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Thanks, Anthony, for your response. Just to clarify how our CMS works, however, internships-abroad is actually a subdirectory of gooverseas.com. Removing the slash is not possible in this situation.

Does this alter your advise?

Thanks!

Hey Moz Community,

I'm looking for some URL structure advice for a new directory of a website. We're trying to rank for the term 'internships abroad in <country>'</country> We have roughly 100 pages targeting specific countries.

Right now the URL structure is www.gooverseas.com/internships-abroad/china, but some of my colleagues believe this structure would be better: www.gooverseas.com/internships-abroad/intern-in-china. I personally prefer the shorter structure, but we couldn't come to any agreement so we thought we'd pose the question to the community.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

I don't think some of the responses in this thread have given you adequate information to solve your problem. 301's and rel canonical are there to solve two very different problems, and when used correctly, can solve a lot of different SEO problems.

In your example you have two URLs which I am going to assume have the exact same information on them. Classic duplicate content situation. Ideally, I think you would want to delete one of these pages and create a 301 to redirect any users and links to the other page. This will focus all your content and links onto a single page and your PR and rankings will rise. I would choose to keep the page that has the better keywords in the URL, and no, it doesn't matter if you have the .html at the end of the URL. With or without, the actual keywords in the URL are more important.

The use of rel="canonical" has a very different purpose. Say for whatever reason you want to keep both of your URL's even though they have the exact same content (testing conversation rates, for example). In this case you would use a rel="canonical" on the page you don't want to rank in the search engines, pointing to the page you do want to rank for.

On http://www.mysite/blue/index.html for example, you would create this tag:  <rel="canonical" href="http://www.mysite/blue/">eCommerce sites have to do this a lot.</rel="canonical">

Rel canonical should not be used when you're trying to move content from one URL to another. That's what 301s are for.

What's your PageRank? I have seen evidence that websites with high PR can get away with a higher number of links on their homepage. Just look at the New York Times or similar sites. They have 100's of thinks on their front page, but Google will crawl all of them because of their authority.

But to address your question, no, nofollowing internal links has been shown to be ineffective and frowned upon by Google (see link in other reply). Follow everything and really think about the value of each link and whether it really needs to be there.

Good luck!

Andrew

Yeap, we noticed the same thing. A lot of these new links turned out to be weird files. I'm hoping this is just a minor glitch with the latest update of the linkscape, and in the months to come will start to die off.

Good luck!

Andrew

Do you have a link to that post? We've been noticing the same thing on our domain and it's got us worried as well..

Thanks!

Andrew

We noticed the same decrease on three of our websites as well, and some of the competitors we track. One of our websites also went dramatically up (with many new questionable links). I believe this latest update of the link graph had some major changes that altered the domain authorities on a lot of websites. These numbers are all relative to everyone else, so hopefully this isn't an accurate reflection of how our websites are performing.

Good luck! Happy optimizing

Andrew

Hey everyone. I just checked our website in OSE with the latest update and noticed some strange numbers. The number of linking domains skyrocketed from 300 to 785 which definitely caught me off guard. Like all good SEOers I work hard to get links, but in a typical month I usually get between 40 and 50. To suddenly jump up by over 300 seems odd.

Digging deeper, I noticed that some of the incoming link domains could be considered less than trustworthy (pages filled with links), while others I couldn't find at all on the page in question. I also never ever asked for any of these links, nor did anyone on my team.

Should I be worried? I've heard of websites who purposely gain bad links to their competitors in order to penalize them. Is there an easy way to find out if this is going on? Could this possibly be a problem with OSE and just reporting non-existant links?

Thanks for your feedback!

Andrew

BTW, the website in question is www.gooverseas.com

Thanks Keri, that was helpful!

I am wondering what the best options are for video hosting websites (YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, etc.). Which host has the best interface that you would want to use to embed into your site? Any advice you have in regards to optimizing the videos on our site, then that would be much appreciated. Thanks!  And our YouTube channel is here http://www.youtube.com/user/gooverseas

I've since realized that links from pages with PA less that 20 are pretty worthless, and not worth spending too much time getting. If you can get them with minimal effort, than go right ahead, but a link with a PA of 50+ will pay dividends in the long run.

Rel canonical doesn't tell engines not to crawl the page (the mata tag nofollow does that), but rather just tells the engine not to index the page in place of the 1st page of your pager results. This helps reduce duplicate content penalties and consolidates your PA onto a single URL. I could be wrong, but I imagine you would also prefer organic users to go to the first page of results rather than, say, page 6.

The result is that engines will still crawl your pages and find your listings (and index those), but only index the first page of your listing page.

I hope that helps to clarify things!

Andrew

Worth a shot. Crawl bots usually work by following links from page to the next. If links links no longer exist to those pages, then Google will have a tough time finding those pages and de-indexing them in favor or the correct pages.

Good luck!

Thanks for your reply! I'll keep plugging away and aiming for higher PA links

Cheers,

Andrew

As long as the duplicate content pages no longer exist and you've set up the 301 redirects properly, this shouldn't be a long term problem. It can sometimes take Google a while to crawl through 1000's of pages to index the correct pages. You might want to include these pages in a Sitemap to speed up the process, particularly if there are no longer any links to these pages from anywhere else. Are you using canonical tags? They might also help point Google in the right direction.

I don't think a no cache meta tag would help. This is assuming the page will be crawled and by that point Google should follow the 301 and cace that page.

Hope this helps! Let me know how the situation progresses.

Andrew

It is my understanding that canonical tags help prevent duplicate content by telling the crawl bot where the original content exists. Say I want to repost an article from Seomoz on my site that I think my readers would find useful. If I did this without a canonical tag Google would penalize me for posting unoriginal content. To avoid this I would include the original URL back to the Seomoz post in canonical tag to tell Google where I am getting this content.

An internal example would be on pages that include URL parameters (pagers for example: www.example.com/product-page and www.example.com/product-page?page1. Here you would want to include a canonical tag to the clean URL).

I believe nofollow tags alone don't help with duplicate content issues. You need to also include a noindex tag. Combined, this is an aggressive and effect way to keep duplicate content out of Google's index and avoid penalizations.

Hope that helped explain things a little better!

Andrew

Like many of you, I've spent a lot of time in Open Site Explorer analyzing our links and our competitors, and looking for more linking opportunities. Recently we've been focusing our SEO efforts on gaining links from high value .edu domains and so far we've been very successful. The DA of these links are high (80+), but the links are also coming through on low PA pages (typically 10-35). Are these links still worth while? When does a link not become worth it?