Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Thomas, Great point about checking for similar exact match domains already in the SERPS. I've always thought the search engines considered the hyphenated option spammy rather than the searcher, or is it both?

Hi All Which strategy from below would be best for the purchase of an exact match domain... 1) www.shiny-blue-widgets.com 2) wwwshinybluewidgetsshop.com Wondered if there was much difference in either as I know both have plus and minus points.

Generally I'd say social promotion, but you could be more specific and target writers who have blogged or written on a similar subject in the past.

I'm curious to see what answers you get as I'm somewhat in the same boat. I do have multiple clients hosted with the same hosts, but there's not much cross over in industries. I do, however always set up completely individual GWT, analytics etc just because of a hunch that Google may consider two sides sharing an account somewhat connected. Whether anyone has any proof is another thing..

Hi Darryl

There's no SEO advantage to having a trailing slash or not. Both are viewed the same. The important thing is to choose one and make sure it's consistent throughout the site. I prefer no slashes, cos it looks nicer, but that's just me and has absolutely no SEO relevance.

Hi Wissam

Yes, I read through it and a few others, but wanted to get clarification on some specifics not covered all that in depth in the guide.

Calling all Magento Kings out there!

I'm working on a client' site - powered by magento. I'm looking to rewrite a lot of the URLs. I know there is the URL rewrite tool, but I think what I need to do may go beyond this.

Typical example would be:

Old URL - http://www.xxxxxxxx.co.uk/fabric/product/product-black-screen-print-and-silver-fabric.html

New URL - http://www.xxxxxx.co.uk/fabric/product/silver

I know that magento's URLs seem to be created through categories so wanted to double check with someone the best way to do this.

Also, I've heard that 301 redirects of non www to www in the .htaccess has a knock on effect on discounts?

All comments greatly appreciated.

Will do.

That's really interesting to hear that the PA and rankings are pretty much in line (off I go to review my sites...)

There has been a drop off on Google showing citations, but they still seem to be showing images placed on local directories, in some instances taking the same image from a local directory over one added to a places listing in the live places listing.

Its a valid question, and something I've noticed myself. There's a couple of things I'd suggest considering.

Firstly, how long ago were the listings in the local directories submitted and accepted? If it's been less than a month it may well be that Google hasn't associated the citation/ link yet to your places listing.

Secondly, have you carried out a search in Google to see if they have indeed indexed the page the link is on, or run a
"link: " type search to see if Google acknowledges the link.

Hi Dejan

Thanks, all good points so much appreciated.

Hi All

I'm looking for some feedback regarding a site architecture issue I'm having with a client. They are about to enter a re-design and as such we're restructuring the site URLs and amending/ adding pages.

At the moment they have ranked well off the back of original PPC landing pages that were added onto the site, such as www.company.com/service1, www.company.com/service2, etc

The developer, from a developer point of view wished to create a logical site architecture with multiple levels of directories etc. I've suggested this probably isn't the best way to go, especially as the site isn't that large (200-300 pages) and that the key pages we're looking to rank should be as high up the architecture as we can make them, and that this amendment could hurt their current high rankings.

It looks like the trade off may be that the client is willing to let some pages be restructured so for example, www.company.com/category/sub-category/service would be www.company.com/service.

However, although from a page basis this might be a solution, is there a drawback to having this in place for only a few pages rather than sitewide? I'm just wondering if these pages might stick out like a sore thumb to Google.

Thanks Wissam. Always good to hear it from someone else rather than Google.

Thanks Mark, Good thread you found there. Gonna play around and see what happens. Thanks

Hi All.

I've noticed some issues between the thesis themes and Yoast's plugin, namely, thesis doesn't recognise Yoast's plugin in for title tag and meta description. Is there a way to overide this?

I've noticed that Google News has withdrawn the necessity for there to be a minimum of 3 numerical digits in the URL if you submit the content via a new sitemap. Is this 100% correct? I'm working on a site rebuild for a client that is where submission to Google News will be instrumental in their strategy. Are there are difference between UK and US submission as this is UK based?

I would suggest that it would be beneficial to have the blog on your own domain unless there is a very valid reason not to. By bringing the blog under your own roof, you're adding fresh content regularly and should the content be linked to or tweeted/ shared, you're domain will get the love.

No problem!

I don't believe it is considered duplicate content. I think Rand might have mentioned this during a recent webinar.

Hi Jeanie, I just had a quick look at your site and noticed you have noindex, nofollow on all of the pages I checked. You may want to adjust this as you're telling the search engines not to index these pages. Take a look at your source code and you'll spot it quite easily.