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If I am understanding your questions correctly couldn't simply utilizing rel canonical to allow you to sleep better at night?
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
Also this is a pretty new feature out of Google that you might find interesting
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.html
Buy Google and tell the engineers to place my site number one for every relevant query : )
Honestly create a content strategy, you could hire X number of experts who's sole job is to create great content/ useful features and tools for your site. If you have unlimited budget there is no reason not to keep your strategy squeaky clean in my opinion.
I thought about the lag in updated info from Google, but that page (with the exact url) has been there for over 5 years.
Also its not just the about page, it is literally every other page on their site except for their homepage is a void of reported pagerank.
I guess I am going to chalk this one up to an error in Google's external PR reporting system. I have seen PR delays, but I have never seen Google report only the homepage (of a site this big) has any sort of PR.
I totally agree but look at this:
Lets look at this page as an example:
It is one click away from their PR 7 homepage with it's link being in the upper left of the page. (prime for passing a lot of PR)
After looking into it at first I thought my toolbar was messed up, then I checked the seomoz historical pagerank checker (I use the SEO Quake toolbar) and it also says this page has a PR of 0?
As I see it:
they are either doing something really sneaky (which I kind of doubt)
or Google's PR stats available to the outside world are messed up for this site???
Its basic purpose is to allow search spiders to better understand what is what on your site. For instance, if you are selling a product and implement your product markup correctly Google can tell (and somewhat understand) what is what from the price, to quality (customer reviews), to what it should tell people it does (description) and looks like (image).
Some of these are already integrated into the SERPs others are expected to be integrated at a later date. Cooking seems to be one that has been a test bed for markup for Google. Look at the differences between this page and this page.
It is not really intended for browsers, just for search spiders. People do not require markups to tell us what is what because we can make logical sense of what is on webpages.
If you are just starting to markup your site use this: http://schema.org/
http://searchengineland.com/download-the-latest-google-search-quality-rating-guidelines-97391
Google has been on a conquest taking them down online but I would really like to take a look at it if you have a copy!
[moderator note - please use the PM system and exchange email addresses there. We've removed emails from this thread before it gets indexed and exposed to the world]
All the content will be accessible through the sitemap which will be displayed in both versions (the user and the bot) version of the site. The only difference is the navigation will change from one version to another. It could be perceived as a gray area, even though we really are just making it more friendly to bots not trying to be deceptive at all.
We usually operate under the principal that would this be ok if it were manually reviewed? In our plan, I am pretty confident that it would pass. We are planning on making what is displayed to bots very basic text link navigation. Our XML and html sitemaps will correspond well with the bot navigation (so to show G we really are not trying to hide anything). And yes we could make the nav more search friendly, but one of our main goals is to have the site look as clean as possible. As far as I can tell Amazon uses this method to avoid duplicate content issues and make their site generally more crawlable which is why I think it is on the table as an option.
We are getting ready to launch a site that has great navigation for users, but it is not so great for search engines. As long as we are ethical about it, does anyone see a downside to detecting a bot user agent and displaying different nav to it? I suppose some could consider it cloaking, but I noticed amazon uses this strategy and they don't seem to be getting a big penalty lol. We are not going to do anything shady with it, just offer the bot a different way to access our content. Any thoughts?
Yea I agree. I have performed many searches on Google shopping and grouped listings seem to perform substantially better than individual listings.
However, that sucks because you don't want to list your products right next to your competition's if you don't want to right? Well the easy work around IMO is to amazon.com. Create a unique SKU and list that on your Google base feed as one of your unique identifiers. Also upload your product inventory to Amazon using this same SKU. Alter these product's prices in relation to your commission you are forced to pay amazon. In a head to head comparison (like what customers will see on Google shopping) it will drive customers to your store instead of Amazon. Using this method you will have all the benefits of a grouped listing, but none of the disadvantages. Plus, the sheer amount of ratings Amazon has will result in them pulling up your listing compared to others. Essentially you are paying amazon a small set fee in order for their help in Google Shopping results. I have used this strategy in the past for products that don't come from the manufacturer with a UPC, and it has worked for me.
Good luck!
No problem, if you have any issues with it feel free to let me know. You can do a TON of different stuff with the WP template tags. For reference here is a page that lists all of the different tags in WP: http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags
You can add Meta descriptions in wordpress 2 different ways. If you have a small site and want to simply add a generic description all you need to do is open up header.php in your themes directory and add the following code:
This will pull the site description that can be set in the "general settings" in the WP admin section. If you are looking to generate dynamic meta info then this is best done with a plugin (although it is not very hard to simply pull the excerpt or any post meta and have that display). That would look something like:
If you want to go the plugin route I would second the All in one SEO and SEO plugin by Yoast. Additionally Premium Dev offers an SEO plugin that is pretty sweet but you have to pay to get access to all their plugins so you are probably better off with the free ones.