Welcome to the Q&A Forum

This is EXACTLY why I see your work as such an invaluable part of the SEOmoz Q&A Keri. You rock!

To help sculpt your search engine results, I would suggest using anchor text on the page you don't want to appear in SERPs, with a link to the page you do wish to appear.

If the search term you are using is blue widgets, then provide a link from the old page to the new page using "blue widgets" as the anchor text. This method will send a strong signal to search engines as to which page from your site should be returned for the given term.

Follow up by ensuring the target page is optimized for the term as well.

Hi Donnie.

I enjoy your analysis but disagree with your conclusion. I believe search engines are working with an unimaginably vast amount of data. They evaluate hundreds of factors then assign different weights to each. Also consider the source data is constantly changing, and the best anyone can have is a "view" of the data at a given point in time.

There is absolutely no need for any random factor. In my naivety, I believe every last ranking result can be logically explained. We simply do not have proper access to the data, metrics and weighting involved in those calculations. Our educated guesses seem to do a pretty darn good job.

HTML sitemaps are generally designed for users, where XML sitemaps are designed for search engines. While either party could use either form of sitemap, each format is optimized for their intended audience.

If your site has proper navigation set up, a sitemap has almost no value at all. The modern day value of a sitemap submission to search engines is to alert search engines to web pages they would not otherwise locate during a crawl.

250 products seems like a lot to present on a page for an average user. Many product pages offer numerous links for each product for image viewing, examining the main product page, options such as colors, etc. A page with 250+ products seems unfriendly to most users and search engines, as I imagine the page may have 500+ links.

Hi Chris.

I have a few questions which will help myself and others to better answer your question.

Are your employee pages currently indexed?

Do employees need to login to access the employee site?

Do your employee pages offer anything of value for the internet? Do you have content that others may be interested in finding?

I have heard that google treats “website.com” & “www.website.com” separately and wanted to know if this has been true in anyone’s experience?

I can verify both from my personal and professional experience it is absolutely true.

If I redirected all visitors to www. Would my SERPS potentially improve?

Yes. Your links are presently divided as if they are going to two different websites. By combining into one site, your backlinks will merge which will increase your PA and DA.

This is a major SEO issue which should be promptly resolved. The fix is relatively easy:

1. Determine which version of your URL is preferred, with or without the www. My recommendation would be to use whichever version of your URL has the most established backlinks.

2. Set up a 301 redirect based on your choice. Your site should only be visible to the world using one version of your URL (like the SEOmoz site, for example).

3. Review your site and ensure all your internal links consistently use the correct URL format.

4. Review your signatures, social sites and any company controlled sites to ensure they all use the correct URL format.

5. Reach out to any partners and friendly sites and request they update your web address.

It may take about a month for the full benefit of the change to be absorbed. Google indexes a small percentage of your site each day.

Many SEOs will advise you to update your preferred setting in Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. You are welcome to make the change but it is not required with a proper 301 redirect in place.

Is stocktips.com your domain? If so, it seems you have removed the old content which means the links on those pages will be gone as well. All the internal links and their 404 errors will naturally disappear in a month or two. You should see the number of those errors decreasing each week as they drop off.

You could redirect the pages to a 410 error, but it already has been over 2 1/2 weeks since the Oct 8th date in your screenshot, so I would simply allow them to fall off naturally.

The page views and time on site information will be of limited benefit since most of the pages involved wont be viewable to Google since they are behind a login filter.

While many people believe that Google considers the factors you mention in their algorithms, I am not aware of any solid evidence or statements from Google confirming this information. In fact, Matt Cutts has specifically stated that no Google Analytics data is used in rankings at all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBw9tbAQhU

It makes perfect sense to me the factors you mention can be considered as part of the ranking process. I am sure many other SEOs believe they are as well. I would love to see any evidence to this effect. I think most people make this assumption.

With the above understood, if you felt the move was a low level of effort, I would probably go ahead with the change. It sounds like it can be a bit nicer for employees to stay on the same site. If this was considered a big project, I would not make the move without solid evidence you will achieve the benefits you desire.

Google looks at Bings trending of our site, so penalty for the duplicated content in Bing will reduce our Google ranking

I have never heard anything like this suggested. Bing and Google are competitors. They may look to each other for ideas, but it is highly unlikely either search engine uses any information from their competitor as a basis for ranking or duplicate content determinations.

If your UK content is at the site's root and the US content is in the /us folder, then you have a clear separation of content. There are numerous distinctions between the US and UK content which can be helpful for both Bing and Google to properly index your content:

• use the meta language tag

• ensure each version of the page uses proper spelling. For example "specialize" vs "specialise"

• use the proper monetary units (pound vs dollar), measurements, and cultural references (king vs president), etc.

• you can geo-target your site sections in Webmaster Tools

• it would also be helpful for pages to earn links from their target audience. UK pages should ideally earn UK links, whereas US pages should earn US links.

In my experience a 301 redirect is always the superior course of action. One reason is with a 301 redirect, you will ensure those who create links to your site will use the proper URL format. This way, your links go directly to the proper page without losing any link juice to a redirect.

Canonical tags are a great backup in case something goes wrong, but 301 redirects are always preferable.

C blocks refer to the IP used to host a site. URLs are formed as AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD. So if your IP is 100.150.222.001 then your C block is 222. Often all servers with the same host share a C block. Changing from a shared server to VPS or other changes with the same host often does not have any effect on your C block.

So if you create 10 sites with the same host and provide links between the sites, those links are devalued.

