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Hi Klarke, yep that's the first thing I tried. Unfortunately with the way this particular site is setup that technique doesn't work. This theme uses custom widgets as the nav menu, and using a regular WP nav won't work without some serious recoding.

I'm currently working on a very awkward custom-WP setup, in which I can't maintain the present drop-down navigation menu without having those pages under a parent or without completely recoding everything.

I have two requirements, for SEO purposes I'm looking for the following structure for each targeted landing page:

www.example.com/landing-page

as opposed to www.example.com/sub/landing-page

Of course, having my landing pages as a child, I get the latter of the two. For navigational purposes they need to fall under a specific category in a drop-down menu. With any other theme or setup this is an easy fix, but not here. What I have now is that the landing pages are currently placed under a parent category page. But, they have custom permalinks. The permalinks are setup as follows www.example.com/landing-page

But, technically the exact structure is still www.example.com/sub/landing-page which then redirects to the custom permalink.

So, my question is - in an attempt to get my most important landing pages close to the root for better PR and crawlability, do I still get the same benefit with my current setup? Is this structure I have, better, worse, or indifferent?

Thanks.

I had most of my keywords within the top 10 for this site, some were even ranking in the top 5. For a possible minor boost, more-so to cover all the bases, I decided to add images to all of the pages, and they were uploaded as a gallery with most of the image file names being the same as the keyword. Thus, url's were created with our targeted phrases, extending off of the corresponding sub-page.

After that, Google quickly picked up the url's to the images and began indexing them, when that occurred the sub-page which was to be the landing page, quickly tanked. Nothing else on-site changed besides the uploading of the images, so I'm sure they're conflicting and for whatever reason Google can't decide which page to index. The page that contains the images used, or the actual intended landing page.

With WP I didn't see a way to not have them link to anything at all, and just be static when using a gallery, stock at least.

So, my question is how can I quickly alleviate this problem and what should I do in the future to avoid this? I believe if I change link thumbnails to image file instead of attachment page, that should fix the issue... Then, I'll have dead URL's which I suppose I should 301 to the sub-page. Alternatively, is there a better solution that will work, I was also thinking about no-indexing the attachment URL's, but that doesn't seem to be an option.

I think you'll find better success in guest blogging for links, so here's some tips on that if you decide to go in that direction... You should definitely do it manually and not try to automate the process. Personally, when reaching out to other webmasters I always keep in mind what my thought process is when people contact me about guest blogging on my site. I know when the role is reversed, the #1 thing that will cause me to delete someone's e-mail is when they spend an entire paragraph telling me how great my site is (which almost always sounds like a generic and canned message), then they pitch me a topic that's far outside the theme of my website.

There's no way that they've actually taken the time (as they say they have) to explore my site before they decided to e-mail me to help boost their SEO. That tells me they're just in it for their selves, and I'm not (nor is anyone else) going to bend over backwards for another webmaster when that person has made it clear that this process is a one-way street to them.

When you're guest blogging, you absolutely must adopt the mindset that this has to be a mutually beneficial exchange. You must want to deliver quality content to the people you're contacting, and scratch their back for them scratching yours.

When initiating contact here's what you should do:

• Keep it short, sweet, and to the point. If you're contacting high PR websites chances are they're getting tons of e-mails every day for guest blogs, so be respectful of their time.

• This part should have been listed first... Take the time to examine their website in full detail. Get to know their content, theme, writing style, etc. Pitch the right topics, be creative, and don't pitch something they already covered a bunch already.

- Instill in them confidence in your ability to deliver content that's beneficial to their website. Your e-mail should be well-written, and again you want to convey to them that you understand and respect what their site is all about

• Be personable. If you know the name of the person you're contacting, address them by their name. The more personable and specific you are, the less your e-mail will sound like a canned message.

• Read their guest posting guidelines if they have any

Some tips for finding leads:

I've found link prospector by Citation Labs to be fairly useful and you can try it out for free.

But, the tried and true way is simply going to Google and plugging in "Guest Post" + Keyword

"Guest Author" + keyword

etc

Overall, and it's worth stressing again, that the key to guest blogging is taking an approach that's mutually beneficial for all parties.

This might be a silly question, but one important enough for me to ensure that I understand the best practice of URL redirects...

I'm thinking of changing my URL's and hierachy of some of my WP subpages around, in order to logically fit the keyword into the url and place the subpage closer to the root domain.

My question is, when doing this, can I simply edit the URL and create a redirect after the fact, essentially killing the old URL. Or, do I create the new page with the updated URL and hierarchy, keeping the old page live and intact, but have that 301 redirect to its new corresponding destination?

Thanks

I'm still learning, so it's a little hard for me to explain. But basically, I have 95 duplicate content warnings. What's coming up is the tag linked to the post and the actual post itself. Which in itself seems like a problem, plus I thought maybe that's related to the rel can. notices.

Hi,

Thanks everyone for the great insight. I think I may have found another problem that's related to this though. I also have a lot of duplicate content warnings, which is also odd. Here's what I found.

Seems like I have tag urls linking to content - for instance:

autodebut.com/tag/carrera/

is this considered being linked to the actual post/perma?

autodebut.com/2012/techart-2012-porsche-911-revealed-at-geneva-motor-show/#more-6382

Could that be causing the problem?

I have a huge rel canonical issue showing up on my website, and I'm not sure that I fully understand why. To my knowledge, this is something that comes about when alternate urls are used to link to the same page. However, this is not a technique that I've used with my website, yet it's still raising a flag on just about every page.

http://bit.ly/jYyTYN

Can anyone enlighten me on what's causing this?

Thanks

SEOmoz pro just finished crawling my website and it's coming up with 250 rel canonical warnings.

Here's one example:

http://bit.ly/ukLlbS

"

<dt>Description</dt>

<dt>Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical."</dt>

<dt>That's all it's saying. I also have metarobots set to noodp,noydir - but I'm sure that doesn't make any difference with this.</dt>

SEOmoz pro just finished crawling my website and it's coming up with 250 rel canonical warnings.

Here's one example:

http://bit.ly/ukLlbS

"

<dt>Description</dt>

<dt>Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical."</dt>

<dt>That's all it's saying. I also have metarobots set to noodp,noydir - but I'm sure that doesn't make any difference with this.</dt>