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#1 - You'll probably incur a small hit but the authority is so closely matched between pages I don't see it as a massive problem (are the .com pages ranking btw?)

#2 - Adding a 301 to a page will pass most of the authority/link juice but not all. The 'time taken' can depend on the next time the page is crawled and indexed and/or how often the page is crawled. Hard to give a definite I'm afraid!

On a side note - Other members will say if you're ranking then why change what you've currently got? That's fine - but in my opinion you should 'future-proof' as much as you can and having the www. version is jut best practice.

DD

Hey Eric,

If you want to create and work on pages but you don't want them indexed you can add the following to the page in the section (the pages will still be crawled):

If you want NONE of your pages to be crawled (I.E the whole website) you can add the following to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Hey,

The only 301 you have set up is from www.ablemagazine.co.uk to ablemagazine.co.uk

The other URLs are returning a 200 status which means that you have pretty much 3 versions of your homepage.

In a perfect world I would have made www.ablemagazine.co.uk your actual domain - then 301 all other URLs including the non-www version of the page to this address. When people link to your site they are more likely to use the full address not the non-www version. (Do this if you can easily update all URLs across the site.)

DD

Cary,

In my opinion sub-domains should be used for completely different content. If your niche has anything to do with the current site then a sub-folder is the way to go. Can you provide more info on the current site and the new niche?

DD

Mike,

This is best practice on all sites. Forgetting about the links for a minute; you have two versions of the same page (in search engines eyes) so the first step is to do exactly what you're asking and consolidate into one.

The next step is to ensure your URLs end with a trailing slash because if you have www.url.com and www.url.com/  you again have two different versions.

DD

Hey,

At the end of the day it's making life easier for you. Stick with it until you notice something you want to change yourself; then go in and have a play with the .htaccess. Don't try and fix something that ain't broke

DD

Hey Christina, I'm pretty sure what they have is this: http://twitter.com/about/resources/widgets/widget_list They create a list and this widget basically displays the tweets from those users. Is this what you need or something different? DD

Timon,

I would give it a bit more time - rankings usually drop with a site change like this. I even have it with pages that are ranking and then I change them when they're not moving domain.

DD

Hey,

Did you identify all of your most authoritative pages and 301 them to the new URLs? or have you simply 'switched one off and turned the other on'?

I'd be wary of having so many links on one page. I say 100 links is a max per page but obviously I'm sure there's going to be sites out there that rank with more than that; but as a general rule...

You used to be able to add nofollow to your links and preserve your PR but I believe if you add that now the link will get no juice and you still lose some. It's more of a 'I don't sponsor this' sort of thing. Hope I explained myself okay there!

DD

Add 'noindex, nofollow' robots meta tag to the login page or use a robots.txt file.

More info here > http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html

DD

Hey,

I'd 'noindex, nofollow' cart pages as they are no use to anyone searching and you're just going to dilute your authority through those extra pages.

DD

I think microsites work well for one-off competitions etc that aren't going to be around forever. I'd rather spend the time adding to a current site that's going to grow in size.

DD

Ah I didn't know you were changing CMS. If that's the case then things change a little. You have the option to 301 all your URL's that haven't been rewritten so that's probably your best bet as your duplicating your effort otherwise. I'd like to hear anyone else's view though

DD

I would take the hit - as I don't believe it will be massive and in the long-run you'd be better off as you'll soon come back to your original ranking position.

You're going to want to change them at some point in time so the sooner it gets done the better in my opinion.

DD

Your reality will almost certainly be different to another persons. I tend to use a number of ranking checkers (every so often) just to compare results. As long as your avg. position is staying in the area you want it to be then I wouldn't worry too much.

DD

I would stick with:

• /shopping/feeding/
• /baby-list/feeding/
• /ask/feeding/

I believe a visitor should be able to pretty much guess the URL if they know what they want. That's how I tend to come up with mine. If I want to shop I may write shop or shopping and then I'd go on to maybe baby feeding or just feeding and then I may want a bottle so bottle goes next; so you're on the right track.

Don't change the keywords targeted on the homepage. If you're wanting extra keywords then you need extra pages that are optimised for those keywords.

DD