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Hi CleverPhd and Dmitri, You are both right, not only Facebook but all other servers are configured to ignore the extra slashes in the URL. This can be a problem for sure for crawlers, as they would treat each URL as different (if asked to index). Moreover, there are infinite number of URL you can produce with this example. As per URI (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt) standard, each slash has a significance. If you test the same phenomenon with Ealier browsers of IE, you will realise that they don't reproduce the same effect, the pages would be missing elements are they fail to find the location of the resources required for the page. The problem is with the how our servers are configured these days to ignore the extra slash and produce the same page as a result. There a quick fix on Apache with mod_rewrite code (you can add more lines to cover 3 or more slashes) which would produce 301 redirect to the right page <code>RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.*)//(.*)$ RewriteRule . %1/%2 [R=301,L]</code> I hope this helps, Regards, Vijay

When Google puts out recommendations like this, they rarely lead people on a self-destructive path. If JS and CSS files could contain relevant information to help Google crawl or index your site more appropriately, then I say let them see those. Sorry I have no data to back up my position, but the articles you listed make a good case. I read a similar article weeks ago and unblocked JS and CSS from robots.txt, but I haven't really thought about this since.

Totally agree with you, great points!

Thanks!

Hello, I've done this. It had absolutely no impact on our listings. I did exactly what you are suggesting to do. I'm not saying it'll have no impact for YOU because I don't know that, but it didn't impact me so is likely not to impact you too. If that makes sense!!! All the best, Amelia

Googlebot don't come only from Mountain View... Said that I would hide those links behind Ajax: that way you avoid any risk; that way you don't evaporate Link Equity

Hey There, I think you're probably correct in assuming this is just a hiccup with GWT, particularly if the sitemap was unreachable for some time. Have you actually looked at line 697 of the sitemap?  Throw it into Notepad++ and check it out.  Maybe there IS something going on with one of your post titles including some weird characters.  It would be worth investigating if you're overly worried about it (which you shouldn't be honestly). I'd dismiss the error in GWT and see if it crops up again over the next month or so.  If it does (of if you're hyper-vigilant) take a look at the Sitemap and see if you can discern anything different/wrong about line 697.  Sounds like there isn't if the validator didn't pick it up. Either way this should be a low priority item on your webmaster radar!  Sitemaps are mostly for indexing purposes and if the URL on line 697 (and all other URLs too, I suppose) is/are getting indexed you're good to go anyhow (I'd bet a bottle of whiskey that it's being indexed anyway if your site is being crawled regularly). Hope that helps, Jacob @ Distilled.

Setting up an internal author bio would be, in my opinion, a credibility enhancer for the particular article/story; however, in order to take advantage of Google's Authorship feature in the SERPs, the author would need to have a Google+ profile. So essentially, I don't think setting up the profiles would have much (if any) benefit from a search engine perspective. If the authors set up a Google+ profile in the future, you could always integrate it at a later time.

Aw, thanks. Glad you found some value in my comments. And, thanks for raising an interesting point for discussion Good luck!

Well, do you want to get included in these search engines? http://media.entireweb.com/images/pages/express_inclusion/ewpartners.png If not, I wouldn't worry about it. Those are not exactly major search engines they're talking about (the previous link was found at http://entireweb.com/express_inclusion/features/). Google and Bing both have ways to submit your site to them for free, if they haven't already picked up on it. Bing's index powers Yahoo these days, so by submitting to just those two you have over 92% of the US search market taken care of (per August Hitwise numbers at http://www.experian.com/blogs/hitwise/2012/08/10/searchenginesjuly2012/) So, I'd save your money and time on that one.

Thanks - I think I actually just answered my own question. I was initially doing queries on on the URL as I wanted to see if the page was in the index to start with.  The words that were being highlighted in the text ad on the right, much of it was related to the words in the URL. I went and searched on some keywords that we rank well on.  When I did this, other parts of the page were highlighted in the preview snippet.  I found some cases where the title was highlighted and others where text from the paragraph was highlighted on the page. So, it looks like Google is taking whatever keyword query you are entering and then when you look at the preview for the page, it decides what text on the page to highlight. If you want to see this in action here is what I did.  Take a page that ranks well for a key phrase.  Search the URL and then look at what text Google highlights.  It is probably some text that is in your URL.   When for that same page, search on the key phrase that you rank well for.  It will highlight a different section.   You would optimally want a page that ranks for keywords that are not in your domain name etc. My initial concern was that Google was not doing a good job of highlighting the right part of the page.  Looks like they actually do decent work on this. That said, thanks for the tip for checking the CSS layout.  I can see where we need to move some things around - thanks Irving!