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Hi Tommo.

Sounds like the clean up is a great idea. I wonder if you still need the GB at all? Is this for language or country? If you are doing country/language I would have a folder for each ie

domain/en/us/title-of-hotel

You can then geo-target these to country specific areas in GWMT as well - which would be helpful.

And definitely 301 them all - this is a must.

A

Have you thought of 301ing it to your stronger sites - passing ever a little bit of authority over to any other sites you have is one idea.

Sounds to be like the site is very flat and not really adding much - I would look at the less is more approach.

I have also had this problem when the site goes down for maintenance - it says there are 404s etc. Have you taken the site or any pages down recently and then put them back up?

A

Have you IT guys done a 301 or 302 from http to https or vice versa? That would be a good place to start looking.

Also check you have an canonical tags in the right place and pointing to the righ areas, people mess them up all the time - that's quite common.

Hope that's a start.

Definitely bad practice. You can have a class in the first h1 but there should be only one h1 to be semantically correct.

The exception is HTML5 where you can have multiple h1s per block but the above is not HTML5 by the looks.

A

Yes, a 301 will lost some link juice, around 80% is thought to be passed through, give or take a little and depending on who you believe.

Hope that helps.

ditto - just seeing what people think, you're in my camp by the looks.

Nope, it's not free. It's actually something that appears in SERPs - like the House of Fraser result you see here: - it's not acutally on site as such.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?gcx=c&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=house+of+fraser

A

Hi,

I was just wondering if anyone had used Google Site Search before and what they thought of it?

http://www.google.com/sitesearch/

It seems quite expensive for just returning your own pages but would be interested to find out more.

Thanks

I agree with all three of your guys - make it as clean as you possibly can.

Yeah - that would work. Well it should work if done the right way.

Hi,

We have 4 foreign language sites, one in spanish and just remove the special characters in all and rank very highly, so there is no harm in doing this, it actually makes it harder.

I would stick with all lower cases or at least have the same logic in the URL - as long as it is consistent, then no biggie.

No matter what you do, make sure if you make changes to any of this that you 301 all of the old pages to their new version otherwise you will be starting from scratch!

Hope this helps.

You're welcome

Is your email being hosted online in HTML form? Google won't crawl an email unless you host it online - there's no way for a rob to crawl something in email form unless you host it online and link to it.

If it is hosted online, then definitely nofollow any links you don't want followed. Hope that helps.

We run one site with all https and there is no problem at all - we link build as usual and see no bad impacts, in fact we are doing very well.

It's not usual practice but for SEO as long as you are playing by the rules it will have no impact whatsoever.

Have you tried nofollowing the links? That might help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

Hi,

We use Adwords for our Spanish site -  and get very good data out of it for both SEO and PPC, even down to the long tail. What types of keywords are you looking for - I will have a look and see if I can help you out and find more.

I asked our Spanish PPC expert, she said adwords works really well for her.

A

From my experience HTML sitemaps are generally ignored a lot now by search engines. You could do a basic one for users but otherwise put your efforts into getting a very good XML sitemap, that will help you more than what is generally just a static HTML page, that like most things on footers nowadays, are ignored by the SEs.

A

I would go ahead and do them, if your competitors are doing, then definitely do it, if they aren't it is a slightly different link profile to them.

We use PR a lot for link generation and it works well. Just don't go mad and put too many links into the press releases and maybe in the future look for a range of PR sites (that are trusted) to seed things on. But they definitely work so don't fret.

A

Good luck Arjun, would love to hear how it all goes!