The three ideas you presented are basically correct. You can possibly use JS for navigation but it depends on exactly how it is coded. A rough test is if you right-click on a page and choose "view page source" check to see if you can see the HTML code for your navigation. If you can, so can Google. If you can't, then Google may or may not be able to depending on the coding.

No-follow internal links and any excessive links should be avoided. Internal pages should be kept a maximum of three clicks from the landing page.

For your tennis racket question, a couple thoughts. I would ensure the URL navigation is something like mysite.com/tennis-rackets/wilson or mysite.com/wilson-tennis-rackets.

You should also be able to smoothly state "Check out of selection of Wilson tennis rackets" once without it seeming spammy in any way.

You shouldn't have to choose between a great user experience and SEO. Google has done a lot of testing and is sharing what they feel is the best user experience. If you don't say "Wilson tennis rackets" one time, they feel your page isn't as well associated with the term as another page which does state that specific term. If you stuff that phrase in too much, then it's not a good user experience. Balance is the key.

My preference is option B.

Google does not like microsites. They are basically a form of internet pollution. I am making the assumption the microsites are serving the primary function of funneling users to your main site.

You can try finding different C blocks, but you are practicing black hat SEO, and you are almost sure to fail. The microsites can be related to the main site in dozens of ways, and even if you take care of the C-block, you will likely miss several other factors.

The last notice I read said it would happen on the 25th.

Like you and many others, I wish the Linkscape updates were more frequent. We all look to Linkscape similarly to the way we looked in college to receiving our grades. We are anxious to see the results of our link building efforts.

We really shouldn't though. In college, we had a darn good idea of what grades we were going to receive without needing to see the official document. Likewise with our sites we should have a pretty good idea of how our links are progressing. Keep in mind Linkscape only captures around 25% of the internet pages anyway, so it's just a guide and not an all-inclusive tool.

Your mix of HTML and JS should be fine. Please confirm by using the test I suggested above on a page.

With respect to your text navigation links, it really depends on how you position them to users. How many brands of rackets do you offer? If you only have three brands, then I would prefer three lines of full text, "Wilson tennis rackets", etc. The header of "Tennis Rackets" would seem unnecessary to me. If you offered a dozen links, then I can understand your position a bit more.

Another tip to keep in mind is Google will use the anchor text from the first link discovered on the page with respect to link weight and anchor text association. Google crawls a page's HTML from the top down. For that reason I present my HTML in the following order: body, sidebar, navigation, footer. With HTML5 Google can better differentiate page sections but I would still arrange the code in this manner until I had confirmation that content was given priority in this regard.

That's up to you, but I prefer to use both. The 301 redirect, once set up, should always work. At times a site experiences an issue whereby a .htaccess file is deleted, overwritten or modified accidentally. When that happens the issue may not be immediately discovered. Lots of headaches can be caused this way.

The canonical tag helps minimize the damage in this case, and also helps with the natural variations websites have such as a "print" version of a page.

Any redirect causes an estimated 1 - 10% loss of link juice. If all your links use the non www version, then from a pure SEO link value perspective you should redirect the www version to the non www version of your URL.

If you are on good terms with the sites who are providing those links, you could also ask them to update their links to your new structure. It's a decision you will need to make.

Your htaccess code seems ok. Once again, that is not my area of expertise. I created the code I used with the Redirect app in cPanel and have copied it.

Adding the "noindex" meta tag to the page will stop Google and Bing/Yahoo from indexing the page, and it will cause them to remove the page from the index if it has already been added.

It is important you remove the block from the robots.txt file because the search engines wont crawl the page to see the changed meta tag while it is blocked with robots.txt.

Short answer, No.

I have heard many stories but never one where someone claimed to lose their PR due to changing the domain registration details.

Domain registration information is accessed by Google. They can use any information located there as a signal. I am not aware of any confirmation from Google of any such data being used. If Google believed your domain changed owners, they may remove your historical PR but that would be if your site's content changed at the same time. For example if you bought AcmeHealth.com and before it was a health food store and now you use the site to sell health insurance, then Google would see the registration was sold and the content changed and make an adjustment.

This video from Matt Cutts is not directly related but you may find it helpful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnfM_szmDh0Q&A Forum

Let me start off by sharing the description of the "Minimal Subfolders in the URL" metric from the On Page report:

The quantity of subfolders in a URL appears to correlate to rankings. URLs with fewer trailing slashes perform better than those with more. Additionally, search engine representatives have recommended that excessive, subfolders in a URL string may be a signal that the page is very deep in a site's structure and may be less valuable/worthwhile to crawl, index and rank.

Your On Page report, like many SEO tools, seeks to call your attention to possible issues on your site. There is a correlation to more folders being an increased number of clicks away from the home page. If that is a concern on your site, then the warning is valid. If that is not a concern, you can disregard the warning.

There are other reasons to shorten your URL structure other then rankings. Click Through Rate can be affected by URL appearance. It has been clearly shown users wish to know the URL of the page prior to clicking on the link. Your current URL cannot be seen completely in SERPs. I performed a search in Google.com for the URL path you shared, "/trails/Canada/British-Columbia/Greater-Vancouver-Regional-District/Baden--Powell-Trail/trail/2". Notice the result URL? It is cut off and you never get to see what is presumably the most important part.

Of your ideas, I like your preference the best as a URL structure, /trail/ca-bc-vancouver/Baden-Powell-Trail.

Whatever your decision, there is absolutely no need to stuff every keyword in the URL. mysite.com/baden-powell-trail works just fine. If the extra folders make sense for your users and site, by all means use them. I would advise against adding any keywords to a URL in a pure attempt to influence rankings.