Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Errick,

No, pointing a page to itself will not hurt you at all. This is common practice as many pages can have parameters.

So something like

thisfluffysite.com    may become

thisfluffysite.com?product=8282&sample=t

Search engines are well aware that this is why people would and do put canonical tags to itself.

In other cases you may have something like the www.thisfluffysite.com and www.thisfluffysite.com/ and no www thisfluffysite.com etc... all these would be pointing to the one in the canonical tag. In general you would want to fix this issue with 301 re-writes but in some cases that isn't possible so tag to the right version is actually how you handle it.

I have found some crawl reports tell you about it, but that is more of a curtsey than anything else.

Hope this makes sense and helps,

Don

Hello,

To answer the question, the footer links are likely not serving any purpose on your homepage. Based on a couple factors, one you stated most traffic is coming on the landing pages, and second links that are in the footer and pages with over 100+ links pass little link authority to each of the corresponding pages.

There really is only one legitimate reason to keep more then 100+ links on any given page. That would be user experience. But as you say people aren't actually arriving on your homepage, and even if so they could easily get to a location page from your top navigation. I would say, remove them.

Bryan touched on the FB issue.. so I will touch on one that I would personally turn me off (since we are talking about user experiences). That is the "Trust Tags" in your footer. They are not links, they are simply images. Had I stumbled upon the site and noticed that, I would have simply left without investigating it further. It is as if you are trying to trick me into saying yes we are GeoTrust, Authorize.net. ExoticCarRental verified, but we aren't able to prove it. All those logos should be links to third party verifications.

Hope it helps,

Don

Hi Satish,

Google will treat your title and description as suggestions. The reason they do this is because they want to provide the best possible description to their users. In such case they may generate their own description based off words, alt text, your description or combinations of all three.

This is nothing new, Google does this to everybody. You can view a video by Matt Cutts on this exact situation here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3HX_8BAhB4

Hope this helps,

Don

Hi Silviu,

You can "Demote" links from appearing in the Sitelinks.

Here is a ref link on google.

Here is a quick answer.

Login to Google Webmasters
Select Domain
Navigate to Search Appearance -> Sitelinks
Enter the URL for the page that shouldn't appear and click the "Demote" button.

*Note Google will only follow this rule for 90 days so you'll have to check it every 3 months to insure everything is working the way you want.

Hope this helps,

Don

Hi Satish,

Then my first response is appropriate. Google will use whatever "title / Description" it feels is best, again I recommend you watch the YouTube video from Matt Cutts (former Google SEO guy) about why that is.

In your particular case it could be the Doctor Deepu Chandru is driving more traffic to the site then your focused keywords, so as long as people keep engaging with Google's suggestion they will keep using it. Or perhaps you have made changes and not allowed Google enough time to re-index the site.

My suggestion remove the H1 tags from the docotor's names you are using multiple h1 tags there, this could be a bit of confusion for Google, change them to H2 tags. Then under your Logo write in H1 the Page title "Liposuction Surgery and Laser Hair Removal". This will tell Google the most important thing on this page is those specific keywords. Give it 1-3 weeks to get re-crawled and Google to get its indexes changed and you should see the difference.

Hope this helps,

Don

Hi Chris,

Things like that sure can be frustrating. Since penguin / panda I have seen many users here question the actual benefit to them as their industries are still riddled with black hat seo tricks.

But in some cases Google can't really penalize a site simply for having 30 or 40 of these crappy links when they have 300-400 quality links. The big issue for Google is that many of these website owners did only what the seo industry told them to do, which was get as many links as possible. I think they did a pretty fair job at penalizing the biggest link rings and farms, but there are still many little guys out there that are operating. I would bet in time many more sites are going to get penalized.,

Remember your users, your content, and your seo basics, and keep up your principles!

Hi Sandi,

I thought Screaming Frog would follow 301 rules and exclude them from the sitemap. To be sure I just ran the domain and it appears to be true. With the free Screaming Frog you can configure things like ignore canonical pages, noindex pages, paginated urls, and PDF's. It also allows you to set the change frequency and priority.

