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Posting this for Dave SottimanoI Here's the scenario: You've got a set of URLs indexed by Google, and you want them out quickly Once you've managed to remove them, you want to block Googlebot from crawling them again - for whatever reason. Below is a sample of the URLs you want blocked, but you only want to block /beerbottles/ and anything past it: www.example.com/beers/brandofbeer/beerbottles/1 www.example.com/beers/brandofbeer/beerbottles/2 www.example.com/beers/brandofbeer/beerbottles/3 etc.. To remove the pages from the index should you?: Add the Meta=noindex,follow tag to each URL you want de-indexed Use GWT to help remove the pages Wait for Google to crawl again If that's successful, to block Googlebot from crawling again - should you?: Add this line to Robots.txt: DISALLOW */beerbottles/ Or add this line: DISALLOW: /beerbottles/ "To add the * or not to add the *, that is the question" Thanks! Dave

Hi  Spencer, I only have experieince with 2 CMS's. I was an early adopter of Word  Press so I wouldn't know my way iaround n it at all anymore as it's changed so much. I currently use Joomla 1.5 . It's relatively SE friendly, but then again so is WP theses days (so I've heard) I've also heard the current WP is much easier to customise than the older versions.

What is the purpose of your website going to be? (eg. blog, ecommerce, etc.)

What I'm about to add is more philisophical than hard data oriented. Don't be afraid to link out to relevant pages. Yes, you will lose some "juice", but you gain goodwill and "link karma" See, I tolld you it was philisophical

Seriously though, if there is a natural fit for a link out, I'd include it.

Feel free to throw this advice out the nearest window if you are in a tightly competitive space. then hoard all the link juice you can.

It's certainly not a hard and fast rule Nemek, but In principle, case differences can return different pages which  would mean the SE'swould spider them separately if they are both linked to and both resolve. This could result in duplicate content . THe SE's are probably good at seeing and accounting for  this, but because it's a potential issue, I advocate lower case always.

Hi Fothe:

There's no SEO advantage, and I persoanlly recommend all lowercase so as to prevent  duplicate content issues when people link with lower case which is likely to happen.

As far as being a Pro member,  the web app, OSE and the mozbar.for Firefox.

THe community rocks! but it's open to non Pro members as well so I didn't include it in the Pro benefits.

Hi y Kerem:

I can personally recommend three for you. as I own and have read all 3.. If you have to get just one then make it "The Art of SEO. It's written by a few co-authors, and our vey own Rand Fishkin is one of them m

Hi Brent.

My answer is geared more to "General thoughts to approach"

If you are building a site from scratch, then you need to be clear on your goals for the site, and build out  the site from there ( (SEO, content, design, etc.)

You had mentioned the following as your goal  [being] "a little different than typical.  What I am looking for in my web site is not sales, but viewership.  I want people to find my site, then keep coming back to my blog to follow what I do. So your goal is to build viewership.

From this point on you need to be in the mind of potential viewers. What kind of photos will they want to see? What will they be interested in reading about? The reason this is important is that you need to be able to get a handle on their intent. This will drive your keyword research, your content choices, etc.

As an important aside, you need to do more than just put keywords in your copy to accomplish your goals. You need some stunning photography and compelling copy. In other words, you need to create a site that is world class. So it deserves return visits from those that stumble across it.

Finally, if I were in your shoes, I would look for a niche within the world of photo blogs and start out trying to dominate that niche. This is just my personal preference. If you want to take on the whole photo blog universe right out of the chute,  then go for it.

Good luck and drop back in when you have your site and give us the URL. Good luck!

Hi Debi:

This is strictly my opinion, not backed up by any research, but if you have an ecommerce site  geared towards sales in English speaking countries, you want to get rid of any barrier in front of your customer. Poor grammar would definitely be a barrier.

I were a prospective customer I would be asking myself, will they get the order correct? If I have a problem with the order will I be able to  communicate it easily with them or will there be a language barrier?

I think it would be an important trust issue.

For that matter, I think poor grammar negatively affects native English sites.

Richard makes a great point Jan (no surprise there eh?)and it makes me realize that I completely neglected addressing user experience in my answer.

I was assuming that you would  redirect to an appropriate page. To give you an example of good and bad (from a users perspective), Let's say you had a page dedicated toa yellow 6 man camping tent. It would be acceptable to redirect that to a page listing all your camping tents especially if the yellow 6 man tent was included among them.

It would not be OK(again, from a users perspective) to redirect that yellow 6 man tent page to a page dedicated to sleeping bags.

Hi Jan: You can definitely redirect the pagesby using a 301 redirect for the pagesyou desire to swap out.

If you need help with implementing, this SEOmoz guide can help.

If you need yet more help, just post your question here in the Q&A again. It should get answered a lot faster on the weekdays.

Thanks Thomas. I'll give two of them a shot (already follow Pete who's quite funny)

Sorry for the Distilled omission mate. I fixed it in edit. Oh! forgot to say welcome to the States!

Thanks Tom. The problem I have with SearchEngineland is that there's too much info. I find that I tend to move on without reading if I'm short time. Now a "Readers Digest" of SEL would be great!

Recently on Q&A, Petra weighed in with a link tool site that had completely missed my radar. My problem is lack of time. I don't have enough of it to readthe2 dozen+ SEO blogscurrently in my RSS feed I would like to tobe able to read to  stay current. So I end up only reading at the moz.

I'm hoping the collective wisdom of the SEOmoz crowd will shine forthand set me on the road of pursuit of new knowledge with the best of the best blogs

Richard, you are a Q&A answering animal dude!

Hey Sean: I triple agree with Richard and Petra. Canonicalize

Hey Thomas: I just sat through the video for the tool and it looks amazing! They say it uses 12 different sources for their link data(SEOmoz Linkscape, Majestic SEO, Google data, Yahoo, Technorati, etc.) THen it sounds like they give you a live verification. So to answer your question, it looks like it's doing both.

Sweet Petra! This site was completely off my radar. I really like the collective intelligence this Q&A is bringing to SEOmoz.

Hahah! My favorite answer these days is...it depends.

, if you have a mortgage company to push, then find your white flag now.

But if you have a niche industry, then yes, it is possible. But like everyone else has said. make the on-page rock solid and work on links.