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For you to use Site A as its own entity again I would suggest cancelling the 301 redirect as you've said, creating all the pages for Site A, making sure they're optimised on-page with good internal links to the other pages,

Once that's been done, generate an XML sitemap and submit that to Google, Bing, Yahoo etc

Then its just a waiting game for the search engines to update their index with the new pages on Site A.

Deviating slightly on the top here but I would say that link inclusion on social sites you should use services like bit.ly and not paste in the URL.

My reasoning for this is what with a bit.ly url if you add a + at the end you can see statistics for that particular link (how many clicks its had etc), which is nice and simple and saves crawling through Google Analytics to answer some simple fundamental questions.

In email signatures, leaflets and printed promotional material (where your typically short on space to use) then I agree it does make things shorter and look nicer, and who know maybe it will catch on and more and more people will start removing www. from their domains and it will then become more of a standard, for which Google and other search engines will probably use as a possible ranking factor.

I must admit this has been a great discussion on this topic.

I've just found this after some searching on Google and (I know its from 2009) but some of the points in the article seem logical. Out the box WordPress (for instance) will add a forward-slash at the end of the URL and I know a few other CMS's do this as well.

One thing I would say is that if you're working on a back-linking campaign (which I fully recommend investing some time in doing btw) then you would want to link to the URL with the end forward slash in the URL, even for the homepage (http://www.domain.com/). If memory serves me right if you access your page with the forward-slash on the end the web server knows your linking to a folder and not a file so it does one less lookup when serving up the page (making the initial request a little bit quicker).

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/linking-issues-why-a-trailing-slash-in-the-url-does-matter/13021/

Hi Luke,

Glad you appreciated the above .htaccess rules, hopefully that will help.

I think file extensions should only be used for anything that isn't .php, .asp, .html etc.

If nothing else it gives you the freedom to change the underlying technology of the site without having to change all the indexed pages in Google using a 301 redirect.

For instance, if I had: www.domain.com/page1.html then it would be better to have this as www.domain.com/page1/

If I had a file it would be best to keep that as: www.domain.com/files/myfile.pdf without the forward-slash at the end.

Yeah that's fair enough but like I said it's not a deal breaker and there are more important things to spend time changing to benefit your site for search engines. I live by the rule, "If its not broke, don't fix it", until search engines decide that non-www is "better" or they decide to put more weighting on non-www domains then there is no point worrying about it.

In the grand scheme of things I don't see it being a big issue as Google's recent updates to the algorithm are targeted at over optimisation of content and weeding out poor quality pages from the SERP.

My point being that from an SEO perspective there are more important things to concern yourself with to ensure your website is ranking highly in Google for your chosen set of keywords.

Personally I think the non-www vs www seems a bit pointless, people very rarely type in the domain name into the address bar and even if they do type it without www. there will be a redirect in place to add that in for them.

In terms of search engines and the SERP page then yes it may look cleaner, but the end visitor isn't going to sit there and think, "oh this site isn't using www, i'll go to that site instead".

Its all down to personal preference but I would suggest leaving it is www.domain.com as this is what the majority of site seem to do (even SEOMoz!)

You could always force a trailing slash using .htaccess even if someone visits the page without the end slash. Something like this might work, if it doesn't, let me know and I'll get something working for you.

<code>RewriteEngine  On  # Assuming you're running at domain root.  Change to working directory if needed.  RewriteBase  /   # www check  # If you're running in a subdirectory, then you'll need to add that in  # to the redirected url (http://www.mydomain.com/subdirectory/$1  RewriteCond  %{HTTP_HOST}  !^www\.  [NC]  RewriteRule  ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]  #  # Trailing slash check  # Don't fix direct file links  RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_FILENAME}  !-f RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_URI}  !(.*)/$ RewriteRule  ^(.*)$ $1/  [L,R=301]    # Finally, forward everything to your front-controller (index.php)  RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_FILENAME}  !-f RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_FILENAME}  !-d RewriteRule  .* index.php [QSA,L]</code>

You could always setup a multi-site installation of WordPress and use the following plugin.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mu-domain-mapping

This should do what you're after, if it doesn't let me know and I can have a think about how we can sort this out for you.

Whilst I've not personally received that kind of response I can see that issue cropping up on occasion. Easy / Quick gains are short lived and aren't sustainable, SEO is hard work and its not made any easier by Google's algorithm updates but there isn't much we can do about that.

As a community its nice to share ideas and help others and at times I feel that some people on SEO Moz are slow to give credit to good answers when its due, but there's not much you can do about that really.

Thank you Andrea. You've also made some good points as well. Obviously storing WordPress on a sub-domain would seem to be the safest option if the website is an e-commerce site, but having WordPress stored in a separate database really would be a necessity. The last thing you'd want to happen is for their WordPress blog to be hacked and data to be deleted from the blog and the e-commerce system simultaneously.

As far as WordPress vulnerabilities go you need to ensure you use trusted and highly used plugins. There is a plugin called WP Security Scan (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-security-scan) that might outline ways you could secure the blog.

