Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi, I migrated a load of product category pages on one of my websites recently to cleaner URLs and to force the crawl I submitted the new URLs (and children) to index via WMT. This was to pick them up quickly - and it worked (within seconds). The old URLs appearing were never a problem. However there are limits to the number of times you can do this so that might be a sticking point for your solution as I'm guessing you have lots of products. Try it with one page (a low traffic and selling product!) and see what happens - and let us know. It's possible Google is holding onto your old URLs because they have a number of inbound links and the crawl will eventually catch up to only display the new URLs if you give it time. Aside from agreeing with the sitemap submission suggestion, I'd also triple check that your 301s / canonicals are set up properly on your website's old URLs by firing Screaming Frog or another crawler at it. George

Just today have read good related article http://www.seobythesea.com/2012/01/sets-semantic-closeness-segmentation-and-webtables/ . Personally i recommend start using HTML 5 semantic tags to help Google better understand structure of you content. Even if there are not ranking factors at this time, once HTML5 became a standard it will. Also agree with Egol - stuff at the top of the page (in html code) a lot more important know.

Make the new page for 2012 and then link it from the 2011 page. Believe me I am all for adding year values on websites, you would be surprised how many people search with the year value it is a crucial element. I would start the social buzz, articles, blogging, link building for the page as valentines day is soon.

Based on my real estate site experience this has not worked in that arena. There is a large MLS (Central) site in a top ten metro area which allows brokerages and agents to pull in MLS and other demo data from their site. Having installed multiple I Frames to pull this data into (only allowed option from MLS site) our sites we have never seen even a micro bump. The site we pull from with the IFrame is a DA of 65. I have put their Iframe on as many as 20 pages on a new site and never pulled a bit of juice. Best of luck

Hi Alex, Great stuff. Thanks for that

I agree with Ryan but question the usability factor of 260 links on your page. Have you done a usability study to check how easily your end users can find the information they are after. It can be daunting for a robot let alone a human to sift through all the sub-menus on your categories. It brings to mind Telstra and Optus sites that take a significant time to find the information your are after because of the huge number of options. I also notice that when you change currency that a prompt is displayed that 'all items in the shopping cart will be deleted' even when the cart is empty. Should you not check if the cart is empty before displaying the message, otherwise the prompt is defunct. If you want to still display them but not have the robots index them late populate them from a JQuery async call on demand as the user hovers over a menu item. You would need to ensure they are linked somewhere or on a sitemap so the search engines can still find them.

Agreed that  I would not dare use it either. You couldn't pay me enough to be part of that type of link exchange, even if all 5400 backlinks were dedicated to my exact niche (not that that many sites in my niche even exist!). If you look at the telalinks site more, you can see they do a poor job of maintaining their own site. There are multiple 404 pages when you click for an example of what a links page would look like, and in a random clicking of some of their sites in the advertising section I found a male porn site, a Chinese medicine site, and designer handbags. If they pay this little attention to their own site, I am really not going to trust what they put into a 1k text file for me to upload.

Hi Alan, Thanks for that. We do want to boost the rank on one domain compared to other domains, so i think this is the way to go. Cheers

i believe it is not just where the content was seen first,  thinks like up time, loading time and other thinks can decide what page will be seen as the original. Rand did and article on it somewhere.