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have decided that I'm just gonna try and see how it reacts, will report back when I have the conclusion.

Just thought of a possible solution.

On the mobile site I guess I could do something like:

And on the normal site:

Does anyone have any experience in using meta data to command the google-mobile-bot?

Hi everyone

I seriously hope you can come up with an idea to a solution for the problem below, cause I am kinda stuck

Situation: A client of mine has a webshop located on a hosted server. The shop is made in a closed CMS, meaning that I have very limited options for changing the code. Limited access to pagehead and can within the CMS only use JavaScript and HTML. The only place I have access to a server-side language is in the root where a Defualt.asp file redirects the visitor to a specific folder where the webshop is located.

The webshop have 2 "languages"/store views. One for normal browsers and google-bot and one for mobile browsers and google-mobile-bot.In the default.asp (asp classic).

I do a test for user agent and redirect the user to one domain or the mobile, sub-domain. All good right? unfortunately not. Now we arrive at the core of the problem.

Since the mobile shop was added on a later date, Google already had most of the pages from the shop in it's index. and apparently uses them as entrance pages to crawl the site with the mobile bot. Hence it never sees the default.asp (or outright ignores it).. and this causes as you might have guessed a huge pile of "Dub-content"

Normally you would just place some user-agent detection in the page head and either throw Google a 301 or a rel-canon. But since I only have access to JavaScript and html in the page head, this cannot be done.

I'm kinda running out of options quickly, so if anyone has an idea as to how the BEEP! I get Google to index the right domains for the right devices, please feel free to comment.

Any and all ideas are more then welcome.

I completely agree on every point (as I tried to explain above) and I could not myself come up with a better solution, but thought I might give you guys a chance before jumping the rel-canon band wagon

To be honest I didn't expect any amazing ideas but one could hope that I hadn't thought about everything, unfortunately it seems I had.

thx for your time everyone

Hi and thx for your reply.

I agree with you, as I tried to explain in my post. But this doesn't really help me with the users from Google not getting served with the correct picture. Possible leading to a high bounce rate. Plus I have the added problem that Google will see the master as less relevant for the colors as keywords. Since the keyword won't be in the page title, h1,h2,ex.. so all in all the page will have a very low relevance for the key-phrase  "blue t-shirt".

Hence I'm looking for a different solution

or maybe my explanation is just crappy

Hi there and thanks for your input. But what you mention is exactly what I already have (maybe I just explain it badly), I was kinda looking for a different amazingly brilliant solutions that I hadn't thought of myself

But your thoughts and time is very much appreciated. If you have any other ideas do let me know

Looking for some input on a SEO situation that I'm struggling with. I guess you could say it's a usability vs Google situation. The situation is as follows:

On a specific shop (lets say it's selling t-shirts). The products are sorted as follows each t-shit have a master and x number of variants (a color).

we have a product listing in this listing all the different colors (variants) are shown. When you click one of the t-shirts (eg: blue) you get redirected to the product master, where some code on the page tells the master that it should change the color selectors to the blue color. This information the page gets from a query string in the URL.

Now I could let Google index each URL for each color, and sort it out that way. except for the fact that the text doesn't change at all. Only thing that changes is the product image and that is changed with ajax in such a way that Google, most likely, won't notice that fact. ergo producing "duplicate content" problems.

Ok! So I could sort this problem with a "rel canon" but then we are in a situation where the only thing that tells Google that we are talking about a blue t-shirt is the link to the master from the product listing.

We end up in a situation where the master is the only one getting indexed, not a problem except for when people come from google directly to the product, I have no way of telling what color the costumer is looking for and hence won't know what image to serve her.

Now I could tell my client that they have to write a unique text for each varient but with 100 of thousands of variant combinations this is not realistic ir a real good solution.

I kinda need a new idea, any input idea or brain wave would be very welcome.

actually I don't mind shared hosting if they can surply the bandwith that I will potentially need. Am actually looking for something like a scaleable cloud solution would be awesome.

I'm not quite sure how much traffic the site will generate yet but potentially allot. Wich is why a scaleable solution would be perfect. But I can't have the site go offline because I have exceeded the monthly bandwidth.

probably won't need support what really interests me is the uptimes and bandwidth

what are your experience there?

