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Hi,

I use VB redirects to URLs with ampersands regularly and cannot report anything but noticeable value being passed down in doing so.

I'm not a coding expert (so I would suggest that consult one in the first instance) but I would imagine it depends largely on the language you are writing the redirect in? For example, in PHP there are quite a few uses for the & character, so you may need to escape & with a preceding \ or by the use of $ - meaning to match the query exactly.

The best advice I can personally give from my experience is - if the redirect works for a human, it will work for a bot.

Hope that helps.

Matt

Well, this was my question really... Does Google consider the TLD as part of a query match? i.e. Would pizza.vegas rank for the search term "pizza vegas" or just "pizza"? Does the .vegas hold any bearing/weight when Google looks to match the query? I would argue that pizza.vegas is not an EMD of the search term pizza vegas

Matt

Hi,

Yes, more than likely. Is there a need for your website to always have a secure connection (https)? Some clever websites can do a request to RSS feeds within https pages, but only those that know what they're doing.

Displaying http content (your RSS feed) in a https page might cause some browsers to mis-trust your site's content, and oftentimes displaying warnings to users. Does this happen to your site?

Basically, having any http content in a https site is not best practise.

Best

Matt

Hi William,

First off, I have never done something similar personally, but until someone either contradicts or confirms my thoughts, I will give you my opinion from a theoretical point of view.

I would do as you suggested first - create subfolders for the specific locations onto one national site. Then I would redirect the local domain pages to the specific page on the national site, if this wasn't too much work. If it is too much work, I would just 301 the whole of the local domain to the subfolder that roughly correlates. This would just redirect any link from the old local domain to one new location.

Having subfolders on one national domain means that you will have all of these incoming links from the local websites (and the value from any backlinks). Every one of the subfolders (assuming your architecture is good) will benefit in some way from all of the backlinks. Win-win. Your site should flurrish with this approach.

With regards to having separate local sites with a link back to the national site, this will only pass on a fraction of the link juice value, and most would be retained by that local domain. I've always likened having lots of local websites to kind of hedging your bets. Hoping for local search value.

I think with good architecture and a good backlink profile, you can easy rank better, even for local searches, with a national website.

I welcome other people's opinions though!

Best,

Matt

"Top URLs" doesn't mean GWT thinks your category page is more important, or ranks better. It just means that there are more occurances of that keyword on that particular page. The majority of my "Top URLs" are directory pages which, whilst they rank well for what they should, do not feature in SERPs for that keyword - my homepage does. If I shoe-horned in all of the mentions of my top keyword into my homepage, it would certainly be considered keyword stuffing, so would have an adverse effect.

It isn't something to worry about.

Best,

Matt