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Hi Daniel, Having a friendly/readable url structure will surely help you in several ways. You can read more about it here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/url http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development In the second article check the "Url construction guidelines" part. But before you start implementation on such a development, try to check how you could avoid an url structure redesign failure. (Such as forgetting about 301 redirects from the old structure to the new one). I hope it helped. Gr. Keszi

For conditional based redirection you'll want to use a 302 or by dynamically serving the right HTML. Things to consider though: Which version will be indexed by Google? Will it be cached? Does the professional version require a login? https? What user hurdles could there be? Cookie off, not executing java script? Is the page crawler friendly? (Lynx test). How's this fit with the business plan? Etc. If it's a paid professional service, it'd probably make more business sense to keep it behind a login. Otherwise your client could be giving away the keys. Moz.com itself is a good example though of a workable model... Here in the Q&A content is being generated that's basic / accessible, but the professional tools are served as part of an account based login.

I believe it is because Sephora is using a recommended 3rd party product review aggregator, Bazaarvoice. They most likely share their product reviews with Google through a data feed file and Google understands enough to implement the reviews in the Organic search. I've only seen reviews shared this way for the purpose of includes reviews in Google Shopping (previously, PLAs), but not organic search.

Just an update for everyone. We use sitemaps, rather than meta tags, to do the circular href lang mapping for our localized domains. In doing so, we've found the HREFLANG XML Sitemap Tool from The Media Flow particularly AMAZING! Talk about saving time! Just make a csv file with a comma for each language/locale, upload it, and then download a zip file with all your sitemaps. Beautiful. watch?v=f85sAafNIUw

The solution I came up with was: Create a list of all the source URLs you have, and all the destination URLs you want Create all the destination URL pages Work out what the Ugly versions of all hashbang (pretty) URLs should be and record them (ref: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/specification) Implement 301 Redirects for the Ugly URLs Deploy a Sitemap with Pretty URLs Submit Your Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools Wait for Google to re-index all your pages Check that the new URL(s) show up in Google search results too Clean up – Remove the pretty URLs from the sitemap Job done! I created a detailed page on this with examples on my blog at www.thedriversgarage.com/web-technology/redirecting-hashbang-urls-wix-urls/ Disclaimer - Make your own enquiries and do your own tests.  I'm a pragmatist, I really don't care if this complies to standards.  It worked for me and that's all I cared about.  Google, etc. may process this stuff differently in the future. Do your own tests.

I think that it's generally understood that bots read page code, they don't "do" page code like the browser does, so the canonical is read, regardless of the other code on the page. This wouldn't be the case for 301's that trigger server side, the bot would then never reach the page to read the canonical. HTH

The end goal should be to leverage as much benefit from the pages as you can for your existing business direction without confusing or tricking your visitors. The approach to your issue might depend on what type of content this is. For example, if your content consists of well written articles that are relevant to the visitors that are still reaching these pages, you might try and leverage that traffic through some well placed call-outs or advertisements for your new service/products/blog. The visitor gets the information they searched for, and you have a small potential to get some benefit from your past work. If your content consists of eCommerce pages for outdated or discontinued products and you have similar or replacement products, 301 these pages to your newer relevant product. Consider explaining to the user why they have been sent to a page containing a different product and that the new product is the replacement for the older model. If you don't have replacement products, and your pages aren't useful content, then you have to ask yourself why you care about the pages getting a lot of traffic. You are hesitant to cut it off because hey, people are visiting the pages and that helps your site overall right? Not if it's bringing your site traffic that doesn't convert. If you're trying to optimize your site for a completely new set of terms, the old pages shouldn't hurt you too much as long as you are handling them correctly. Google doesn't like it when you try to trick it into thinking that a page/site is about subjects that it's not really about. You don't mention anything about the new business but I am curious, if it is such a different direction, why not a new website altogether?

Perhaps you could try focussing on the exclamation mark (!). That you use the HTACCESS file to rewrite the url with the exclamation mark to the url without? Something like: RewriteRule ^!(.*) http://www.site.com/locations/$1 [R=301,L] The exact syntaxis for this statement should come close to this one. I'm not sure that this will work but it might work. Regards Jarno

I think an overall better solution would be to work on developing a strong enough website that the site is given sitelinks, indicating a stronger brand that has extra real estate space at the top of the SERP. With subdomains, you might be able to rank second or third as well and I've definitely seen this happen (although can't replicate it right now). However, Google usually tries to show relatively diverse results, even for company names. You might have trouble ranking content on the same domain, even presented as subdomains, in both top positions. It's more common for Google to pick a social profile, a separate company resource and perhaps a review site for the top results, rather than listing link after link from the same root domain.

On one URL. How I have always tried to explain it to people before. If you have two urls and a person is searching in google, you are leaving it upto Google to pick the correct page to display. Google isn't perfect and may show the user the wrong URL and not help the user. However if all the information is on one url, then you don't need to worry about this. Plus you don't need to build links into two pages, just one page (hopefully getting you a better page authority and ranking). Plus it adds fresh unqiue content onto otherwise product pages, which can be similar across the web If you worried about not ranking because of the word review missing from the URL, this is only a small issue but the benefits of the above IMO out weight the slight disadvantage. Great article by Econsultancy on benefits of Reviews on product pages: https://econsultancy.com/blog/9366-ecommerce-consumer-reviews-why-you-need-them-and-how-to-use-them#i.1mpjwvuml2epzz

Hey Daniel, I doubt that sending radio traffic to the old URL would have any impact on which page is ranking in Google. Another thing you should do is add canonical tags to all of your pages. That will also help Google tell which version of the page is the correct version to show, and also helps prevent a lot of common duplicate content issues.

Hi Federico, I have a follow-up question that maybe you can help with.  What would be the best way to prevent these product pages from showing up in search results?  One of their products that's only available in Canada is showing up as a top page for US users. Thanks!

Hi Daniel, You are correct using canonical's is for content that is the same or very close to the same. Here's a good video from google themselves if you have 20 minutes to spare https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en -Nick

Hi Daniel, You've gotten some good responses to your question. Do you have any additional questions or comments you would like to add?

This is generally an exception Google supports - for example, they say that you can use rel=prev/next and rel=canonical in conjunction, where one handles pagination and the other handles sorts/filters. In the case of a sort (like ascending/descending) the actual results could be very different, but the intent is still legitimate. They generally understand you're trying to clean up these pages. In a perfect world, these filters wouldn't create unique URLs, honestly, but now that they already exist, you have to manage them. The other option would just be to META NOINDEX those filter URLs or set them up in parameter handling in Google Webmaster Tools. I tend to prefer the canonical here, personally.

Daniel, All of the tools I know about for checking outbound links only really tell you whether the link is working or not. They are designed to look for error codes so you can update your outbound links that go to 404 pages and such. There is a ScrapeBox plugin that will tell you how many links the page you're linking to has, which could give you a general idea of whether you're linking to a directory, links page, etc... but I'm not sure how helpful that will be to you. As Federico mentioned, you may check with the people at Link Research Tools to see if you can customize one of their products to get the job done, but I don't think it works that way out of the box. Good luck and if you find something please post here so we know about it too!

Agree with Dave. Since you are doing one-for-one 301 redirects then you are delivering the user to the page that best matches their intent. If you were redirecting all of these to the home page, then that could be a problem.

excellent link. Thanks for sharing.

Try using ScreamingFrog (app for mac and pc). It's free and will crawl your site and list all the errors an dresponse codes 9inc 404s) you can export these as a CSV file. HTH Steve