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Hehe, you answered my question.  I was a little late.

Still though, just redirecting one site to another (and not a 'change of address') might confuse the heck out of the crawlers.

What's the plan, anyways?  Just 301'ing every page on site a to the homepage of site b?

Are the two websites related?  If they are in completely different genres, then it won't do much good in redirecting one entire site over to another.

Well, what are your concerns?

I mean, you're using Wordpress, so the majority of the SEO structure should be taken care of.  What keywords/phrases are you looking to rank for?

And I believe you have misspelled habitat wrong in your logo.  You have 2 b's when there should only be 1

"I don't think Google is sophisticated enough to breakup a string into words without hyphens"

I wonder though... they might very well use the same algo that they use when you misspell something in the search box on google.com

Try typing in two conjoined words and it manages to separate them asking, "Did you mean..."

You brought up an interesting point.

"good mix of link directories and natural links"

Exactly, that's what I was missing in my first reply.

You're still going to need those legitimately earned backlinks to go within your link portfolio.  Just replying on 50,000 directory submissions might get you a burst up front, but that will fade away very, very quickly.

There are quite a few factors at play here.

1. I've always preferred, as a developer, to have end-pages split up into categories and sub-categories for ease of development.  However, it also let's the user know where they are within the site simply by looking at the URL.

There really is no right or wrong.  You just have to do what makes sense for the site.  If we're talking a micro-site here, with only a handful of pages, then you don't need to create categories and sub-categories.  Just make a straight up URL, ie. /vacuum-services.html instead of doing /services/vacuums/

Remember to try and keep your preferred keywords to the foremost left of the URL to ensure some significance is placed on them.  Not imperative, but if you can, I'd suggest it.

2. Always use hyphens to break up a word.  Underscores are seen as a form of concatenation by search engines, whereas hyphens are seen as separators.  Using neither is not recommended as it's not legible to the end-user and ultimately just forms one large word comprised of several keywords.  No good.

I am yet to find any harm in these (assuming you don't post to ones that carry bad links, ie. outbound links to gambling sites, xxx sites, etc).

If link directories were so bad, how come some of them are as respected by Google as they are (PR7/8/9's).

Just don't go overboard, and don't expect a whole lot from them.  Get your keywords right, and use approx. 10 different keywords/phrases throughout.  Also throw in your brand name as a set of anchor text.

So, let's say you found a package to submit to 1,000 directories.  Chop that into 10 different anchor text's (max, and 10 might be pushing it), so you'll now get approx. 100 links to different pages of your site with different anchor texts.  And don't forget to use your brand name for 100 of those.

Like you said, every time I do research on competitor's backlinks, they always, and I means always, have thousands of links in link directories, and are top 3 in the SERP's.  So I have found it hard to believe that it's a bad practice, even though every SEO guru on the planet will try and tell you otherwise.

As I understand it, they are pretty self-explanatory in that "Page Authority" is the authority of a specific page based on its content.  And "Domain Authority" is the authority of an entire domain/website (ie. CNN.com has a massive domain authority).

Often times you will comes across an article on something and notice that that article itself is a PR6, while the homepage of that same site might only be a PR2-4.  That page has developed a significant Page Authority, whereas the domain has not.

Domain Authority always trumps Page Authority, in my opinion.  For example, getting a backlink to your site off a relevant website with a higher Domain Authority is always going to play better for you than getting a link off a page where the domain doesn't carry much weight.  That's just been my experience.

Hehe.

Generally speaking, and I've actually come across this quite a bit lately, it's better to just put your efforts towards fixing the technical issues than to try and manipulate the site using redirects and canonical tags.  But it's easy to say when it's not my technical problem, nor my money/time on the line to fix it!  However, that is always the best-case scenario in my opinion.

I worry about setting up a canonical tag that points to a URL Google can't access (as it's just being redirected via 302 back to the non-www version anytime it will try and read the canonical URL).  And since a canonical tag is kinda sorta like a 301, you'd ultimately be 301'ing (kinda sorta) back to the www version, only to have a 302 header sent, 302'ing Google back to the non-www.  And endless loop, so-to-speak.  I'm not sure how Google would handle this.

How about just working 24/7 to resolve the "technical problem" that is causing this?  I know, easy for me to say

"an advantage of having both locations on one .com is that all links will help towards it, rather than getting less benefit by link-building to two completely separate sites"

I disagree.

There is no better way to geo-target your site than to adhere to the appropriate top-level domain.  If your site has UK product, it belongs on a .co.uk, hosted on a server in the UK.  That way, search engines know that you are specific to that region.  Same goes for US, Canada, Mexico, Ireland, you name it.  You want to be relevant, you need to take the right measures.

And link-building is just part of the game.  Link building on two sites is nothing considering many people, including myself, operate 5+ websites on a regular basis, so that's not a valid reason/excuse.  If you have thousands of US-based links pointing to your site, then your site will be ranked for US content.  There is an equal amount of link building necessary whether you have US and UK content on one domain, or two, as either way you will still have to gather UK-based backlinks for your UK content, and US-based backlins for your US content.  The benefits of two domains far outweigh any benefits of one as it's cleaner, and more specific to your product.  You will show up in the correct SERP's (google.co.uk for UK, google.com for US).

It's just important to get it right the first time, that's all.  Changing your mind 10 months from now to make a switch can take you down a few notches in the serp's.

If OP insists on staying on one domain, use a subdomain, and not a folder structure.  Will at least give it some separation from the US content.

While I didn't watch the provided video, I don't see anything about geo-targeting specific folders.

Not to dwell on grabbing a .co.uk, but I know of many company's that have altered their domain name slightly because somebody else already had their domain name.  For example, you could have domain.com and domain-uk.com, or something along those lines.  Just a thought.

