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I disagree with mrcensorious and Dubs: I highly doubt that taking the time to change all of your URLs will be much of an SEO benefit, plus, changing URLs always brings a dip in traffic.

Your current URLs are not so incredibly long that they're difficult to understand or share, and you already have keywords in them (I'm assuming they're in the "page" and/or "pagename" subfolder). As Google has been getting smarter, we've seen it place less and less emphasis on keywords in URLs and their structures, so my guess is, this would minimally help SEO right now (if at all), and probably wouldn't help in the future.

Add on to that, whenever you make URL changes, you will always see two things:

• A temporary dip in organic traffic, as search engines see the new URL as an entirely new page and haven't attributed all of the links from the old URL to the new URL yet.
• A permanent dip in organic traffic, because 301 redirects don't seem to pass as much authority as a direct link.

We never advise that our clients change their URLs unless they're going through a site redesign anyway and have to change them. So, I recommend you leave things the way they are!

Kelli - the first thing I thought was what garfield_disliker asks: have you set up Google Webmaster Tools to ignore these parameters that are important for the cart page to load?

That said, Google Webmaster Tools is run by a team that's separate from the primary search team, so it's possible that GWT is flagging an issue that isn't an actual issue for Google. Run a search in Google for "site:yourdomain.com/UpdateCart" and see what URLs Google has indexed. If they have that 404ing URL, that's not good. If they have correct URLs, it's possible that this is a Google Webmaster Tools thing.

Hi,

CleverPhD has some interesting ideas with robots.txt and Google Webmaster Tools, but simply password protecting all dev pages should keep pages out of Google's index. There's no best practice here, since a password wall will keep Googlebot out on its own.

To be doubly safe, you can also include a meta noindex tag on dev pages.

Keep in mind that once a page is in Google's index, it's going to take awhile for it to leave (unless you use CleverPhD's method). But, having a blank page in Google's index really isn't all that bad. It's there, but it won't rank for much.

Hope this helps,

Kristina

I've never tried a method like this - FreshFireOne, did you?

Maybe you should noindex user profile pages until they've been active on the site long enough that a) you're sure they're not a spam bot and b) they're actually active users, with some interesting information to share on their user page?

Like Shaliendra said, this is your call. It's really about your website goals, and what those user pages do for the site. Are you getting much organic traffic from user pages? If you aren't, it's probably easiest to just noindex all user pages. But if some profiles are bringing in organic traffic, I'd recommend that you add a noindex tag immediately, but remove it once someone has commented a few times.

Does that help?

I've responded to specific comments below, but here's the information you need to redirect: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details

The gist is, you need:

• 301 or 302 redirects from the desktop site to the mobile site, based on user agent detection
• Rel="canonical" tag on each mobile page pointing to to each desktop page
• Rel="alternate" tag on each desktop page pointing to each mobile page
• A Vary HTTP header
• A mobile sitemap

As I mentioned below, I also recommend that you have a link at the bottom of the mobile and desktop sites pointing to the other version. That way, if you get the redirects wrong, people can self correct.

I disagree with Lesley, saying that you should just ask. I would recommend that you redirect to the mobile version of the the site, then ask. Basically: get people onto the page that you're 90% sure they want to be on, but let them switch back and forth. Just add a link to the footer of the deskop and mobile sites letting people switch between the two.

He's correct about redirecting to the right page, though. Don't redirect all of your desktop pages to the mobile homepage. When Google ranks your desktop pages on mobile search results, it checks out the redirect to mobile content. If the mobile content isn't similar, the page won't rank in mobile.

The best way to handle redirects is to use a 301 or 302 redirect (this is probably the only time in SEO that either gives the same result) based on user agent detection.

Is that enough detail?

Hey Melissa,

Many large websites choose to create separate mobile sites rather than using responsive design because they don't want to change the main version of the site (often because they've built a mobile website team that doesn't have any say in the activities of the primary website team). Don't use that fact to shy away from responsive design.

