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I have a client that has some site links for their store but on of the links does not appear how it should.  It should be a category that is all Capital letters but instead is appearing as initial Caps.  I am guessing that this is due to anchor text somewhere on the site but for the life of me, I cannot find it appearing like this anywhere.  Anything you think I might be missing here or should try?  This is probably just something stupid I have overlooked.
THANKS!

For #1 you are saying both have the href lang on the page and the Sitemap?

If you have one site with multiple language and locale variations how best should one approach the sitemaps.  Here is what I believe the options to be:

1. sitemap_index.xml which includes all of the difference lang/locale sitemaps on the site

2. create 1 main sitemap that includes the rel=alternate href lang for ever alternate page to the main US version.

3. Do the sitemap_index.xml for all the other sitemaps and also include the rel=alternate href lang in those separate ones as well.

I have these in this order because it goes from least to most work....Thoughts folks?

It has been quite a while since I have seen an article really talk about this and I am wondering if this even matters anymore?  I prefer the look of a - rather than a | but just wondering if this is still a thing... If you know of a recent article going into findings on this supporting one or the other it would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Yes, you are doing the right thing.  You may also want to look at including Meta Tags in the as well. ()

I have been having a hard time finding any decent information regarding the robots.txt syntax that has been written in the last few years and I just want to verify some things as a review for myself.  I have many occasions where I need to block particular directories in the URL, parameters and parameter values.  I just wanted to make sure that I am doing this in the most efficient ways possible and thought you guys could help.

So let's say I want to block a particular directory called "this" and this would be an example URL:

www.domain.com/folder1/folder2/this/file.html  
or
www.domain.com/folder1/this/folder2/file.html

In order for me to block any URL that contains this folder anywhere in the URL I would use:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /this/

Now lets say I have a parameter "that" I want to block and sometimes it is the first parameter and sometimes it isn't when it shows up in the URL.  Would it look like this?

User-agent: *
Disallow: ?that=
Disallow: &that=

What about if there is only one value I want to block for "that" and the value is "NotThisGuy":

User-agent: *
Disallow: ?that=NotThisGuy
Disallow: &that=NotThisGuy

My big questions here are what are the most efficient ways to block a particular parameter and block a particular parameter value.  Is there a more efficient way to deal with ? and & for when the parameter and value are either first or later?  Secondly is there a list somewhere that will tell me all of the syntax and meaning that can be used for a robots.txt file?

Thanks!

So here is a question that may be obvious but wondering if there is some nuance here that I may be missing.

Question:  Consider an ecommerce site that has multiple sites around the world but are all variations of the same thing just in different languages.  Now lets say some of these exist on just a normal .com page while others exist on different ccTLD's.  When you build out the XML Sitemap for these sites, especially the ones on the other ccTLD's, we want to ensure that using

<loc>http://www.example.co.uk/en_GB/"</loc>

<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="en-AU"
href="http://www.example.com.AU/en_AU/"
/>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="en-NZ"
href="http://www.example.co.NZ/en_NZ/"
/>

Would be the correct way of doing this.  I know I have to change this for each different ccTLD but it just looks weird when you start putting about 10-15 different language locale variations as alternate links.  I guess I am just looking for a bit of re-affirmation I am doing this right.</xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br>

Thanks!

So let us assume I am selling an item on my website and it comes in a large array of varieties.  Let us also assume that this item is commonly referred to by two different names.  (i.e. Cover & Case, Car & Automobile, Notepad & Notebook) Both of these names that are used, in regards to this product, have, for the sake of argument here, the exact same search volume.

I want to make sure that I rank for both terms.  In my Title Tags I am currently thinking about the following methodology to help that cause.

"GE Motors Super Fast and Awesome Car / Automobile"

"Ghostwriter Kids Notebook / Notepad"

"Super Soft Pillow Cover / Case"

Notice I have the space in between the words and the / but my question is if this is necessary or not?  What is Google's policy on how they view that / ?

Can I do this and still have Google see it as two different words?

"GE Motors Super Fast and Awesome Car/Automobile"

"Ghostwriter Kids Notebook/Notepad"

"Super Soft Pillow Cover/Case"

Apologies if this is a fairly basic question but cannot seem to find this information.

The problem I see with the rel=alternate tag is how do I set this up for a locale versus just setting this up with the hreflang?  Both are english so it really doesn't qualify as alternate in a different language.

I am running some crawls on some sites and I have a number still pending.  I have one from 7 days ago, a couple from 6 days ago, and 1 from 5 days ago.  The confusing thing is that I have run a few others in that same period that have finished already.  Do I need to restart the crawls or cancel them and start over?

