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Hmmm..probably i misunderstood your "parent" question. No value will be passed if link points to the current page.

An amusing take on it here: http://www.xydo.com/toolbar/15421107-eu_cookies_directive_-_what_it_means_for_you by Dave Naylor

If you own an e-commerce site you would want to know: products viewed products purchased purchase date visits to purchase etc This data could be used to serve them with related products, make it easier to find previously looked at products ,drive behavioral targeted e-mail campaigns etc...

In some cases my list will be upto 100 locations - to the user this looks really: a/. Spammy b/. Ugly c/. Unreadable It's an irritating situation - If I am going for option 2, what I am in reality doing is pandering to search engines over users - exactly the opposite of what you should do, and SE's are very clear on this as well. You would have thought SE's would have figured a solution to this out by now as it must be so common - and as a user when I see lists like this which are clearly for SE's not users, then I get annoyed with the site. I'd be interested to know if there has been: A/. Any test done on such list types to see if SE's can actually recognise that although the anchor just says the Location, if the link title has the perfect anchor, do they take this into account. B/. If there are any other methods that could be used to try and tell the search engines the full meaning of the links - eg something like a tag on the container holding the list.

Checking the URl's in google they do indeed seem to be tracking URL's, which must pass info back into their alogrithm.

Even when phrases have the same meaning, there can be different reasons to prefer one phrase over the other. An exact match will (and in my opinion should) be given preference. The phrase could be a name of a movie or book or be contained in a speech. Ultimately a decision needs to be made on how the results will be offered and this is what SEs (not just Google) have determined is most helpful to users. I would guess Google would offer a relevancy rating to each phrase. I can see how "Golf Holiday" and "Golf Break" could be used to refer to the same thing, but I would suggest the relevancy of those two particular phrases is a bit low. A person could work 4 hours in the morning, then take a "Golf Break" and hit 9 holes, then return to work. I wouldn't refer to that as a "Golf Holiday". An example of terms with higher relevancy would be "mobile phone" and "cell phone". I would suggest that 95%+ of the time these words mean exactly the same thing. But you still have to give people credit for exact name matches with domain names, titles, etc above those who use the second form of the phrase. There often is a reason a user chose the phrase they did and could prefer an exact match.

A good way to get real keyword data is to run adwords campaigns for the exact keywords, yet it is never going to be exact due to demand increases and drops over time.

excel and adwords editor are also great to use with this - ie find replace etc

Hi Big Zee, So sorry you didn't get a response about this. You asked it right when our Q&A system was down for a bit and a whole bunch of new questions got buried. Are you still looking for suggestions, or have you made a decision? Can you share anything you learned with us if you have made a decision?

I'd 301 it. I haven't tested it but it makes the most logical sense.

If it gives your brand/keyphrase more exposure on SERPs then why not? Wouldn't it be great if you could rank number 1 and 2 with different websites? I suppose it depends on the competitiveness of the keywords to an extent, so do some research there.

Google Analytics will not track anything after the # in the URL. I suggest using Google's tracking tags and coming up with an internal naming system. Since your affiliates are paid, I wouldn't worry too much about them not copy tracking tags as long as you're very clear that they have to link with the very specific URL.

Just a thought... Ever think about looking around for a few days and find someone who has something similar to what you are looking for, then approach them about purchasing it? Then alter it to your own specification. I know the pitfalls, but this may be a quicker and cheaper solution.

I've got the same issue. I have a lot of links on my site and I was trying to see if adding title="something" for each link will help or not. We could always try it and see what happens. I don't see a reason why if they were added in it could cause an issue with the search engines. However if anyone has more experience on this I'd love to hear about it.

Hi there a quick reply from me 1: if I were you I would make my links in text and not in images. If you do have to add images avoid names such as read more. There are Java Script tricks you could use if you must have images. Such as replacing text with an image on "dom ready" there is no reason to show google an image if it's only a "read more" button anyhow. 2: If I make a list of links, make it a list, don't do divs if a list makes more sence eg: link 1 link 2 link 3 3: Since speed matters: If you can avoid images do it. If not; Use CSS sprites and the background property. If You must use img tags, always add a height and a width, that way the browser won't have to read the image size and the page will render quicker.

Many thanks - I'm going to have a serious word with my coders!!

The new synonym pages are not ranking anywhere significant for their exact synonym - it is the primary synonym page ranking for them. To me this would be proof that they are seeing the synonym pages as duplicate so you may be better focusing on one page per keyword. Although if these pages are only a week old they could take more time to get picked up. As Ryan mentioned, changes need time to settle in properly, you won't see final results in a week. As you mention in point 3 you are definitely going to decrease the strength of each location if it has to share link juice between 8 similar pages, so you are making it harder for them to rank well.