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Suggesting subfolders without considering the peculiarities of the site jusrt because it's a "best practice" is not the ideal thing to do. Even if subfolders have sure advantages, their use can be not technically affordable or even good for effectiveness.
Hypothetically they could, if they respond to all the characteristics a site must have to rank in the first positions for the given keywords:
I know that Rand did studies last year where also the domain terminations was somehow influencing rankings, but if I remember well the correlation metrics were not so to think the termination as an primary factor.
Repeating myself, I think we don't see those domain names ranking mostly because people tend to prefer domains like .es, .co.uk, .
About the .com.au, that's the main ccTLD for Australia
Actually you may think in building a Global page on Facebook. As you can read in the page I linked, with Global Pages:
Each brand's Global Pages structure will include local Pages for specific markets (single- or multi-country regions) and a default Page for all other markets. More details on this new framework:
The problem is that the requirement really are for strong global brands, as you can see in detail in this post.
Honestly, I looked a lot into the Facebook Business pages and I was not able to see an explicit link for creating a global page. So, I consider right what some experts say that you have to contact Facebook directly via email.
However, if your brand is global, but not with such a big budget so to afford a Global Brand Page, then the only solution is creating as many regional Brand pages as you need.
This is very easy. Just create a page normally, but then indicate in the creation process the region your Page targets for each regional pages.
Hi David,
I too prefer the play.com example. And no... Search Engines does not consider the content into tabs as hidden, because - if you think it - it is not hidden at all as the users can click on the tab and read the content.
If the users weren't able to access to content in the tabs, that would be hidden.
Amazon model, on the other side, is ugly to see, but somehow it is such a "visual trademark" that people do not care to scroll the page... but it is Amazon: I don't believe that a new site would have the same condiscendence.
Likes are not a ranking factor :D... so thinking they are the reason your UK Facebook page is outranking the German one in google.de is not a correct assumption.
I would look to more classic reason, as the backlinks your UK Facebook page may have and the DE one not.
Try to build links pointing to your German FB page from German webistes. This should be enough for making understand Google to present your DE FB page to German users instead of the UK one.
Finally, the hreflang annotations (presence or not) do not have any influence of how your Facebook pages rank or not.
Mmm... not a line answer question this one 
Your answer point to the right direction: "links".
But it is not just the numbers of links to a page. If it was just that you could simply rely on the link you put in a forum signature and then "spam" the forum with usefulness posts.
I warmly suggest you to check the 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors by SEOmoz, that offers you insights also about the authority of page issue.
To resume, what really count are the unique root domains linking to the page and, to be even more precise, the unique C-Block linking to a page. In fact, the more a page is linked by different sites the better.
But that is just one factor. In fact a page that owns backlinks from authoritative domains will have more authority than a page who receives backlinks from not authoritative domains. Beware that this doesn't not mean that if a page as just one link from one site, even though it is the New York Times, that that page will rank better than other that has 100s of unique domain names linking, even if they are less authoritative.
Finally, if you mean with authority of a page the PA metrics of SEOmoz, remember that it considers also many other factors, between them also on page ones. To understand better what is the Page Authority metric, check this page: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/page-authority
Is a course going to be tagged as being about two or more kind of categories or just one? For instance, an SEO course could be put both as "Internet" and "Marketing".
if you reflect your is the same problem that some eCommerce have with products' classification, so the solution I suggest you is to do what in eCommerce is common to do in these case or to avoid these cases:
www.domain/course-title/
That way you avoid any possible duplication due to assigning a course to more than category and avoid potential links to both course's pages and - now that it is important - that the eventual social sharing and signals get split in two identical pages.
If the quotes are just part of the content and not a big part of the content, I would not worry too much about eventual problems, always if you cite the source of the quote.
If the quote substantially means the highest % of the page content, but you want the page to be indexed, then the use of the canonical tag with the original source in it, it's not the solution, because the SE will filter out your page and show the source only. In that case I think that a link back to the source could be enough.
There could be an alternative, but it is just an idea as i don't know if it could work in your case: to use a schema (microdata) in order to better specify the source to the SE: http://schema.org/Article and http://schema.org/BlogPosting
Then, if you don't want to have the quoting pages be seen at all, then simply don't make them indexable with noindex,follow or use the canonical tag with the source url in.
Casey is correct.
If you already have written new pages, there's no need to update the old ones. Redirect them 301 to the most consistent new page you have.
Anyway, in the future, try to consider to use one of tips I suggested in one my last comment in the SEOmoz blog: you can read them here > http://www.seomoz.org/blog/new-links-old-pages-whiteboard-friday#jtc165757
Psst... I've seen the site and, sincerely, it is one of the best sites about wedding photography I've seen so far. Just a suggestion: being the photos so important both in the site and the blog, I warmly suggest you to add the Pinterest button to your site and to partecipate in Pinterest as I truly believe that it is the social network perfect for a business like yours.
To call John Mu simply as a Google Employee is to undervalue him, as he is the Webmaster Trends Analyst in Google :).
So... knowing who he is, somehow makes even more relevant what he says.
Hi Bradley,
let's start with the first doubt... when you talk about a "landing page for the above categories", do you mean one landing for all 5 categories, or one landing page per category.
In the second case, the same /category1/, /category2/... should be treated and considered as landing pages.
In the first case, instead, your idea of having the landing on the same level of the architecture as the home page is formally correct, but - IMHO - it would be poor UX solution, because your are obliging the users to pass trough one possibly useless click in order to arrive to the category they are interested.