The content is fairly similar as we sell most of the same products in all the locales but the problem I have is this is true for all my regions but the UK is where I am seeing most of the trouble.  The backlink profile is pretty garbage for the UK site.

Would using the rel=alternate tag on the XML sitemap for the .com help any you think?

So I have a client that has a number of sites for a number of different countries with their specific ccTLD.  They also have a .com in the US.  The problem is that the UK site hardly ranks for anything while the .com ranks for a ton in the UK.  I have setup GWT for the UK and the .com to be specific to their geographic locations.  So I have the ccTLD and I have GWT showing where I want these sites to rank.  Problem is it apparently is not working....Any clues as to what else I could do?

So staying confined to my limitations except the robtots.txt file do you think I have better luck with this:

Using a rel=canonical for the next month and allowing the SE's to index as many of those new pages as possible, hoping they get as good of visibility as the old site, and then after a month robots out the old pages, to remove them from the SE's but 302 them to the new pages anyways just for consistency as far as a visitor is concerned.

So I work for an organization that uses virtual domains.  Basically, we have all our sites on one domain and then these sites can also be shown at a different URL.

Example:

sub.agencysite.com/store

sub.brandsite.com/store

Now the problem comes up often when we move the site to a brand's URL versus hosting the site on our URL, we end up with duplicate content.  Now for god knows what damn reason, I currently cannot get my dev team to implement 301's but they will implement 302's. (Dont ask)

I also am left with not being able to change the robots.txt file for our site.  They say if we allowed people to go in a change this stuff it would  be too messy and somebody would accidentally block a site that was not supposed to be blocked on our domain. (We are apparently incapable toddlers)

Now I have an old site, sub.agencysite.com/store ranking for my terms while the new site is not showing up.

So I am left with this question: If I want to get the new site ranking what is the best methodology?

I am thinking of doing a 1:1 mapping of all pages and set up 302 redirects from the old to the new and then making the canonical tags on the old to reflect the new.  My only thing here is how will Google actually view this setup?  I mean on one hand I am saying
"Hey, Googs, this is just a temp thing." and on the other I am saying "Hey, Googs, give all the weight to this page, got it? Graci!"

So with my limited abilities, can anybody provide me a best case scenario?

Alan, I appreciate the help.  I will go with this and see what happens and try to find those videos.  Graci.

Also do you know of any documentation that states that it takes a few passes for a canonical tag to be honored and also for 301's as well?  That would really help me explain my initial thoughts on using the canonical tag.

I get the part about the 301's and I believe we have iis7 but between departments, just not as simple of a change especially regarding the number of products I have to do this for, 800+.

Regarding the links to the old URL, it was my belief that with the canonical tag, that weight should transfer over to the the new URL as well or was I mistaken on that?

I have a website that contains some products and the old structure of the URL's was definitely not optimal for SEO purposes.  So I created new SEO friendly URL's on my site and decided that I would use the canonical tags to transfer all the weight of the old URL's to the New URL's and ensure that the old ones would not show up in the SERP's.  Problem is this has not quite worked.  I implemented the canonical tags about a month ago but I am still seeing the old URL's indexed in Google and I am noticing that the cache date of these pages was only about a week ago.

This leads me to believe that the spiders have been to the pages and seen the new canonical tags but are not following them.  Is this normal behavior and if so, can somebody explain to me why?

I know I could have just 301 redirected these old URL's to the new ones but the process I would need to go through to have that done is much more of a battle than to just add the canonical tags and I felt that the canonical tags would have done the job.  Needless to say the client is not too happy right now and insists that I should have just used the 301's.  In this case the client appears to be correct but I do not quite understand why my canonical tags did not work.

Examples Below-

Old Pages:

www.awebsite.com/something/something/productid.3254235

New Pages:

www.awebsite.com/something/something/keyword-rich-product-name

Canonical tag on both pages:

rel="canonical" href="http://www.awebsite.com/something/something/keyword-rich-product-name"/> Thanks guys for the help on this.

Gianluca,

Really appreciate the feedback here.  So the one thing I have a question of then is how this rel=alternate tag would look on my .com as this is where I am apparently getting a little confused.  I would basically  list my other English versions there correct and the same for my co.uk, etc...?

I am wondering about the efficiency of the rel=alternate tag and how well it works at specifically localizing content.

Example:

I have a website on a few ccTLD's but for some reason my .com shows up on Google.co.uk before my .co.uk version of my page.  Some people have mentioned using rel=alternate but in my research this only seems to be applicable for duplicate content in another language.  If I am wrong here can somebody please help me better understand this application of the rel=alternate tag.  All my research leads me to rel=alternate hreflang= and I am not sure that is what I want.

Thanks,
Chris Birkholm