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Hi NicB1, We use Amazon CloudFront here at SEOmoz and it allows us to setup a CNAME for our CDN. So if you look at our images you will see we use a few different ones, such as cdn.seomoz.org, profile1.seomoz.org and profile2.seomoz.org. While I haven't done any studies on this, I can tell you that we have not seen a major change in image traffic in making the CDN switch a few months ago. I'd check with your CDN people and see if you can setup a CNAME and place it on a subdomain. Casey

Overall I think we are OK, but I just want to point out that since we'll be adding click tracking, we could have numerous urls that all resolve the same page.  The "tg" element in my example will change just due to what specific link a user chose to select (but the content of the page will be exactly the same). One page http://www.oursite.com/section/content/ Internal links to that page http://www.oursite.com/section/content/?tg=zzzzjj6 http://www.oursite.com/section/content/?tg=zzzzww2 http://www.oursite.com/section/content/?tg=zzzzyy1 http://www.oursite.com/section/content/?tg=zzzzvv4 The tg is irrelevant as an identifier for the page.  I don't think that is a problem but it is a slightly different use case as outlined in the referenced Google article.

In short, a direct link is MUCH better than a link that redirects. Links that redirect through an internal URLdon't work like a 301 redirect. A 301 redirect will take you directly to the page. These redirects stall on the intermediary page for a few seconds. I'd bet no link juice is passed. Google will follow the link, yes. But not in a "passing link equity" sort of following. If it's a large website, I'd say it's definitely worth it for the referral traffic, but I wouldn't expect it to help your rankings.

Spot-on answer from Brian. So long as everything is done properly (such as correct URL mapping, 301s rather than 302s...) in a timely fashion, then you may even experience a zero drop in rankings and visitors. With regards to inbound links to your current/old URLs; for any valuable links, try to get those changed so that they point directly to your new URLs, so that none of that link juice is lost through the redirects. Regards, Simon

If the content is too late, you're right, the Googlebot may not grab it. However, Google is getting better and better at indexing AJAX content that's loaded after the fact. On one of the sites I work on, we really didn't want to go through the whole process of serving up an HTML snapshot to Googlebot (outlined http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/).  About a month ago, I did a search in Google based on the AJAX content, and it returned the page, meaning Google is finding that AJAX content and indexing it!  They're indexing comments now (see http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-indexing-facebook-comments/35594/) as well, like Disqus and Facebook comments.  What kind of comments widget are you loading that Google can't get at?  Maybe they'll be able to index them soon? I would guess that Google would devalue <noscript>text, as almost everyone has JavaScript enabled. Otherwise, everyone would be keyword stuffing in their <noscript> tags.</p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;">The option you outlined sounds like it could work. If you're just taking the content from JavaScript, and loading it in the HTML if the user doesn't have JavaScript enabled.  Google is actually suggesting in their ajax crawling guide to actually serve the Googlebot a static page instead of the page with AJAX content, which seems much closer to cloaking than the option you're suggesting.</p></noscript>

If it's a Page 1, Page 2, Page 3 type thing, you might want to take a look at the new Google pagination options (rel="next" and rel="prev"): http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

If you want to rank for this content you need to display it statically. AFAIK there is no way to instruct googlebot to try different variables to bring up different dynamic content.

Hi Jamie -- I noticed the mobile version of our website is appearing in the Bing search results (from a desktop) --- can you employ the same technique as Google and specify to the Bing/Yahoo! mobile bot to only crawl the mobile version of your site and restrict the normal bot from crawling mobile version?  Thanks for additional guidance.  I assume this would clear up this issue of our mobile site appearing in normal non-mobile search results. Matt

Hey! I Cant believe that nobody has answered this... Yes I would say that any site with a mobile version should have a seperate sitemap for it, it does count and Google likes it as it makes it easier to crawl and index for them. Just make sure that: Your mobile sitemap ONLY contains URLs that serve mobile content (otherwise they get ignored). Make sure all URLs have the  mobile:mobiletag.</mobile:mobile> Have fun! Dan

Have a look at the resources below and let me know if you need more help. Responsive web design is recommended by Google but it does not apply to all websites. You have to take into consideration things like user intent, navigation, content. There is a lot of debate about it here on Seomoz and I would proceed carefully by reading some of the resources below. One thing I would advice though is to keep the robots blocked until you figure out what you want. In my opinion, Bryson Meunier has written quite a lot about the subject on several respected blogs in the industry. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/search/label/mobile http://www.brysonmeunier.com/ http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-of-responsive-web-design http://www.seomoz.org/q/mobile-seo-tips-and-best-practices Hope it helps!

Perhaps its some SEO testing. "Let's create a new page, use a robot txt file to block the bot, and then spam a 100k new links to page." "That's crazy enough that it just might work."

I think you've answered your own question by noticing that the searches for Brad Pitt photos and Brad Pitt images are different. I think Google is smart enough to know that photos and images could mean the same thing, but still treats them as different entities. For my titles, I try to add variations but I'm careful not to look like I am stuffing. Another thing you could do is try an experiment.  Title the page "Brad Pitt Photos" and after a while see if it ranks for "Brad Pitt Images", then change the title to "Brad Pitt Photos and Images" and see what happens to the SERPS.