I also did not really understand your second question, but normally if you have to start adding subdirectories, than the URL of a subdirectory should be something like this:
www.domain.com/directory1/subdirectory2
as saying, you will add a second level of deepness in your navigational architecture.
Please explain better the "parameter" thing.
Said that, I would prefer using the subfolder option, which is the cleaner one.
Hola Marcus,
everything is correct in your approach.
The only thing you didn't tell is if you are going to use an .es domain or a generic one.
Saying because a .es domain name would automatically target Spain as main country (so, no need to geotarget yourself the site on GWT).
Yes, when content is in two languages, you don't fall - quite obviously - into the duplicated content issue. Said that, it is better implementing the hreflang in order to present the correct es or en URLs to the users depending on the language set in their browsers.
Note that doing so you will target differently all the the searches done in Spanish and in English, let's say, for instance, that you will "optimized" also for searches done in Spanish from Argentina.
Hence, if you are only interested in Spain for whatever reason, than the hreflang should be set es "ES-es" and "ES-en" (Spain-Spanish and Spain-English).
Finally, you can use hreflang or with the code solution or with the sitemaps solution. Using both is redundant.
Infinite scroll may be useful for users, because they don't need to click click and click.
From an SEO point of view, yes it may be a problem if you don't set it up correctly.
Adam Sherk wrote a magnificent post about how to correctly set from an SEO point of view the use of infinite scrolling:
http://www.adamsherk.com/seo/seo-tips-for-infinite-scrolling
From a page performance point of view, I also suggest you to use - sorry I cannot remember the correct naming right now - that function that "retard" the upload of the content until it is now visible by the user due to the scroll down itself.
That way you are not uploading all the content of the page at the same time but just when it is really needed by the user.
I don't agree that much Adam about the useless nature of the About Us page. It's in that page that a company usually share its Why.
Said that... treat all these pages as "unisex". With that I mean: create just one page with an unique URLs and use it both for the woman version of the site and the male one.
If that is not possible, use the rel="canonical" choosing one URL as the canonical one.
2. In your pages you should NOT have 2 hreflang meta tags. Each page should only have one tag. In the thai page a tag pointing to the english version and in the english page a tag pointing to the thai version. Right now you have 2 hreflang tags on each page.
I'm sorry, but I have to correct you:
the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" must me also self-referencial, because you must tell Google that the URL it is crawling, you want it to be shown for queries done in determined language and from a determined country.
Hi Adnan,
remember that the rel="canonical" is not a directive, hence it is not saying "Bots don't index this URL, index this other one", but "Could you bots don't index this URL, and instead index this other one?".
The canonical tag is a suggestion, that usually Google, Bing and Yahoo! respect.
But the canonicalized URLs still are crawled... and for that reason Roger Mozbot alerts you about the duplicate content issue (as well as it notices you that they have the canonical tag set up.
If you know that they are ok, simply don't care of them.
But knowing how Mozbot has a limited budget crawl, if you really want the best from its crawling service, disallow just for it those kinds of duplicates via robots text.
Ciao Dario,
first of all everything said by Samuel is correct.
Said that, I would not care that much about the domain name being your own name. All the contrary! Use it for improving your personal brand: it doesn't exist a better way to make remember your name to other marketers than having it in the domain itself.
Related to what multi-language option, I consider that the subfolder one should be the best. With WPML combined with WordPress SEO by Yoast you can optimize all the SEO factors also for the /en/ subfolders.
Using the subfolder option will help the English version gaining some link equity from the Italian version, hence starting appearing for not too competitive queries.
Said that, you should start putting in action a good inbound strategy in order to outreach other sites and, especially, others mid to high influencing experts in your niche, so to create bonds and co-marketing opportunity.
Again, work on your personal brand... which means being very active on social. And, remember, social is not just Social Networks. It is also being proactive in communities (blogs and forums) and helpful (i.e.: answering questions in Quora).
The answer given by Marcus is 100% perfect.
I'm answering to your doubt about "the compatibility with Moz Analytics", and the answer is that you have not to worry about that, because does not exist anything like a compatibility issue for tools like Moz, Raven or others suites.
On the other hand, remember that the Moz crawler still doesn't consider mark-ups like the hreflang, so it doesn't report advices or mistake related to their implementation.
If you want to verify if the hreflang has been correctly implemented, look to these tools:
Farsi is Persian
Then, and this is for CleverPHD, the hreflang, albeit suggested, is not strictly needed because Google is quite good in understanding that they are two different languages. Moreover: Google stated tons of times that translated content is not duplicate content.
I agree on geotargeting, if you mean to target a specific geo-located audience.
You can do that also for subfolder creating a Google Search Console property for the /farsi subfolder and geo-targeting it in the "Internationalization" section. However, I don't think you are desiring to geo-target to USA, because your lawyers are from all the globe. Am I right thinking, then, that your main country target for the farsi version could be Iran itself, so to offer iranian lawyers abroad for Iranian countries, which want to open its business also thanks to the quite recent end of the blockage?
Finally, I tend to agree with Dimitri...
if the target are the farsi speaking people resident in the USA, probably there is not that much search volume in farsi for your niche, even though and accordingly to the 2,011 census about 400,000 people speak it.
On the other hand, if you're targeting Iran, I would also consider the possibility that the Iranian Internet Laws are somehow limiting the visibility of your /farsi subfolder in Google.
Finally, I didn't check out the technical SEO and On Page SEO state of your site, but I would also check them in order to see or discard any other potential issue.