Screaming Frog found 428 url's and the sitemap has about 100'ish urls. Which is still in the range of easily being manually reviewed.

Here is a link to the sitemap I generated for your site: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5yObTBvN3iVWFJZczJWTUlZU0U/view?usp=sharing

Here is a link to Screaming Frog official site: http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

When doing SEO it always best to have a full toolbox!

I hope this helps,

Don

Wow Good info Dr. Pete!

I'm a little surprised Google didn't give more a lead time warning, but we have known for awhile something like this was coming.

Great info,

Don

Hi Kirby,

What you have here is a common hurdle to many online businesses. Just like a company selling T-shirts, they may have a smiley face t-shirt in s, m, l, xl, xxl and in 5 different colors. So how does one optimize their content to be found when somebody searches for XL red smiley face t-shirt?

You can take one of two approaches.

Option 1: You can optimize a page for the "main item" in my example it would be "smiley face t-shirt". Then try to get the long tailed keywords on the page by listing colors, sizes, on the page a couple times. The goal of this page would be to rank #1 for the broad keyword Smiley Face T-Shirt, and high on longer keywords like XL Smiley Face T-Shirts, and Red Smiley Face T-shirt. With this approach you would use parameters for items, so you could generate a unique url, but you would canonical it back to the main page.

So the main page would look like this:
url: thetshirtShop.us/mens-tees/smilely-face-tshirt
Title: Smiley Face T-Shirt, Men's Small Through XL
H1: Men's Smiley Face T-Shirt, S,M,L,XL, 2XL, Select A Color & Size

Then for each option you would have your parameters (example red, XL)
url: thetshirtShop.us/mens-tees/smilely-face-tshirt?size=XL&color=red
Canonical: thetshirtShop.us/mens-tees/smiely-face-tshirt

That is the basic structure, but be sure in your content you include the color's and sizes at least twice so when the page is crawled the crawlers see the sizes and colors.

Option 2: which in my opinion is the better of the two would be to create unique content for each item. I know this may seem like it would be difficult or time consuming, and to a degree it is. Again how much different is a red t-shirt from a green one? Aside from the color not much, but there is opportunity here.

Example option 2 color red / xl
url: thetshirtShop.us/mens-tees/smilely-face-tshirt?size=XL&color=red
Title: Red Smiley Face T-Shirt Men's Size XL
H1: Men's Red Smilely Face T-Shirt Size XL

Content Block (Smiley Face T)
By artist Harvest Ross Ball the smiley face t-shirt puts a smile on your chest and a positive attitude by on-lookers. Staying true to the original creator the smiley face tee has been digital optimized and transferred to the tee using our proprietary screen process that insures the image will last. This is one of best selling iconic tees and available in colors, yellow, red, black, white and green. Men's U.S standard sizes, small, medium, large, extra large, and extra extra large.

Content Block (Color-Red):
The T-Shirt Shop using the finest natural dyes in creating our vibrant red color for {Smiley Face T-Shirt}. Using red hibiscus, sumac berries and beets. Our red color is formulated to last for thousands of washes with no fading or wash bleeding. The end result we get true red {Smiley Face T-Shirt} which is quality tested to be HEX #FF0000 RGB 255,0,0 +- within 2 shades.

Content Block (Size XL):
Our Men's Size XL for our {Red} {Smiley Face T-Shirt} follows U.S sizing standards; width 24" (61 cm), length 31.25" (80cm). Sleeve length for the {Red} {Smiley Face T-Shirt} is 9" (22cm), and can accommodate up to a 16" (40cm) bicep comfortably. All our T's are pre-washed and pre-shrunk to ensure our high sizing standards are meet.

Okay, so let me break down what I did here. I created 2 different "specific" code blocks with dynamic elements inside them noted by the { } brackets. Along with the original description block. You can reuse these blocks for other t-shirts, and still achieve a unique page. For example:
Smiley Face T (red/xl) Content Blocks = Smiley Face T, Red, XL
Smiley Face T (green/large) Content Blocks = Smiley Face T, