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Hi Gwilso,

I don't see anything wrong in your rewrite rules.

I see a lot of false positives on 4XX errors on my campaigns. Sometimes the MozBot crawler comes up with some interesting URLs.

You have any indication this is a recurring problem? I'd check the log files to determine that.

I'd also correlate what you're seeing in SEOmoz Crawl Diagnostics with your Google Webmaster Tools crawl reports - see if Google is hitting this same URL.

Bottom line is this is most likely not worth fretting over unless you see a lot of log activity around this URL request. Crawlers do weird things sometimes. Doesn't necessarily mean your site is "broken" or that this is impeding your SEO or user experience in any way.

-Mike

That certainly can't hurt either.

Seems to me these pages aren't actually having any trouble showing up in the mobile index, but GWT for whatever reason isn't associating them with your mobile sitemap.

I'd also take a look at inbound organic search traffic from mobile users landing on these pages. If they're pulling traffic, I'd assume the GWT thing is a bug/delay.

Not a silly question at all, they've moved the mobile search a few times and now it seems the only way to get at it is:

1. Via tools like this http://www.mobilemoxie.com/site-analysis/mobile-seo/
2. By setting your user agent to iPhone/similar with the User Agent Switcher for Firefox (or similar) - then simply navigating to Google.com and running your searches
3. With an actual smartphone (slowest method IMO)

For spot-checking single URLs, I'm using the info: operator (the site: operator will return an index count for the full subdomain/directory, info: is for single URLs).

Best,
Mike

Hi Paul,

Sorry, yeah - indexation in the mobile specific index looks better for the pages in the sitemap.

An alternative approach to guiding Google's indexation of your mobile content is found here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details (scroll down to "Annotations in Sitemaps")

The initial lack of rel=canonical tags is likely part of the problem. This creation of rel=alternate annotations in your desktop sitemap may be a way to help sort it.

That's the best I've got right now, after some internal discussion with our Q&A team. Not sure why GWT showing no pages indexed of your Mobile sitemap, when clearly these pages are in the mobile index.

I'd probably look to analytics at this point - to determine whether/how many of your mobile pages are getting traffic from G mobile searches. This could just be a lag in GWT data, whereas the actual index is cleaning up nicely.

Best,
Mike

Hi Paul,

I'm a bit stumped here. I spot checked a bunch of mobile URLs from your sitemaps, and none of them are currently indexed by Google.

I've put this question out to all other Moz and associates who handle Q&A forums to see if there's someone who can share some insight here.

I don't see anything wrong with your mobile sitemaps, and the pages I checked that were not indexed are indeed loading properly with mobile content. So I'm frankly not sure what's preventing Google from indexing these pages.

Just wanted to post this response to let you know I've raised your question to the attention of our Q&A people, hopefully someone has some insight to share.

-Mike

Hi Nakul,

Forgive me if this is too simplistic...

The following rewrite rules should cover the examples you provided:

RedirectMatch 301 red-widgets-cid-1234.html http://www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-4567.html
RedirectMatch 301 red-widgets-cid-1234- http://www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-4567.html
RedirectMatch 301 red-widgets-cid-1234+ http://www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-6789.html

We just need to escape the special characters (period, hyphen and plus sign).

This should cover the examples you provided, and no need for any elaborate RegEx patterns. Of course, if there are variants your example doesn't mention, things could get more complicated. (I'm also assuming here you're on an Apache environment.)

If I've misunderstood your question or the situation is more complicated than your example demonstrates, let me know.

Thanks,
Mike

Probably a safe way to go - even with images comprised mainly of images I'd be surprised if you saw a negative impact from the footer blurb, but I've been surprised before.

To clarify: yes it's a good idea to mention your target phrase a few times, outside of your Title and H1 tags, in as organic a manner as possible. However, the "keyword density" most people discuss is related to calculating some percentage, attempting to determine the "optimal" density of the keyword phrase related to other copy. This is the "waste of time" I was talking about - sorry for the lack of clarity there.

1. I would not expect the footer text to hurt on-page SEO. "Duplicate content" does not mean any repeated content whatsoever across your pages. This flag only goes up for Google's filtration purposes when the vast majority of content on the page is duplicate to another page.

There are countless sites across the web with similar "template" content that occurs across all pages, and this does not impede them from ranking or draw any filters/penalties against them.

2. Keyword density is not worth focusing on. It can safely be dropped from your SEO work at this point.

3. I'd look at this from a usability standpoint. If you have reason (data) to believe the footer content is being read by users and therefor actually serving a purpose, I'd recommend leaving it as-is. If nobody is reading this content, or it simply clutters the page unnecessarily, it's a good idea to remove it in favor of a more straightforward user experience.