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Hey Trevor -

A couple of things here. First, I would never recommend that someone use obfuscated Javascript on links in order to make it so that the crawlers cannot see them.

Also, I think the "too many links on a page" guideline is not one to follow too strictly. It's not an "error" in the Moz Pro Campaigns because it is a guideline. Depending on your site, you can have many more than 100 links on a page and be fine. Or, you can use other ways (iframes, nav behind Javascript) to have these links available to the crawlers.

Just remember (as I am sure you do) that these links will not pass any link juice and you will need to use other ways to get your pages indexed and to have a good crawler-friendly architecture.

Just my two cents. I don't think you'd be cloaking, but it's starting to get a bit iffy. I'd steer clear.

Hey Techboy -

Assuming your site validates fine using the Rich Snippets tool,  as you said, unfortunately I don't think there is much you can do. I heard Stefan Weitz from Bing talk about it, and he said that it's a slow rollout because they want to get it right, and they are also wanting to see how people use it. Also, the search engines are giving priority to brands and well-known people (especially with rel=author markup), so the little guys are having a harder and harder time getting the semantic markup to show in the SERPs.

He even went so far as to say that we should mark up our sites now, so that when Schema is rolled out more we'll be ahead of the curve (and he insinuated that it will affect rankings positively as well).

Sorry I can't provide an actionable answer, but right now with the semantic markup it can be a bit of a waiting game.

Hi -

The first three seem to make sense to me. If I were you, I would treat Property Listings like a Place. Place also has GeoCoordinates as an Itemprop, so you can mark up the location from within that Schema as well.

Depending on what kind of property it is, you could also use the Thing > Place > Residence Schema for certain parts. It's a bit more specific than Place.

Hope this helps a bit!

You can also use tools like SEMrush to find the keywords that your site (or a competitors site!) is ranking well for, ie their top keywords. The free version gives you a snapshot, and I'm sure the paid version gives you even more.

Anthony is right though, since parts of your site individually probably rank for longterm. The idea of taking the keywords driving traffic, as found in Analytics, and backtracking them through a tracking tool is a great idea. And these are the terms you should care about as well. The sweetest thing, to me at least, is finding a term that I rank well for, that drives traffic well, that I have not optimized for at all, yet could easily gain more traffic on.

Good luck!

I'm not positive about how they'll deal with it, but why take a chance? It won't be that hard for them to change it from a single to a normal quotation, especially since it's on your test server.

Better safe than sorry.

Rodrigo -

Thanks, and thanks for the follow-up. To be honest with you though...I have not seen or experienced anything about this. I tend to follow the suggested rules with code

So my answer is "I don't know". Anyone else know?

I also agree with you on the meta tags. Robots.txt is best used for disallowing folders and such, not pages. For instance, I might do a "Disallow: /admin" in the robots.txt file, but would never block a category page or something to that effect. If I wanted to remove it from the index, I'd also use the meta "noindex,follow" attribute. Good point!

Rodrigo -

Good question. The syntax does in fact matter, though not necessarily for SEO rankings. It matters because if you screw up your robots.txt, you can inadvertently disallow your whole site (I did it last week. Not pretty. Blog post forthcoming).

To get to your question, it is usually best to put the "Sitemap: " line at the bottom of the robots.txt, but it is not required to have it there, so far as I know.

You do not need the Allow: / parameter, because if you leave it out, Google assumes that you want everything indexed except what is put in the "Disallow: " lines.

In your case, you are disallowing "http://www.site.com/form.htm" and everything in your cgnet_directory folder. If you want everything in these folders hidden from crawlers...you have done exactly what you need to do.

I'm still learning about this, so I'm open to any correction the rest of the community has.