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Yeah check out URL Normalization under the Indexing tab.

There is no penalty for including multiple sitemaps. See this google blog post on the topic.

In addition to potentially getting more pages indexed as mentioned in the seomoz post link above, it will help keep you and the future site maintainers sane when its time to update or edit the sitemap.

Those are "access denied" errors. In other words, you are displaying links on your site that can only be accessed if you're logged in. Don't worry, this isn't a really big deal.

To fix it you would need to use a server side language, like php or asp, to check if a user is logged in before outputting the links. One really elegant way to do this is to change the destination of the link depending on if the user is logged in or not. If they're not logged in, send them to a registration page telling them the benefits of signing up. This could really boost your conversion rates. Of course, if the link is to an admin section this wouldn't apply.

Rel Canonical should help with the issue. You should also go into google webmaster tools and put in all your URL parameters, so the crawler has a better idea of whats going on with being able to get to a particular resource with several URL variations.

Robert check this article out re: frontpage and htaccess

Frontpage is an html editor that helps you build a site. Apache is a server that site can run on. It sounds like you have both.

You'll want to edit the .htaccess file in the root folder of your website, wherever the file for your homepage sits.

Rel Canonical is considered a best practice in SEO, so you should just always include it in your pages, even if they're the only copy of the content you know of. It will help prevent any scrapers from stealing your content down the road.

And re: you're sorta right. Technically speaking, what we're doing with that htaccess code is 301 redirecting every URL, either to the www or non-www version. So say you go with my method anyone going to http://example.com just gets 301'd over to http://www.example.com

Actually in cases like your example above its more an issue of an ambiguous URL rather than actual duplicate content.

The thing to do in the example above is to choose which version of your site you want (with www or without) to always use, and then set your server accordingly. In Apache this means using your .htaccess file.

If you decide to always display www (my preferred way) then this should be in your .htaccess:

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on</ifmodule>

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

If you want your URLS to not use www:

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on</ifmodule>

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

You want to go through each page of your old site and if it had any links or authority at all, create a 301 redirect for it. That tells the engines your page has permanently moved, and tells them where to find the new page. This will preserve the majority of your authority for every page.

If you 302 them all to the homepage you're telling the search engine "this content is related and is a substitute, for now". However, you want -all- your pages to continue being indexed with as much authority as possible, not just the homepage.

After you've got your 301's set up correctly, then you can focus on creating a 404 page that is helpful to your users. Usually this means suggesting content based on the keywords in the URL, or including a search or link to the homepage.

According to teh Google you'll want to create a second sitemap specifically for your mobile pages. See: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34648

Start with making sure your website has great informative content. After you have your basic site populated, you can start to develop a "blog" strategy for adding more content and targeting more keywords. I put blog in quotes because this could take the form of a wordpress install at /blog on your site, or it could be an articles list, or a knowledgebase of answers, etc. Just make sure that you've got a strategy to continually add new content, and target more and longer-tail keywords. Then, if your blog posts can be tied into a current event, or if your organization is a news-maker itself you can re-write those blog posts and distribute them as press releases via prweb.com and others.

Check out this video: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-dealing-with-duplicate-content

It will give you a much more thorough answer than just a percentage of uniqueness. But if you want that kind of answer I mostly hear guesses between 20% - 40% unique content.

Personalized results.

• Location. If you are pegged as being in a different geographical location (San Francisco vs Palo Alto) you will get different results.

• User History: If you're logged into Google, you will get results based on your personal search history, +1's, etc.

When I'm doing my rankings checks, I make sure I'm logged out and my location is set to the most generic for my use case (in my case 'United States', but yours may be a state or nearby metro region).

That will be helpful to preserve your link juice, but it won't make the site easier to navigate for your users. Ideally you want a "flat" and "wide" site architecture. Inbound.org recently had an article on this exact topic.

I'm not sure no-following those duplicate links is going to do a whole lot, other than spread your "link juice" more evenly around your site. For example, if 60 of your 160 links are duplicated (meaning theres another link going to a different anchor on the same URL), that means those 60 pages are getting hosed with link juice twice, and your other 40 pages with only 1 link will get half as much of it. If each URL has only 1 followed link from the homepage, then your homepages link juice will flow more or less evenly across all the pages.

Yes, almost all sites do this. If there is ever a chance someone could search for your brand name then you definitely want to be on top of the SERPs for those searches. If you don't think people will ever search your brand name then you've got  more fundamental marketing work to do before the SEO.

By way of examples: Amazon and Zappos both do this (in varying forms). A good rule of thumb is if Amazon and Zappos do it, you should give it serious consideration.

That definitely sounds like too many H1 tags.

On my pages I have two: one for the site name and the second for the page title. The site name H1 is in my

<header>section, while the other is in mysection. I wouldn't advice using more than 1 per section.</header>

Here's what you need:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.shewula.nl [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.shewula.nl/$1 [R=301,L]

The 500 error is because you were not escaping the . in your regex on the first line.

The code here will only redirect if it doesn't have the www.

Do you mean you have many different pages for 404 errors, as opposed to having many pages that are returning 404?

If you have specialized 404 pages, for whatever reason, you should probably noindex them. That way google isn't  trying to index a page thats just there to help your users find your content, and you're not getting dinged as a site that produces duplicate content.

I had a conversation about this very topic recently, here is the advice I got:

Headings get totally different treatment in HTML5, we have to throw away everything we knew about this from HTML4/XHTML.

In earlier versions of HTML we only had headings (h1 - h6), there are no other sectioning elements at all. That is why we had to be very careful about our usage of the h1 tag, and there was always controversy regarding it usage.

In HTML5 the sectioning is much more powerful. We have a whole bunch of new elements for sectioning and the algorithm used to generate the outline is far more complex, and flexible. In short, it no longer matters how many h1 tags we have on a page.

We must still adhere to a structured approach and be careful to generate the right outline (one that reflects the proper structure of the document), and this is what this theme does.

To conclude and clarify, in HTML5 it doesn't matter if there is multiple h1 tags on a page, what matters is how they are used in conjunction with the other sectioning elements, and that the outline produced represents the correct structure of the document.

Yep your game plan is pretty good. Since they may not be able to do a lot of editing after its up, you may want to gear your research towards finding their best ranking pages and using the content/markup of those pages as a basis for the new pages. If its possible, create a 404 page that can recommend pages based on keywords in the URL. If thats not possible, at least get a search bar on the 404 page.