Hi there

not so quick as you might think. I would run it through the following firefox plugins and follow their advice:

• ySlow
• Google Page Speed
• avoid links width anchor texts like view "more", "read more" or "view all" and so on.
• several links (that are images) are missing title tags
• several images are missing alt text since you made them using css sprites witch is good, but doesn't help google allot.
• Several of your image buttons could easily be swapped for text with a background image, this would help google crawl your site as well.

Regarding design:

• the top menu disappears in the gradient background
• the lower part of the page is a bit messy (text wise.)
• Too many font sizes used
• Too many font colours used

Hope that you don't take my critics personal, but the above where my immediate thoughts when I saw it

I do believe that the common consensus is that the panda affects the entire domain if it penalizes pages then some of that penalty will rub off on the rest of the domain.

My advice take the penalised pages down while you rework them. That should solve your problem.

I see no need to use robots.txt for that. use Google and Bings webmaster tools. Here you have each domain registered  and can submit sitemaps to them for each domain.

If you want to make sure that your sitemaps are not crawled by a bot for a wrong language. I would set it up in the .htaccess to test for the entrance domain and make sure to redirect to the right file. Any bot will enter a site just like a browser so it needs to obey the server. so if the server tells it to go somewhere it will.

the robots.txt can't by it self, do what you want. The server can however. But in my opinion using bing and google webmaster tools should do the trick.

Google have written allot about this subject and cuffs debated it one of his vids, here is a few links:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPiALaxDr6E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo

You might a bit. But more links are (almost) always better. You should try to get both high quality links and some low quality (easy) links. The easy links (yes link catalogues) can work quite well if done in conjunction with the heigh quality links. Sure they won't be as effective as the high quality ones but allot easier to get. But try to keep a reasonable spread, for each heigh quality link try to get 5 or so low. Keep a natural link acquisition rate.

Google / Bing will understand that your plural keyword is probably the same. But it will rank you better if you optimize for the exact match key-phrase. So my advise would be to keep focus on the one with the most searches and mention the other a few times. That way you get both, but make sure that the language is something that makes sense and reads well.

you can't submit a sitemap in GA so I'm guessing you mean GWT

Whether or not you put it in the robots.txt shouldn't be a problem. since in each sitemap, the urls would look something like this:

Sitemap 1:<url><loc>http:/yoursite.coim/somepage.html</loc></url>

Sitemap 2:<url><loc>http:/yoursite.dk/somepage.html</loc></url>

I see no need to filter what sitemap is shown to the crawler. If your .htaccess is set-up to redirect traffic from the TLD (top level domain eg .dk .com ex.) to the correct pages. Then the sitemaps shouldn't be a problem.

The best solution would be: to have a web in web. (a folder for each site on the server) and then have the htaccess redirect to the right folder. in this folder you have a robots.txt and a sitemap for that specific site. that way all your problems will be gone in a jiffy. It will be just like managing different 3 sites. even though it isn't.

I am no ninja with .htaccess files but I understand the technology behind it and know what you can do in them. for a how to do it guide, ask google thats what I allways do when I need to goof around in the htaccess. I hope it made sense.

actually it will affect SEO in a positive way, since google will notice that the hosting server is located in the region it targets. BUT and there are several:

• You will have unhappy visitors, what if I visited your site while I was travelling in Spain, since I don't understand a word Spanish I wouldn't be a very happy camper.
• Google will only see one of your languages since it has a fixed IP.

The right way to do it:

• have a separate domain name for each country. Eg: Danish target group .dk English UK .co.uk English US .com German .de and so on
• Have a well written (translated by a translator not google translate) version for each language
• Give the visitor the opportunity to select the language he/she want to read, don't force them, guide them.
• have your different languages hosted in the target areas.

Have you considered loading the landing page in a div when they click on it (as a pop-up)?

The pros of opening things in a new window is that when you link off site,the user won't leave your page and can return later. The cons well.. to many pop ups can be annoying for the user. If the page is something they might use as a reference then opening it in a new window can be a good thing, think size guides for a shoe-store. You can browse the products but still have the size guide as a reference.

The example you mention is a perfect example where it might serve you better to think "what is best for our users". And since you don't link off site (at least it doesn't sound like it) I see no problem with linking to it in the same window.

2: completely up to you and what you think serves you users best

be careful when optimizing for both, you might end up in a situation where it will look like keyword spamming. I personally wouldn't optimize for both in the page title, just the primary. And then optimize for the secondary and the primary one in the H1,H2 to Hwhatever..

You don't want to look like a spammer.