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Hi there,

If you don’t want these pages to appear in the index then yes, noindex follow would be the best directive to ensure any link juice still flows through them pages into other indexed pages, such as your blog posts found on those pages etc.

The harm of using noindex is when you are actually bringing in organic traffic through those pages, so have a look in analytics before you start noindexing. Take a look at organic traffic where your paged pages are the landing page – you could use a filter for something like page/ or page/[0-9]+ (or however your urls are structured for pagination) to look at all of these pages.

If those pages are bringing in organic traffic, why not optimise your metas and encourage even more users onto those pages? If they aren’t getting any entrances from search, you’re safe to do whichever you prefer - you could noidex,follow them to drop them from the index and keep the PR flowing.

Those pages aren’t harming you so you’re safe to leave them if you’re unsure, but always check entrances from search before you drop ANY page from the index. That way you can be sure you won’t lose any of your traffic.

Hope that helps,

Tom

Hi Cindyt,

When I try to access that example URL I get a 404 on rock-n-roll-action-figures.com, which leads me to believe you still haven’t fixed your redirection issue. If you’re using an Apache server you can redirect page for page with these few lines in your .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !newdomain.com$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

The only difference between this and what Ray described was happening on Tuesday, is that it captures the entire path that is being requested with ^(.*)$ and appends it to the end of the new domain with the $1 – which is the reference for our first (1) captured group (the brackets). Very simple to implement.

Remember the rules are executed top to bottom in your .htaccess, so if some page URLs have changed and need to be redirected individually you should add them before your ‘everything’ rule.

Hope this helps,

Tom

Hi there,

You’d redirect just the same as redirecting an entire site, except only create rules for the pages you used to own. Mirror your old content on your new site (if you can use the same URIs that would make things easier) and then write a series of rules to redirect only your content.

If your URIs are staying the same you could do something like:

RedirectCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/your-old-content/$ [NC,OR]
RedirectCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/folder/your other content$ [NC,OR]
RedirectCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/mynews/.* [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

You could use regex to match lots of your URLs at once, but you’d need to be careful not to redirect the new owners pages too. When I redirect an entire site I always create a final rule which says anything else? Send it to the homepage like this:

RedirectRule .* http://www.newsite.com/ [R=301,L]

But this time you would leave that off, as any requests not caught by your rewrite condition will belong to the new owner and go to where they’re intended on the old site.

Hope that helps explain things,

Tom

Hi there,

You can use separate sitemaps along with a sitemap index but when you use you hreflang annotations you must specify all alternates for the URL. or they may not be understood correctly. You’re fine to use a sitemap for all of your content which you don’t wish to add the hreflang tags to, and another for the URLs with hreflang tags.

Just remember to specify every version of each page you mention in your hreflang sitemap along with a <loc>entry all wrapped in a <url>tag:</url></loc>

<url><loc>http://example.com</loc>
<xhtml:link rel="”alternate”" hreflang="”x-default”" href="”http://example.com”">//for users with no version specified
<xhtml:link rel="”alternate”" hreflang="”en”" href="”<a">http://example.com” /> //for English users in any country
<xhtml:link rel="”alternate”" hreflang="”en-us”" href="”<a">http://example.com” /> //us english
<xhtml:link rel="”alternate”" hreflang="”en-gb”" href="”<a">http://example.co.uk” /> //uk english
<xhtml:link rel="”alternate”" hreflang="”it-it”" href="”<a">http://example.it” /> //Italian users in Italy
<xhtml:link rel="”alternate”" hreflang="”it”" href="”<a">http://it.example.com” /> //Italian users anywhere</xhtml:link></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></url>

You cannot have one sitemap for hreflang=”en” and another for hreflang=”it” but you can use a separate sitemap on example.it specifying static pages on that domain:

<loc>example.it <loc><loc>example.it/page2</loc></loc></loc>

Your hreflang sitemap on example.it would have the same hreflang tags as the .com, but with the Italian domain specified in <loc>:</loc>

<url><loc>http://example.it</loc>
<xhtml:link rel="”alternate”" hreflang="”x-default”" href="”<a">http://example.com” /> //for users with no version specified
<xhtml:link rel="”alternate”" hreflang="”en”" href="”<a">http://example.com” /> //for English users in any country
<xhtml:link rel="”alternate”" hreflang="”en-us”" href="”<a">http://example.com” /> //us english
<xhtml:link rel="”alternate”" hreflang="”en-gb”" href="”<a">http://example.co.uk” /> //uk english
<xhtml:link rel="”alternate”" hreflang="”it-it”" href="”<a">http://example.it” /> //Italian users in Italy
<xhtml:link rel="”alternate”" hreflang="”it”" href="”<a">http://it.example.com” /> //Italian users anywhere else</xhtml:link></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></url>

So, each domain would need its own ‘sitemap 1’ (the hreflang sitemap) and its own sitemap 2 specifying the pages which weren’t in the hreflang sitemap, and its own sitemap index pointing to both sitemaps. Unless you verify both properties under the same WMT account, then you could use a sitemap containing every <loc>from all different sites, along with all their international variations, and reference that 1 international sitemap in your sitemap index for every site – this post will explain multiple domains: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/75712</loc>

This webmaster help pages explains about sitemap hreflang implementation: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en

Hope that helps,

Tom

Thanks Everett - Just popping across to Stack Overflow now!