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Not even the customization page (http://code.google.com/apis/+1button/) mentions anything about changing the looks of the button.

It does make sense for Google to force this design how from their perspective. This way everybody will connect the looks of this particular button with the +1 service, even though this is indeed unfortunate for end users who want it to blend in with the rest of their design.

You could use enviromental variables (for example in your env.ini or config.ini file) that are set to DEVELOPMENT, STAGING, or LIVE based on the appropriate environments the code finds itself in.

With the exact same code, your website would either be limiting IP addresses (on the development environment) or allow all IP addresses (in the live environment). With this setup you can also set different variables per environment such as the level of detail that is shown in your error reporting, connect to a testing database rather than a live one, etc.

[this was supposed to be a reply, but I accidentely clicked the wrong button. Hitting 'Delete reply' results in an error.]

I'm sure there is, but I'm guessing you don't want any human visitors to go to your development subdomain and view what is being done there as well? I'd suggest you either limit the visitors that have access by IP address (thereby effectively blocking out Google in one move) and/or implement a .htpasswd solution where developers can log in with their credentials to your development area (which blocks out Google as well).

I'm afraid a slight miscommunication has happened. The website MyWeddingFavors isn't mine (I wish!) but was simply an example I used.

That aside, yes, you would have to do some 301 redirects, but I don't see that as a problem if it greatly improves both the user friendliness and the structure of the website as perceived by the search engines.

From what I know that website performs really well in the search engines for both long and short tail keywords, which would indicate that once set up well, both structures can perform good in the search engines.

I would personally go for the structure provided by mediAvatar. This one clearly indicates what type of item we're viewing, and enables users to 'chop off' a part of the URL to get to the index page of that particular category.

However, many big boys including for example Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/What-Every-BODY-Saying-Speed-Reading/dp/0061438294/) and My Wedding Favors (http://www.myweddingfavors.com/key.html) have chosen your structure, which of course has clear benefits of its own (such as a far shorter URL).

Both are equally good and neither are preferred more or less by the search engines. Just choose which one you like more (for whatever reasons) and redirect the one you don't choose to the one you do.

My personal choice is www as it looks more 'classic', but various reasons could be given for the non-www as well (such as the fact that it creates shorter URLs for example when Tweeting one)

Assuming the website we're talking about is the same as in your email address, I find the meta robots tag

For the page https:// webshop . acsi . eu / en / checkout / onepage / (spaced to prevent indexation of this post).

Are you sure the right meta tags are in place?

I personally doubt these links (or any links for that matter) are 'decaying'.

Knowing that SEOmoz only crawls a portion (however large, but still a portion) of the pages on the web, these pages that were once showing up containing your links, may simply not be crawled anymore due to being 'not important enough'.

To either strengthen or break the theory above: are these 'decaying' links coming from authorative / strong domains or from weaker domains that could possibly be fallen out of the crawling range of the SEOmoz crawler?

I would suggest to noindex,follow all the pages beyond page 1. This way the paginated pages will not show up as individual results in Google, but still pass on link juice to the items themselves.

This way the only thing you'd have to worry about is whether putting that category description up is helpful on these pages for your visitors, rather than have to worry about the search engines as well (the page won't be indexed anyway).

I was talking about the same concept you're describing when I mentioned category listings. The next / previous and related items sound exactly like the things that I would recommend to get links to the page > 1 items! Lastly, yes the canonical URL should be the page we're actually viewing and not always page 1.

You're welcome! It is a link from one page of your website to another, thus an internal link. I don't see how noindex,follow would change that. Yes, they will receive link juice. Because of the follow in the robots tag the pages (even though they aren't indexed) still pass link juice. Like I said in my original post, it is best to have other pages (such as category listings for example) link to these items as welll though.

"What you describe is ok, no policies are violated."

I strongly disagree on this one. What he describes sounds an awful lot like Google's description of a 'doorway page', which are explicitly against Google Webmaster Guidelines:

"Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination." (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355)

In light of the above I would advice against the practice your describing. Instead I would optimize (sections) of the main site for such keywords or set up independent (complete and value adding) domains for these keywords you'd like to rank for.

If I understand correctly what you're trying to achieve, then you could use OpenSiteExplorer and click on the tab 'Anchor Text Distribution'.

From what I've read on the internet, it is best to "noindex,follow" all pages >1. This issue had bugged me for quite some time as well, and I've struggled to find good resources explaining why their solution was the best. Now that I've actually given the subject some thought, and finally managed to read some quality material on the matter, it all makes sense.

It's basically a checklist. Do you want search engines to

• index your paginated result pages: yes / no

• reach the items that are listed in your paginated result pages: yes / no

In most cases you don't want your paginated result pages to be indexed. With our without Panda, visitors get little value from actually viewing 'page 7' in your result pages. That actual page provides little or no value to those visitors. However, you DO want those items listed on these paginated pages to be crawled, especially when you don't have any other pages linking to them (which you should by the way). This boils down to:

• Don't nofollow your paginated links (because you want search engine spiders to reach them)

• Put "noindex,follow" in the meta robots tag for all pages >1 (thus page 2 and greater) so the engines will no index these paginated results, but will crawl on to the pages that are behind the listings

Good luck!

My gut feeling says #2. I'll spend the rest of this post thinking out loud why I think that one is there better option (though I don't think there is actually a 'wrong' and a 'good' option here, both have their advantages en disadvantages).

• Both your visitors and the search engines will stop visiting the old URLs as fast as possible (saving you bandwidth on the redirects).

• Less 'code overhead' regarding cases such as 'did I change that one already?'

• You are treating search engine robots and human visitors equally

Love to see what others have to say about this!

Yes, a followed link is still a followed link. It was like that before Panda and it is like that after Panda.

However, not every followed link has the same value. For example: a link from CNN.com has more value than a link from buy-viagra-online-now.info, this holds true both before and after Panda.

What Panda did was decrease the value to you that a link from eZineArticles.com has. Whether you're wasting your time is up to you to decide. Given that you know the article submitted to eZineArticles will only generate a low-value link, is that a wise task to spend your time on, or is that time better spend elsewhere?

B. Neutral

Pretty much the answer I've landed on by excluding the other two. Because this link is Javascript based and the engines are to my knowledge not following these kind of links (please correct me if I'm wrong), it won't give you any positive value. Giving that you're not doing anything illegal or bad, I don't see how this could affect your website's SEO negatively either. Thus, I would say that B best describes the value of this link from an SEO perspective.

These updates by Google are applied algorithmically. This means that they are applied based on a set of standards, which should affect as many 'bad' sites as possible, while at the same moment affect as few 'good' sites as possible.

For some reason the website you're mentioning apparently didn't match the algorithmic criteria to get hit by lower rankings (on this series of updates).

To my knowledge there hasn't been a definitive conclusion on this one.

The general advice as I know it seems to be: they are equally good, pick one, and make sure the other one (with slash if you choose to go for 'without slash' or vice versa) redirects to the chosen one (to avoid duplicate content).

I would personally place the keywords at the end for clarity. It indeed seems unnatural to have the id as the final part of the URL. Even if that does indeed cost you a tiny bit of 'keyword power', I would glady sacrifice that in exchange for a more user-friendly URL.

Limiting the amount of words in the URL does indeed make it look slightly less spammy, but slightly less user friendly as well. I guess this is just one of those 'weigh the pros/cons and decide for yourself'. Just make sure the URLs don't get rediculously long.