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Generally the shorter the URL the better - both from an indexing & usability perspectives..

Also, shorter URLs attract higher click-thru rates

Further discussion/reading:

• http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-isn-t-seomoz-using-file-extensions-html-etc-on-any-of-their-web-page-urls
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls
• http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/8183/do-file-extensions-matter-anymore

Delete!

As Autobytel mentioned, specifying the canonical would be the way to go.. considering you also have www & non www versions:

• http://thegorillafirm.com/bikes/
• http://thegorillafirm.com/bikes/index.asp
• http://www.thegorillafirm.com/bikes/
• http://www.thegorillafirm.com/bikes/index.asp

I'm not familiar with Cartweaver but these are just guides..

First define an organised URL structure - on bartramgallery.com, at a quick glance, a good one could be:

• bartramgallery.com/photographer (e.g. bartramgallery.com/gordon-michael)

• bartramgallery.com/photographer/photo (e.g. bartramgallery.com/gordon-michael/juniper-study-joshua-tree)

  OR
  bartramgallery.com/landscape-photography/photo (e.g. bartramgallery.com/landscape-photography/juniper-study-joshua-tree)

Keep in mind that the shorter URLs the better (could even have bartramgallery.com/photography/juniper-study-joshua-tree)

Second, rewrite the URLs using Rewrite Rules in the htaccess file (see this post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rewriterule-split-personality-explained)

I did a search on the Cartweaver support forums and found this:
http://forums.cartweaver.com/topic/google-analytics-identifying-products-and-categories

Oli, from the Cartweaver Support Team, seems to suggest the same "untested" approach as above

Let me know if you need any further help

My pleasure If you set up redirects, you shouldn't loose any traffic

This can also be controlled via htaccess

In google, search for this "site:bartramgallery.com" (without the double quotes) & you will see all the pages you need to redirect

I see the Charles Cramer page as the first photographers page that comes up & the redirect would be something as simple as:

Redirect 301 /results.php?category=10       http://www.bartramgallery.com/charles-cramer

Ryan is absolutely spot on.. you can create some redirection rules in the .htaccess (assuming the site's on apache)

something along the lines of..

RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/(.*)$ /$4 [R=301,NC,L]

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

(of course if totally depends on your site structure & I'd test these on a staging server if possible)

Looks like there are inbound links split between http://getvetter.com, http://www.getvetter.com and the https versions (https://getvetter.com & https://www.getvetter.com)

I always recommend to either use https sitewide - always on, or to only allow it after a form has been submitted so it doesn't get crawled

A link canonical should be applied to the homepage at least, the https issue may take longer to resolve:

If you're comfortable, then add a canonical to each page, e.g.
to the www.getvetter.com/tour page

(but be careful to ensure it is respective to that page)

This may not fix the specific PR problem but should be addressed nevertheless

To achieve a balance between visual aesthetics and search engine interoperability, you could use a Javascript font renderer like cufon: http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/ - which will give you nice anti-aliasing.

Look at Google Fonts too - http://www.google.com/webfonts#ChoosePlace:select

I would redesign & work towards getting a H1 on there rather than working backwards

@Simon agreed - could be a 302 & check WMT

Also, it may not be a bad thing having results in position #1 & #2 in the SERPs Means your client has listings in the best positions

Another option could be to use a rel=canonical to wipe the site out very quickly - see Rand's example of how he removed his old blog: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday (generally, be extremely cautious with this approach but given your goals , i.e. remove site from index, it should be fine)

Oh I just found the culprits.. in this blog post:
http://www.getvetter.com/posts/35-continuous-improvement-continuous-innovation-at-toyota-in-the-1950-s-classic-photo

the anchor "employee creativity" points to:

https://www.getvetter.com/posts/29-employee-creativity-encouraged-by-crazy-office-decoration

also in,

http://www.getvetter.com/posts/44-disrupt-think-the-unthinkable-to-spark-transformation-in-your-business-something-for-the-to-read-list

the anchor "employee creativity" points to:

**https://**www.getvetter.com/posts/33-what-is-incremental-innovation-is-vetter-incremental-innovation-software

there are more.. too check the internal links throught the blog and change any https:// to just http:// and crawlers will no longer find them

Agree with all these responses.. add 301 redirects via .htaccess (or relevant technology applicable to your server) that will permanently redirect humans & crawlers to, at least, the home page or a relevant page with similar content.

Some of the deleted pages may still be linked from other sites or internal pages within you site...

Thanks

I'd use folders or categories if the amount of products/items is large and/or going to expand

If it's a small amount & finite then make the URLs as short as possible

The 301s are warnings and could be in place for a reason - you can also download a spreadsheet with all the crawl findings.. it's really useful.

Generally, fix all the errors (in red) if any.. fix warnings as required & examine the notices

For example, I have a site that has 100+ canonicals - all fine & a couple of warnings (titles too long but only over by 1 or 2 characters)

Hope that helps a little

There are 2 issues here:

1. Need to fix the URLs for better user experience & search engines and can do so by using rewrite rules in htaccess

   The one suggested by the support forum (I've modified to better match your site but it's untested):

   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteRule ^photographer/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/([0-9]+).php$ results.php?category=$2 The URLs would then be:
   http://www.bartramgallery.com/photographer/charles-cramer/10.php (not ideal with "/10.php" at the end but may be best given the limitations of the cart)
   rewrites to: http://www.bartramgallery.com/results.php?category=10

2. Clean up the Google index (remove old URLs & add new ones)
   Since both URLs will render the same content we can fix by adding a
   tag - attributing 1 source to the duplicate content - check if you can do this dynamically in the templates but be very careful not to canonical everything to the homepage or all your pages will be wiped out the index except the home page!)

Will the site categories/products grow? If so, then the slash could be used to organise the structure & prepare for the future

In the example, you presented:

1. www.example.com/accounts-titanium
2. www.example.com**/**accounts/titanium

These are the same length & make no real difference

When we compare these 2, however:

1. www.example.com/open-demo-account
2. www.example.com/accounts/open-demo-account

You can see that #1 is shorter, doesn't repeat keyword (even though they are plural) & would be more likely clicked in the SERPs

Does that help some more?

Can you get to it using a proxy service like proxify.com?

I'd suggest to rebuild the site using HTML5 & some JS for effects & font rendering - currently there is only 1 URL for the entire site but there is a whole lot of content that could be created into pages (separate page per model with bio & links to their Google+ accounts etc).

Following on from Andy's ideas around social - you really need to leverage from social media sharing buttons on each model page.. I'm sure you'll be able to get their mums & wives liking the pages

Good responses

Having a look at your site.. another option you could look at is to create a "food-truck-franchise" landing page, i.e.: http://gourmetstreets.com/food-truck-franchise (with content targetted to food truck fanchises & links to each different franchise type)

And have all the franchise pages site in a folder beneath:

• http://gourmetstreets.com/food-truck-franchise/american
• http://gourmetstreets.com/food-truck-franchise/chillipeppers
• http://gourmetstreets.com/food-truck-franchise/deli-cuisine

From that "parent" page you could create a whole heap of knowledge base articles:

• http://gourmetstreets.com/food-truck-franchise/how-to-create
• http://gourmetstreets.com/food-truck-franchise/costs
• http://gourmetstreets.com/food-truck-franchise/locations etc etc

Yes