/auto-repair-services, I would definitely not 301 redirect that to www.example.com/dallas-auto-repair-services just to get the word "Dallas" in there, for example. 301 redirects sometimes don't seem to transfer the exact authority / rankings from one URL to another, so unless there is a very good reason to go through redirects, I would not do it.

Hi, I totally agree with the fact that it difficult to build up authority for multiple sub domains as for sub directories. But as of now the website is to be operated from a single TLD. Thank for the answer cheers!