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I personally don't see the why you would want to do this other than if you are trying to track clicks in which case you would be far better using Google Analytics as you mentioned. All internal links on a website should be on that sites domain not on a redirected link. Is there any other reason for using bit.ly? If so maybe myself or one of the community could make so suggestions to a better alternative?

mod_rewrite and RedirectMatch are two different ways of doing a 301 redirect - both are fine. You can have both inside a htaccess file, however you may want to place the RedirectMatch directive outside of the call for the mod_rewrite module so after

You could use the following RedirectMatch directive in your htaccess file obviously swapping in your actual domain -

RedirectMatch 301 ^/product/(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 

I personally would ask for a name and email address, as this is common practice online and it will allow you to know what each person is specifically interested in as you say. I don't think that is too much information and the data gathered would be valuable. In my experience this won't put people off and if it does are they really that interested in your product in the first place - I think you a separating the wheat from the chaff that way!

In terms of QR codes and their use in Asia you may find this article about China's use of them useful - http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/29/people-actually-use-qr-codes-in-china/

Hi Wes - so I take you are asking if you can 301 redirect your old domain that you had a penalty on from dodgy links? Can you clarify what you did and what you think has hurt your old domain? Sudden ranking/traffic drop? Manual action in Google Webmaster Tools?

At the end of the day if you have had a penalty on your old site i wouldn't recommend using a 301 redirect to try and pass authority of your old penalized domain as it is known that the penalty will flow. However if you have done work to clear up the issue and have removed links and done a disavow if required then you should be fine.

As with anything in the wonderful world of SEO if it sounds to good to be true it usually is and I would go with your gut - "it would seem a little sketchy to me and I would prefer not to get slapped and penalized "again" for doing something dodgy..."

I hope this helps!

Hi Ron,

I think that it doesn't really serve any benefit to the user and in my opinion it does look at little spammy - another way of trying to get "titanium rings" mentioned on your page again. I would personally consider removing it. I would also consider adding some more content on your pages where possible - maybe some more crossover with your blog, as you mention "titanium rings" a lot of times in a small amount of text. I know this is the product you sell, but from my experience increasing the content on page with relevant valuable information will help with your optimisation.

On a side note I would recommend you run your site through a tool such as screaming frog - http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ if you haven't already as this will give you a good insight into how your site is optimised.

Hope this helps

Have you setup your https version of the site in webmaster tools as a separate site, if not I would and then I would submit a https sitemap on this profile.

I would also 301 redirect the http to https across the site - you may find this previous question useful - http://moz.com/community/q/best-method-of-redirecting-http-to-https-on-homepage

Hi Hashtag - Ricky is correct - it doesn't really matter either way as the 301 redirect will force the load of the new location page and its content whatever, so you won't be able to access your old page contents as its url is redirected - unless you have logins for your server of course...

Hi Jordan,

I have worked with all of the platforms that you mention and my personal favourite is Magento. I find it to be very SEO friendly and there are lots of great tweaks that you can make to help with things like site speed. I also find the wide variety of extensions is very good with Magento. Some platforms are also more difficult than others for setting things like Google Analytics ecommerce tracking up - Magento is super easy

Hope this helps

Hi Doug,

I have never seen this done before and as both you and Andy say I can't imagine that it has been done on purpose - more automated link building.

Hi

I would definitely setup a 301 redirect for the case sensitive URLs issue - you may already know how to setup this up but I thought I would include this link - http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/18670/how-to-redirect-any-url-to-lowercase-url

For your pagination issue you need to look at if it is possible to change /casestudy to a "view all" page and then place a canonical link to the /casestudy page in the of each page in the paginated set.

Another option for your pagination is using rel="next" and rel="prev" and for the filter parameters you could  tell Googlebot not to crawl these parameter URLs.

Hope this helps

Hi

I have used the URL removal tool in the past to remove URLs with success - as we know it helps speed things up. What you have done is right and if you are patient Google will start removing each page as it crawls it again. You might find this confirmation from Google reassuring in your situation - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en

Reading the article you posted of when not to use the tool I can't see that your pages fall into any of these categories - but either way I personally can't see using it causing an issue to be honest but its your call.

I agree with Anthony on this one - make sure you 301 redirect the pages you are loosing to the most relevant pages in your new structure.

I agree with Travis if you are going down the keyword rich domain I would go for the one without hyphens.

There is no way to force Google to use your page title when it displays the search results. Google can change your title for different seearch queries if it thinks your url fits but the title doesn't. That being said you can look at optimising your title to below 70 characters and making sure it is as natural as possible. I can see your page title is 77 characters. Google has recently started only displaying a set pixel width after a redesign - you will find this recent article by doctor Pete useful - http://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool - so the potential title displayed has been further limited in character length, but you can test it with the tool..Doctor Pete states he is comfortable with a length of 55 characters to be dispalyed fully but remember character length can vary quite a bit..Also remember Google still process data past the cut off!

Using the redirectmatch directive to redirect the entire deal directory to deals should definitely work for your situation. You then just repeat for each - so for deals:

RedirectMatch 301 /deal/(.*) /deals/$1

Hi Tai,

I understand what you are saying in regards to making it easier with all the different URLs, however you will need to specify some start point in terms of being one level down from the domain root else you are effectively placing a wildcard on the whole domain, which wouldn't work when you are still working on this domain. So you need to try to identify the few main category URLs such as /listing and so on in order to create a rule.

Did the redirect I give you work for all URLs apart from the one listed? It should have worked for that.

An alternative you can try is:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^listing/(.*)$ http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business/ [R=301,L]

Hi Robert,

I definitely wouldn't start creating multiple title tags as that is just going to cause the search engines confusion. For the pages that you want to rank have you considered moving them up the hierarchy/internal link structure. It would be great to have an example of the pages you mentioned in a previous question and your site address to get a better feel for exactly where you are and what you could do...

Hi Alina,

One thing that I did just notice is that there isn't a canonical tag on your homepage and both these urls load with different page authority:

www.skadate.com/ pa65

www.skadate.com/index.php pa49

I would look at rectifying this straight away - I checked because you mentioned it was canonical and I did a quick search in the source code.

Hi Tai,

I had a look at your site homepage and from your examples I could see you have relative urls which can cause 404 errors and as you mentioned 8000 I thought this could be part of your problems - no domains in your main navigation links so /business rather than www.yourdomain.com/business in coding - so no base URL can cause this. I took one of your links you mentioned to check if your hrefs were relative.

Putting what I mentioned aside for a second do you just want anything that is /listing and /deal redirecting to /business?

Have you tried this for the listing example and repeat for the others such as /deal/:

RedirectMatch 301 ^/listing/.*$ http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business