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Hey there.

Here's the biggest tip I can give you: stop thinking about what will please Google and start thinking about what will please your users. Make them happy, and Google will follow.

A useful exercise is to have a whiteboard next to you, and every time somebody asks you a question about a product, category, brand or similar add a tally mark next to that. Whenever you get a chance to write some new content start with the one with the most tally marks. It's the one your customers want to find content for the most!

Often this content is best placed in the product description themselves (I've written about the frustrations I have where shops ignore this kind of detail at) but could also be static pages or blog posts.

Be in touch with your customers - best trick in the book.

• Andrew

I'd probably put this down to a lack of local competition to show him how it's done!

Hi Miguel,

Probably not! You'd be better off keeping them all on the same level on the domain, but perhaps your URLs could be tidied up to be more like...

shop.com/category/product/

A sub-domain is basically a new website, you may as well have one site to optimise for than having a bunch of smaller sites struggling. Strong together - weak apart.

• Andie

Hi Juan Miguel Callejas Romero,

It looks to me as though those two websites are identical. I would definitely settle on one of those domains and then set a 301 from the 'discontinued' domain to the new one.

If you have a market outside of spain, I'd probably advise you go with the .com. If I'm in the UK and see an .es domain I'm unlikely to click on it. Conversely, if you're exclusively in Spain and as a Spanish resident I see .es in a sea of .com's I'd likely click on that.

In summary: select the TLD which you think will have the best click-through rate (analytics may shine a light on this) and then 301 the other to that domain.

• Andrew

Google does index PDF files quite well, and from my experience Powerpoint does a good job of generating PDFS. I don't expect you'll see any problems here.

But how about this... if you uploaded your powerpoint to a service like SlideShare you will probably provide a better experience to many users, you can have an additional social elements and gain one or two decent links from SlideShare. Worth some thought?

Hi Demetrios,

It's difficult to say exactly how it'll affect your DA or PA - like PageRank there's a considerable number of factors and contexts that build that ranking.

Domain Authority is in part built up from your MozTrust score. The MozTrust is roughly calculated by measuring how many sites sit between your website and a trusted website. Educational and Government websites tend to be considered trusted websites, so if they link to you directly the MozTrust there is very high indeed.

Be aware though, you shouldn't build your site's success on the back of one or two trusted links. You need diversity and as many trusted relevant sites as possible to "back your credentials up" to Google and other search engines.

I know that's vague, but I hope it helps. Learn about how MozTrust works.

Hi Manutx,

First Click Free looks relatively simple to implement. Essentially all you need to do is allow crawlers with the user agent of "Googlebot" or referrers from Google results to go directly to the article instead of a sign-up form, just as it would do with a logged in member.

I can't find any pre-built Wordpress plugins that handle First Click Free for you, but this piece of PHP may be useful if you could integrate it within your single.php template:- http://www.ryancramer.com/journal/entries/first_click_php/

• Andrew

Good question. In your situation I've seen lots of people set up an "Outlet" store on eBay.

I think you're right about the duplicate content risk, it would pose an issue. You might want to consider noindex'ing those empty products but that would mean they wouldn't be discoverable on Google itself.

Alternatively perhaps if it's a refurbished item you could add a canonical link to the main product's page, and on that main product page link to the empty page so that people can discover it that way.

Absolutely! You can do a blanket "301 any page with .html at the end to the same page without it" rule with .htaccess to save you time and energy once you've done your renaming process.

This neat little bit of code (found at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5730092/how-to-remove-html-from-url) should do the trick nicely.

<code>RewriteEngineOnRewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-f
RewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-d
RewriteRule^(.*)\.html$ /$1 [L,R=301]</code>

It may be a bit of miscommunication on their part Thomas.

While there is likely to be development work for these country specific sites, you shouldn't have to get a new site built for each country, that's most likely insane!

What they're probably suggesting is to launch country sites at yourcompany.com/de/ but then registering domain names such as yourdomain.de which would just redirect to that - not for SEO use but just to protect your brand and for those who try to access it from those domains.

Press "Create my sitemap" beneath the advert. It's pretty well hidden, isn't it?

Hey Omid,

I've taken a good look through various websites built with Adobe Muse. These were ones featured in "Site of the Day" on the Adobe website, and so I imagine are considered the best of the best.

I'm not impressed by the quality of the code. Perhaps the most worrying thing for me is that things that are clearly semantically headers are being rendered in

tags.

Additionally there doesn't seem to be any alt text applied to any images on sites I've found running Muse.

They also seem to rely on a large number of HTTP requests and many resource seem to be poorly compressed.

Without knowing too much about the tool, everything I mentioned could be down to individual designers - but the trend is there.

I wouldn't rank their markup too highly, and there's some pretty unoptimised elements on those sites. I think that if your site does well on SERPs with those sites it's probably in spite of your markup.

• Andrew

You certainly would have the upper hand in theory in that situation, however nofollow is just a rule of thumb and Google's algorithm may be smart enough to figure out it's a reciprocal link.

Ask yourself if the reciprocal link is adding value to your (and their) customers? Is it in relevant content, or is it on a "Links" page? If the link is there purely for SEO, don't bother risking it - I'd say.

Hi Dana,

I think your page is corrupted, I have copied a link to the sourcecode I am seeing http://pastebin.com/BRfFT4RR

It looks like Google Cache is also having problems with this page. Perhaps OSE had trouble too and so skipped the page?

• Andrew

I'd probably advise that if there is a like-for-like category you can merge with, 301 the old category to the new category. If there's no category to replace it with but you still want rid of it then 404 it - after awhile Google will deindex it.

In other words: if you don't want it, Google probably doesn't either.

Hi Joshua,

Stay calm! Nothing to worry about here. Google ignores (that may not be true 100% of the time, but let's say that it is...) nofollow links - that's the point of them!

You wont gain from them - but neither will you be punished.

On OpenSiteExplorer I can't see any real data there, so I can't look any deeper than that.

Hope that helps!

• Andie

Hi Luca,

It doesn't make a difference to your rankings. However Matt Cutts from Google suggests you go for Option 1, as from a usability perspective users tend to prefer it and so it may improve your click-through rates when you are found.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=971qGsTPs8M

Hi Joshua,

Assuming that both of the pages are the same in all but name the correct practice would be to create what's called a 301 redirect from "german-shepherd-blog" to "dog-blog".

I believe Wordpress handles this for you when you rename a post. However if you're talking about moving your entire blog on a subdirectory, you may need to write a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file.

Once you've implemented a 301 redirect you're basically telling Google, "Hey, remember german-sherpherd-blog, it's still around but now it lives at dog-blog - could you update that for me please?".

It might take a while for them to get to that, and while they do there may be duplication in your search results but if your 301 redirects have been setup properly they'll both lead to the same destination.

Might have an initial knock-on effect, but in the long run it sounds like it'll be beneficial. Keep your content manageable and working for you.

As long as your blog posts are great, don't worry too much about deleting unnecessary categories. It sounds like a good spring clean to me.

Just remember to 301 when you merge categories, 404 when you delete.

I've looked into this very briefly and it looks as though Google doesn't index the domain http://feeds.feedburner.com/* so they'll not find these links to provide 'juice' your way unfortuantely.