Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Martijn much appreciated

Hi there, There's a bunch of conflicting information floating around about this, but the last thing I read from Google was that they no longer recommended using the canonical tag when implementing hreflang: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html See the greyed / crossed-out section and the note underneath. It was super helpful of them to not announce this in any way, but just edit that article. Keep in mind that the original was written in 2011, of course...

Definetely go for subfolders, you can then target all you linkbuilding activities to different parts of the domains, and this will eventually help the complete domain. We work already with subfolders for the last 15 years and also with the hreflang, works fine.

"If it aint broke...."  Hard to argue against that!    I'd test removing it on a category though... I'm like that I'm off to do some window shopping then.

Thanks Linda I'll check that out. Robert

Hi Jarno, I want to keep the categories and yes ideally shorten the urls. I thought about changing ther permalink structure to %postname% instead of the current /%category%/%postname%/ Also I think I could chnage the reading settings to show only snippets of each post and add cusotm category text to make each category url as unique as possible. This post http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success advises to keep category pages indexed so making these unique as possible is most likely the best solution to avoid duplicate content. The last thing I want to do is mess anything up. Although the blog itself doesntget much traffic anyway so I can only make it better. Already implemented a few changes including adding google authorship for each user which seems to have worked well. Already ranked a new post on page 2 for "best ski jacket" which was only published last week (date says may but this was altered in publish settings to keep another post sticky) Thanks for your help.

Hi Robert, In my experience, going for responsive design is always the best option. m. sites can work but they don't make sense is responsive is an option. Take a look here in regards to your canonical query: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details Let me know if that helps!

Thanks Rikki, I did find the canonical tag and thought myself it would have an impact. Just always good to get others opinion. Thanks Robert