And another thing to consider would be to instead of using a folder to separate the countries, I would strongly recommend using a subdomain, ie. uk.domain.com as it will be easier to keep track of in terms of analytics and such.

You are correct in thinking that. Nofollow links are used to say "we do not endorse this external reference", which means no PR value is passed (although, Google still reserves the right to actually pass some PR if it feels the external reference is worthy), but the external site will be crawled.  Nofollow does not stop the bots from accessing the referenced URL.

With that said, you need a proper ratio of dofollow to nofollow backlinks to keep your incoming links looking organic.  For example, if 99% of your backlinks are dofollow, Google might see that as being a little fishy.  The biggest mistake people make is to not go for a backlink just because it has a nofollow tag on it.  With all the social media out there these days, and the large majority of them applying nofollow tags on all external url's, it doesn't make sense to not get your links out there regardless.  Google still sees these backlinks and recognizes them as a reference to your site/company, and there is a large signal in their current algo for that.

So don't dwell on it, trust me.  You will find you're just investing too much time for something that you cannot control.  Just focus on creating relationships with relevant sites and the rest will fall into place.  Pay no attention to the nofollow tag.  Take it from a guy who used to be OBSESSED haha.  I read more source-code than actual page content for years!

End note: when it comes down to it, to help put things in perspective, consider a _nofollow_backlink to your site coming from wikipedia.com or something like that.  And then consider a dofollow backlink coming from some no-name, or less reputable site than that.  You're going to see a significant increase in popularity from that one nofollow backlink than any other dofollow backlinks, no what I mean?

OK - off the bat, in my opinion, it would be worth setting up a .com for your US site and a .co.uk for your UK site.  Although, I'm not sure .co.uk's can be purchased without proof of business within the UK.  Might want to look into that.

Doing that would make each of your sections geographically relevant and would benefit your site much better as you would be able to show up in the appropriate serp's.

1. Google will find all your content as long as it's linked internally.  Making sure Google knows the difference between what is US content and what is UK content will be the challenge.  Your title/meta/H1 tags will need to reflect that, ie. My Product - UK - My Company, and so on.  This is why it's easier to just have it setup on its own .co.uk

2. As far as I know, you cannot specify geo-locations on folders within Webmaster Tools (WMT).  You can only set the root directory as you already stated.  Therefore, if you have a website that accommodates several geographic locations, you're best to leave the "Target location" as blank.  Specifying it to US, or any country for that matter, will hinder your chances of UK getting recognized to its full potential.

3. I wouldn't use a canonical to point UK back to US.  That would throw search engines off I could only imagine.

Summary: if you can, take advantage of a .com and .co.uk, and that way, you can setup WMT to accommodate each as specific geo-locations and hopefully reap the benefits of proper geo-location.

Hope this helps a bit.

• Marc

Agreed.

"I dont want to write this differently on each 1k [pages]"

But why not?  It's very time consuming, yes, but will pay off exponentially in the long-run.

And then once you're caught up, writing those descriptions for any additional product that comes in will be  abreeze.

That's the best-case solution; but to answer your concern directly, yes, there is a good chance that search engines will just disregard each write-up as actual content if it's in a template fashion with only a word or two swapped out.

Well, I don't think there is any denying that using special characters/symbols help anything stand out more.  And while I cannot help you with any definitive answers, as I have not run any case-studies myself, I can tell you that people are becoming more sensitive to spammy looking sites and such within the SERP's.

With that said, if you choose to use any special characters within your title/meta tags, tread lightly, as preceding your actual site/page title with 5 moons or stars might look a little fishy to some.

But I agree, as an end-user, your eyes are definitely drawn to things that stand out first and foremost.

Last thing you'd want is to be ranked for a symbol by the major search engines.

Sorry, that probably not much help... just my 2 cents on the matter for what it's worth.

Hehe, hey now, not all us developers are lazy

You know your system better than any of us do.  My 1. and 2. are just the best-case order in which to get things done.  Do what works for you and your site.

Yes to your first questions.  Here's the process for each (as I see it):

1. Fix/remove the ability for system to generate ?print URL's and implement canonical tags; open beer and wait 'til search engines sort things out.  Nothing more you can do here.

2. No fix to system so we still have ?print URL's.  In this case, setup the 301's in your .htaccess file; however, as long as the system is still generating these ?print URLs, you will have to keep the redirects in the .htaccess in tact, permanently.

Untested:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^([^/]*).html?print$ /$1.html [L,NC,R=301]

Just to clarify.  If there is in fact no difference between the pages (as you originally stated), then please just use the canonical tag.  As much as you might want to setup 301 redirects, they would not be the way to go in this case.  Trust me.

Otherwise, here is what I would do, honestly: find out why the ?print is causing information to be displayed improperly in some cases.  If it's accessing the same db tables using the same queries, then that shouldn't be happening.  I'd fix that, and implement the canonical tags, and wait it out.  That would be the easiest approach and most beneficial with the least impact to your site and any rankings.

If this is something your not capable of fixing (not sure if you're proficient with coding, etc), then you can setup 301's as a 'hack', but they should not be left in permanently as the process in which I stated just above is the best way to resolve the issue.

In order to assist you with any .htaccess markup, you'll need to provide some examples of your URL's, and whether they have any common identifiers.

OK - I was basing my answers on what you said, "the only difference between the original and the duplictes is the "?print" at the end of each URL"

If there is in fact different content on each page, and the ?print page is the one with the errors, then you should remove the ability for ?print pages to even be generated in the first place instead of having them constantly redirecting user/bots.  Forever 301 re-directions can hurt you down the road.

Once you've removed the ability for users/bots to find and access the ?print pages, then setup the 301's and insert the canonical tags.