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Best if you give the urls but I would say its a "Good Thing TM" .

A rich page of content around a keyword topic with mulitple media types is the way im building my content now - even if it doesnt work for Search Engines, its nice for people (crazy, huh?)

I would 301 and not rel canoncial. Less chance of error or things getting out of hand. Also, its the correct way to canonicalise urls. The rel canonical tag is for different situations (sorting order etc)

If your rewriting, chop off the .html bits for style

Its rare that a directory will help you in any way. Have you read the SEOmoz blog? Go and look for posts on Penguin and you will see that these types of links are more likely to hurt you than to harm you

Hi Brandon

I have worked with it only once and it seemed ok. Our pretty mediocre devs managed to make it work.

We used the Joomsef component to handle most of the on page seo stuff. Maybe have a read up around it if you plan to use it

Its not as bad as .net

S

I normally work on around 60 days (or two runs of the crawler)

http://www.ethicalcommunity.com/eco-shop/coffee/papua-new-guinean-coffee-454g-10261

All these coffee pages look like crappy duplicate content - you have such a tiny percentage of actual content product description vs all the other stuff on the page - on product pages strip out all the extraneous crap and just focus on selling your product

Also the site is very slow for me, run yslow/google page speed optimiser and see what you can improve

Also check woopra-ns.com

Wanting a quick fix with is what got you into the mess you  are in in the first place. Maybe consider not doing more of the same

Do something amazing and get lots of brand links

Personally I like to have links open in the same tab, I will open them in a separate tab if I want them there.

But like Alan, Ive never heard of it being an issue one way or the other

help@seomoz.org is probably the right place for that. They are pretty quick to follow up

S

I think that navigation issues may well be what trip you up.

http://www.ethicalcommunity.com/eco-shop/buy/Food-and-Drink when I navigate through the product pages, I am not seeing the html changing to reflect the new contents, the html reflects the coffee content of the first page

However when I copy+paste the url directly to page 3 I get the correct html for the products on the page

Ajax isnt my strong point, but you need to aim to give engines access to your products via clear categorisation and pagination. Has your developer considered using a hashbang (#!)?

Here's a SEOmoz post that may help http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-allow-google-to-crawl-ajax-content

Let me know if this is the issue, interested to know

S

Multiple anchor texts are likely to appear spammy and not editorially given (in the case you describe, they would not be editorially given)

I suggest you place links in a natural manner rather than trying to cram them on the page

S

I would write a great single page of foreign language content on each of the country TLDs. The stick in a single english language paragraph with exact text links back to your site

You rank for your terms in the foreign language
You get exact text links back
You get 10 unique domain links

Heres one I made earlier http://www.mendeley.de/

Note the footer is in English, How Mendeley works is the exact text links I wanted to point back to deeper pages on mendeley.com

Also note that the language in the html is correctly changed to DE

But, they didnt change the title or description from the English. and they made up some German words instead of using the real ones (sigh)

where are you based? what is your budget? how big is the site likely to be? to maintain? What are the KPIs? Why not just php? What do you mean by SEO?

More importantly, what was wrong with their website if it needs to be redesigned from scratch? This sounds like a company that doesnt actually know what it problems are and is just going to wave a redesign wand and hope for the best i.e. not a good company to build a website for!

It sounds like theyve made a whole load of decisions on what the solutions should be, without knowing what the problems are.

S

Can you implement on a section or on a % of your pages first? then you can test the effect without risking your whole catalogue

I wouldnt go within a million miles of those SEO directories...

1 there is no point having canonical on a 404 page. I would say its a very confusing signal to bots

2 don't always 301. 404 exists for a reason. In most cases I will 301 old pages but there are cases where letting pages 404 is the correct way forward

Use the wiki you get with gmail

under "Sites", make one with a wiki style

i normally use {H1 assuming its unique} | Section | Brand.com

or if ist too long or the sections dont add menaingful context

{H1 assuming its unique} | Brand.com

If you are incredibly well know and trusted site in a spammy community then go with Brand.com | {H1 assuming its unique}

If you are sure it has a penalty, I would 404 the page and get the links removed if possible