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I have heard conflicting things from people at Google, including Matt Cutts, throughout the years. I have also seen some first-hand anecdotal evidence that subdomains inherit some benefit from the parent domain, though much less evidence that parent domains gain anything from the subdomains. It is my opinion that the devil is in the details here. If, for instance, you have a site with dramatically different topics on various subdomains, as if they were completely different websites, I think it is more likely that Google will treat them as such. However, if you have a site with a subdomain for a certain section, such as a forum or blog that is of the same, or very similar topic, with lots of interlinking between the two - as if they were different parts of the same site - I think it is more likely that Google will treat them as such. So I don't think the answer is as cut-and-dry as people often like to think, which is why it is so difficult to find consistent proof of one theory or the other. In the end, do what's best for your users and developers. Most of the time that means a subdirectory, but every once in awhile it means a subdomain. I'll leave this open for other opinions. Maybe someone has some empirical proof that we can look at.

Thanks for the response Gregory. I like the first idea. We are about to go through a redesign so perhaps I'll try implementing your idea

Hi there, I am experiencing the same - connected my GA but seems like there is no data appearing at all. Kindly advise. Thanks! Jane

The only time I used it is when I was working at a site in the educational field, and we used it to markup our lesson resources. We used it less for SEO and more for interoperability with our partners.

thank you very much for this! I am already working on link changes. All the best Iris

It looks like your site might be using a combination of Flash and iFrames to deliver results. You do have a Page Authority of 33 on your home page, and a domain authority of 27, with 12 linking root domains.  Hope this helps...

Jon - If you have the different websites running with different languages (i.e. .com is English, .nl is Dutch, .fr is French, etc), then you should probably have a separate sitemap for each site. If they are all the same language, and you just have the site loading with .com / .nl / .fr, then Google will see this as duplicate content and you should likely make changes to keep them a bit more separate... Thanks, -- Jeff

Hey MarikeP I think that you are thinkig of the Knowledge Graph. Here is an excelente blog post from the moz blog, that will anwser your question. http://moz.com/blog/mega-serp-a-visual-guide-to-google

I found this video extremely helpful in terms of the architecture of one's site: http://moz.com/academy/website-architecture Since I don't know what products or services you provide, I'll just give you some suggestions I have implemented with other websites which may or may not work with your concept. 1. Implement appropriate, useful social media icons. Too often, people put EVERY icon possible on there but just add the ones that your community uses. One exception, I'd add Google+ regardless of how large your community is. 2. Add a "subscribe to our newsletter" form somewhere tasteful. 3. "Brand out" your homepage, but make sure it's well written. If necessary, hire a copywriter. 4. If you have a web design company build your site, make sure if they add a "website designed by X" that you are getting something out of that in return or delete their link. 5. Do not use a slider. It makes your site slower and serves no valuable purpose. Good luck! Ruben

Actually, no-indexing your contact page is usually a very bad idea, especially if you are depending on any aspect of local SEO for the site in question. You Contact page is the ideal spot to include all your geo-location information, your properly formatted NAP (Name, Adderss, Phone) to match your Local Citations, and a Google Map of your location. As the others have said, even if not depending on Local SEO, there's no value to just no-indexing this single page. Paul

Hi, ive tried cloudflare before. Problem is that i am using SSL for some of my pages, so Cloudflare doesn't play nice unless I pay them. Also, I am using amazon cdn - does that work with cloudflare or is it a bit ott? I will take a look at your links and thanks!

Hello Larry, Yes this is a problem for you, and could be harming your rankings. Google has hundreds of those review pages indexed from your domain already: http://goo.gl/Ey7w4c There are a number of ways to deal with this issue, as outlined below: 1. The quickest, easiest way to get them out of the index is to use the URL Removal Tool in Google Webmaster Tools to remove the entire /reviews/ directory from the index. Then you can place a disallow statement in your robots.txt file to block the entire /reviews/ directory from being crawled and indexed again in the future. The downside of this is that you won't get much, if any, "credit" for links pointing to those review pages. However, I doubt anyone is linking to them to begin with. 2. You could put a rel canonical tag on the review pages, which would point to the product page for which the review was left. For example, http://www.audiobooksonline.com/reviews/review.php/full/0743554337/0/name/desc would have this as a rel canonical tag: 3. You could 301 redirect the review pages to the product page, as someone else suggested, but I think this would cause all sorts of unintended errors and redirects on your reviews platform. I don't recommend this route. 4. You could use a noindex,follow meta tag on the review pages. Googlebot and Mozbot, and their respective indexes, behave differently. You're not always going to get the exact same numbers from GWT that you get from Moz.com. Use Moz.com to identify critical issues on your site, rather than expecting it to give the same broken link count, 404 error, duplicate page count, etc... as Google. I hope this helps give you some options. Also, I recently wrote an article that I think might help you: eCommerce Product Review Solutions Good luck!

Splenta is right Searching on Google for site:example.com will show you whether or not any pages for that site are indexed. You can also try "site:moz.com seo" this will narrow your results to show any indexed pages on MOZ that contain 'seo' in the page. Extremely helpful if you are trying to find an exact page or set of pages.

They are looking at the number of likes a page on your site has, such as a blog post that gets 17 likes on that particular URL. They're not reporting on the number of likes your page on FB has.

I figured as much. Its a shame that it has come down to that. Its amazing how my website still gets about 3000 comments a day, all of which are in a spam queue. People seem to think they are still counting for something. What would you say is your favourite way for building links now then? (without spilling your secret sauce of course)

Hi there! Were you able to sort this out? Please let us know how things turned out, thanks! Christy

I typically keep category names out of the product URL. It creates problems, especially when the product lives in multiple categories. You can use a rel canonical tag, but I'd rather just not have to deal with it. Here is how I do it: www.domain.com/products/product-name/ www.domain.com/category/category-name/ and www.domain.com/category/category-name/sub-category-name/ This convention has several advantages, including easy segmentation of the site to determine, for instance, how many product pages are indexed in the SERPs. One could argue that having the category name in the product URL is good for SEO because of the keywords, but I would argue that putting the product farther down in the site structure, and the non-canonical URL issues related to certain taxonomies (e.g. multiple categories for a product) negates what little benefit keywords in the URL have these days. Of course not all eCommerce platforms really allow the structure above. Magento, for example, will allow you to put products in the root, but not in the /product/ folder. The product will also be viewable on the category-version of the URLs, but they will have a rel canonical tag pointing to the root directory version. Good luck.