If WordPress security is a potential concern here are a few things I would recommend doing (or getting your hosting company to do for you):

1: Password protect the wp-admin directory with a .htaccess fileBy password protecting the WordPress admin area, if a malicious user tries to access your WordPress admin area login page to launch a brute-force attack, or any other file which resides in the wp-admin directory to send a harmful crafted HTTP request, he is greeted with a server side login prompt and no direct access to WordPress files is possible. Something like this should do, but feel free to suggest improvements:

_   AuthUserFile /etc/httpd/.htpasswd__   AuthType Basic__   AuthName “restricted”__   Order Deny,Allow__   Deny from all__   Require valid-user__   Satisfy any_2: Change the wordpress table prefix from wp_ to something else.This will make sure that a malicious user cannot insert wp_<table_name<strong>> into their scripts to compromise the database.</table_name<strong>3: Install and use the Login LockDown plugin to restrict failed login attempts (brute force attacks) http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/login-lockdown/4: Don't use 'admin' account and use strong passwords.http://www.safepasswd.com is good for generating strong passwords if required.

5. Restrict access to /wp-admin to known IP addresses (Public Home IP and a Public Work IP for instance)

Put a .htaccess file in /wp-admin with the following:

Order Deny,Allow 
      Deny from all
Allow from xx.xx.xx.xx
      Allow from xx.xx.xx.xx

You can use whatismyip.com to file the ip addresses you want to use and just update it as necessary

Personally I would say that having the WordPress blog as a sub-domain would be the simplest and easiest option available to you, you could always have links from the WordPress blog on the sub-domain pointing to content on parklanechampagne.co.uk to pass on some link juice from the blog.

In terms of moving the content across you would need to do a database export of the wordpress blog (if this is possible) you could always do this using WordPress Database Backup plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup) and send the .sql file to an email address.

You would then need to open the .sql file and do a find/replace on "http://www.alastairharrison.me" (note, no / on the end) and replace it with "blog.parklanechampagne.co.uk". Then you can import that .sql file into the database for your main website. If possible I would create a separate database for the blog on parklanechampagne.co.uk just to keep things nice and tidy.

You might want to have an Excel (or shared Google Doc) documenting incoming/inbound links, whether they are followed or no-followed (using manual verification) then showing the domain authority of the linking root domain and the anchor text used on that link.

I use a similar technique when performing manual link building. In Excel I can sort / filter the table to show how many backlinks I have used for specific anchor text and that allows me to see if I'm using a particular phrase too much or too little.

I know this isn't specifically answering your question but I hope this helps in making your SEO efforts a bit easier

That is a mystery and something I personally cannot advise on. It may be that the tool is showing incorrect data?

I know for a fact that the SEO Moz dashboard (where it shows errors, warnings etc) can be incorrect in what it shows. I've had tools that have shown 404 links (that I verified and they were broken) but SEO Moz failed to report them.

Whether this is because the error was fixed before the weekly crawl was done, I don't know but I never rely solely on one tool alone and this has helped find and fix a number of errors in the past.

With Joomla all the url's use $mosConfig_live_site in configuration.php at the start of the URL's and then everything is routed through index.php with query strings.

If you're doing a 301 redirect you might want to have a go at using the following in your .htaccess file, without knowing what your redirecting to what is difficult  to provide a correct answer.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^option=com_content&task=view&id=76&Itemid=110$

RewriteRule ^index.php$ /your-new-page/? [R=301,NC,L]

ID is the content ID and Itemid is the id of the link in your menu to that page.

Hope this helps.

That's useful to know, I thought Google's indexing was the same speed for all sites, are there any best practices for Facebook updates to potentially add SEO value to Facebook updates?

As far as I can see the homepage link is followed, there is no rel="" attribute on the link and the only JavaScript is the onclick="" to open it in a new window.

I've looked through their javascript files in the header and footer and I cannot see any JavaScript that is adding no-follow to the link so I think its safe to say that the link in in-fact followed.

In terms of it being a "search engine friendly" link, I would say that it is, however using JavaScript to load the link in a new window seems a bit overkill. They could have used a rel="external follow" and added Javascript to add 'taget="_blank" to all links with a rel attribute of external.

I agree. You never want to de-index your homepage as (in my opinion) the heart of your website. You're showing willing to co-operate by removing references of the trademark throughout your site and personally I would think that would be sufficient.

If you have pages within your site then I would use a .htaccess 301 redirect for the pages in question and redirect users to the homepage instead, that way you attribute the page rank (link juice) from the removed pages back to the homepage.

If the client has suggested you remove the index from the homepage I would cover your back and write a letter informing them of the negative issues of de-indexing the homepage and just say that it can be done but you hold no responsibility for loss of search engine traffic as a result. It might also be worth adding an annotation within Google Analytics noting the date the homepage was de-indexed so the client (and you) can see the impact it has on the site.

This was raised as a potential issue in another thread I was contributing in, and its better to follow, noindex category pages, paged > 1, and author archives to help avoid duplicate content issues.

It's better to build this functionality into the theme because if you suddenly decided to change the WordPress plugin from Yoast to something else then the new plugin may or may not provide a means of either canonicalising or noindexing the relevant pages.

I wrote an article about this here: http://www.laceytechsolutions.co.uk/blog/wordpress-development/avoiding-duplicate-content-in-wordpress/

I know plugins are persistent through theme changes and that is why they are popular with most users but for something like this hard coding seems to be the best way to go.

In my blog post I use the following code):

 1){
  echo '';
} ?>

';
} ?>

';
} ?>

This could be condensed as follows if you want to use all three:

1 || is_author() || is_trackback())
echo '';
} ?>

I hope this helps

For the record, for my blog SEO Moz is showing no errors and no warnings across the board.