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Hi everyone. Thanks in advance for the assistance. We are reformatting the URL structure of our very content rich website (thousands of pages) into a cleaner stovepipe model. So our pages will have a URL structure something like http://oursite.com/topic-name/category-name/subcategory-name/title.html etc.

My question is… is there any additional benefit to having the path /topic-name/category-name/subcategory-name/title.html literally exist on our server as a real directory? Our plan was to just use HTACCESS to point that URL to a single script that parses the URL structure and makes the page appropriately.

Do search engine spiders know the difference between these two models and prefer one over the other? From our standpoint, managing a single HTACCESS file and a handful of page building scripts would be infinitely easier than a huge, complicated directory structure of real files. And while this makes sense to us, the HTACCESS model wouldn't be considered some kind of black hat scheme, would it?

Thank you again for the help and looking forward to your thoughts!

Hello all and thank you in advance for the help.

I have a coffee company that sell both retail and wholesale products. These are typically the same product, just at different prices. We are planning on having a pop up for users to help them self identify upon their first visit asking if they are retail or wholesale clients.

So if someone clicks retail, the cookie will show them retail pricing throughout the site and vice versa for those that identify themselves as wholesale. I can talk to our programmer to find out how he actually plans on doing this from a technical standpoint if it would be of assistance.

My question is, how will a spider crawl this site? I am assuming (probably incorrectly) that whatever the "default" selection is (for example, right now now people see retail pricing and then opt into wholesale) will be the information/pricing that they index.

So long story short, how would a spider crawl a page that has two sets of distinct pricing information displayed based on user self identification? Thanks again!

Hello all,

Select pages on a website I manage utilizes Facebox lightbox elements for additional information. These Faceboxes have been indexed as their own pages by Google. Unfortunately, when they were created, there is no call to action or navigation elements or anything. So I would prefer that Google not index them since it is a pretty horrible user experience if you navigate to one of these Faceboxes directly.

I have tossed up no-index tags on each about three weeks ago, but they are still being indexed at present. Is there any tips or tricks that anyone has to handle this scenario or any ideas that I am not thinking of outside of just no-indexing them?

Thanks in advance!

I have a client who is wishing to switch from an established, but unattractive domain, to a domain he just purchased that is more attractive. For example purposes, his existing site is "His-Company-Website.com" and the site he just purchased and wants to transfer to is "HisCompanyWebsite.com." The only difference is the old site has hyphens in between the words and the new one does not.

He is not making this choice from an SEO perspective, but more of a "I don't want to keep saying all those hyphens when telling people about my website." But he said he doesn't want to lose his search engine rankings as a result. So he knows this won't necessarily increase his ranks, but doesn't want them to drop as a result.

When speaking with him, I thought we could simply toss in a 301 redirect at the root level and pipe them over to the other site, but he wanted some actual proof. I went back to look at what I thought would be a similar case that I did earlier in the year (transferring from a .net to a .com) and noticed that we did see some rather substantial drops in at least traffic, so I am not so sure about this plan any longer.

So my questions for my far more insightful colleagues...

1. What would be your suggestion on this problem? Transition to the more user friendly domain or stick with the unfriendly domain?

2. If he does elect to transition to the new domain, what all can I do to preserve his search engine rankings?

3. Should a rankings and/or traffic drop be predicting when completing this?

Thank you all in advance. Any other tidbits anyone has to offer would be great. Looking forward to your replies.