I generally recommend responsive. There are very few things that responsive designs can't do. Namely, you can't have different content on your mobile site than you do on your desktop site. Do you want your mobile site to be a mini version of your desktop site? Then you can probably make it responsive. You can definitely create a responsively designed site that allows you to search for properties easily.

Hope this helps!

Kristina

He means, yes, it's possible to create a responsive site.

It's most likely that Google is ignoring this, and will continue to ignore it.

There are just too many meta tags that you can include, and Google knows they're often used manipulatively. Unless you were using the meta expiry tag a lot and completely correctly, search engines will probably ignore it. (By correctly, I mean, use it for pages that actually do expire, then cutting off internal links after this date.)

That said, it's probably best to remove this tag.

Hey Letty,

It's been about a month since you posted this - how are things going? Did the information Thomas give you help the process?

Just to make sure I'm clear on your original question, the situation is:

• You have 5 desktop websites on 5 separate domains
• You have mobile versions of the site, but just on 1 domain (as an "m" subdomain)
• All of these sites currently share the same mobile platform

The issues are:

• To search engines, it will look like 4 of your sites don't have mobile versions, and the one mobile site will have "duplicate" content with the other desktop domains
• Visitors may be skeptical if they try to visit one domain and it automatically redirects/recommends that they visit another URL for the mobile page

The answer is, basically, you're right. Search engines are getting pretty good at recognizing when a separate mobile URL or subdomain is actually the mobile version of a desktop site, but this structure is really confusing. (If it confuses humans, it's probably going to confuse search engines.) You should really set up separate m.site#.com subdomains for each site you own and mimic the structure of your desktop site on each one.

Did that answer your question? Is there anything else I can help with?

Kristina

Yep, if Bing Webmaster Tools doesn't show problems with the sitemap, I'd focus on the points I highlighted back in mid-June on this thread (make content robust, unique, and make sure text is in HTML).

Good luck,

Kristina

I haven't heard of Bing keeping historically submitted sitemaps and confusing them, although I know that they're very picky about the number of inaccuracies they find in a sitemap, so it's possible they keep the latest one around so they can refer to it if the current one seems to have holes.

That said - when you search for your site, are the same pages coming up on the first page? What about the second? Third? The number of pages that come up when you search for site:mysite.com are approximations and can vary even as you scroll through the results pages. The more important question is, how many pages does Bing say are indexed in Bing Webmaster Tools?

Hey Jesse,

There's a lot of debate about the ideal way to build a mobile website, but your initial question made me think that you don't have a lot of time and/or money to spend on this. Is that correct?

If it isn't, I would spend some time researching the pros and cons of responsive vs. a separate mobile site (I won't go into it too much more than that - I'm obviously biased: http://moz.com/blog/seo-of-responsive-web-design). Setting your company up with the right sort of site the first time around is going to save you a lot of time, effort and money in the future. I really like Aleyda's mobile site audit to help guide you: http://www.stateofsearch.com/mobile-seo-audit/

But, if you don't have the time/money/support to knock it out of the park quite yet, building a decent separate mobile site is a good option. (You can't really half-ass responsive or else you'll mess up your desktop site too.)

You originally said you're good with HTML, so have you thought about just building the site yourself, with inspiration from CMS templates? Building mobile sites isn't that different from building desktop sites, although you want to stick to HTML and CSS as much as possible (no Flash)! The bigger issue is figuring out the design with such a drastically smaller screen size.

Like I said, you can probably look at a great CMS's design and mimic it somewhat with your own HTML. You can also read our guide to mobile best practices, http://www.distilled.net/training/mobile-seo-guide/ (ahem not to over promote ourselves or anything), which has a section on design. The key issues I'd keep in mind are:

• Use your web analytics to figure out the standard screen size for your mobile visitors. It's probably around 320px. Design your mobile site for that width, but make everything relative (i.e. 80% vs 80px) so that the display will change to fit the size of the mobile visitor's phone
• A button or link needs 28px x 28px around it to be easy to click. If it's inline links, there can be text around it, but no other links.
• Redesign for a single column layout. Get rid of ads or move them to the top or bottom of the body copy. Hide navigation behind a drop down. I really like how Bridgestone does that: http://m.bridgestonetire.com/
• Make your mobile site fast. Shrink images down to a smaller size, then compress them again (or, if they aren't already compressed on your desktop site, just compress them everywhere ). Go to http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ to test how fast your site is.

Good luck!

Kristina

Another idea is to reach out to the websites that you would like to get links from and ask what they're interested in seeing. An open ended question like, "What should I build?" probably won't yield great results, but if you have a couple of ideas and ask a site owner if they're interested, they'll a) let you know if that's a good idea before you even build it, b) probably add some information that will make your new content richer, and c) will already be engaged and more likely to link to your content once it's built.

An intranet is, by definition, locked down from the outside world, so Googlebot shouldn't be able to crawl it. And if Googlebot can't crawl something, it can't see the link.

If an intranet were improperly set up, and accessible to general online users, it could work. But my experience working at a university makes me doubt that there are many like that.

Inline scripts aren't bad per se, search engines just can't always understand them. Worst case scenario: you have extra code that Google has to crawl but doesn't understand, which takes up bandwidth and doesn't add value. But, it won't lower your rankings.

So, do whatever you need to do to deliver the best user experience you can on your site with this map and related route, and figure that Google will ignore it (Google is trying to understand it, though, so it may be helpful in the long run). Then, for search engines, include some text content describing the map and the route so that search engines can send the right searchers to your page.

Good luck!

Kristina

You were fairly brief, which makes it difficult to give definitive answers, but here are mine. For the first question:

• Are any of these new pages going to compete with currently ranking pages? If so, they could limit the traffic to existing pages. Use Google Analytics to identify your top organic keywords and check them against your new pages. Compare any new pages that might compete with existing pages; which ones do you think will win?
• If the new pages WON'T compete with existing pages, they will only have an effect on the Domain Authority, which should really only be a net gain. You'll have more pages, and more links overall.
• Last, is there any chance that this new content will trigger a penalty? I only ask this because AndieF is right, search engines don't see much value in directories, and if your site goes from 50% directory pages to 75% directory pages, the entire site may be hurt as a result.

And, for your second question, about the effect of existing traffic on the new pages

• If the new pages are really brand new, they should be indexed faster since they're a part of an established site. To estimate the traffic they'll bring it, identify the keywords they're targeting, get the monthly traffic from Google AdWords Keyword Tool (download the list of keywords for actual previous months' traffic), and find the opportunity traffic based on how well you can reasonably expect to rank: http://geoffkenyon.com/google-serps-click-through-rates/
• You mentioned in a comment that these pages are currently living on different domains, and you're moving them over. If you use 301 redirects, you'll only carry over 90 - 95% of Page Authority, but not all of it. If those links are more valuable than the new links you're providing through your site, they won't do as well. If you have some really good links to those old URLs, you may want to contact the webmasters who are sending traffic to your site and ask them to update their links.
• Also note that pages will take a dip in rankings whenever they get new URLs, so if you get significantly less traffic for the first couple of weeks, just wait it out.

TL;DR Check:

• That the new pages won't compete with old pages
• That the new pages won't trigger a penalty from Google
• **The estimated searches/month (from Google AdWords Keyword Tool) for the new keywords you'll be targeting, and the proportion you can reasonably expect to get to your site (based on CTR research for Google) **
• The number of links that were pointed to the pages on the old URL that you'll only get a portion of the Authority from

Hope this helps!

Kristina

Good luck!

If these tips don't work, you should follow up here again, but include a little more information about your site. It's possible that Bing IS crawling all of your pages properly, but something about them is making Bing think that they aren't valuable enough to be in their indexes. I'd particularly look to see if:

• Content seems to be duplicate, either within your site or if it's duplicated elsewhere
• Content is extremely thin (less than 100 words on a page/no unique text above the fold)
• Content is unreadable by Bing: check the cached version of a page that's not indexed and make sure you can read the unique content

Hope this helps! I'm going to mark this question as "answered," only because if you have a follow up question, it'll probably be more specific now that you have more information, and I'd like all of that info to be included in the original question.

Best,

Kristina