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EGOL You could become my new religion. Your answer is as profound and as moving as scripture, it makes me believe i could almost aspire to Heaven...then i look at the ground beneath my feet and wonder which foot first and where!

How can we make use of this to our main websites advantage? Keep it under lock and key so your competitor will not get it. A lot more information would be required to decide if it should be developed into a free-standing site or if you should 301 to that domain.

Thank you very much. Its looks so simple but when you've not done this before it can be scary. I also didn't want to get it wrong and miss roger on his crawl tomorrow!

It depends how much info is there and where it is on the page. Never try and hide anything though as this can be seen as a negative from Google. They will wonder why you are trying to hide it? You could always change the content to a link and have it open a pop-up window with the same content if you want to get rid of this though? Cheers, Andy

There was a problems with Q&A over the weekend and this question seems to have posted several times!

There was a problems with Q&A over the weekend and this question seems to have posted several times! Anyway i've decided upon no duplicates. I knew it was the right thing to do, just needed a push in the right direction. Thank you.

Hi Its magento. This version of our site is in development, so i can't give a live example.

I sent you a direct message -Dan

Yes i did mean 'Magento's Own URL Re-Writes"Our developers have produced re-writes from all our old url to the new ones through the url rewrite management and as we're yet to go live i wanted to check this was the best method. We are using community to start with as i believe it is not too difficult to upgrade - and there wasn't anything the other packages could offer us that we needed or couldn't get from an extension. However i'm eagerly awaiting the release of xcommerce to see what that brings and whether there's a migration path. I've been very happy so far with its magentos versatility. We have opted for quite a few tweaks especially when it comes to its order processing which is longwinded to say the least. We are also loosing the .html after advice from the guys here and opting for only the /lastcategory/productname and the /thelastcategory  for the url structure.

Are you essentially asking if you have Boots, Dress Shoes and Flip-Flops, and on each you link to the other, e.g. "you may be interested in these awesome leather boots" or in the side nav everything is linking. If so, yes - a good idea. It helps the search engines find other content. I would make sure there is content to the link, e.g. not just a random link in the middle of nowhere, but within navigation, related products, "other categories" "suggested products" etc etc, this is fine. There are some white-board Fridays to check out about exact match anchor text that may help too.

If we decided not to optimize would it be better to 301 or canonical link. I've read arguments for both?

There is not any "acceptable" number. You would write the minimum number of rules possible. That number can range from 1 to the total number of pages you currently have on your old site.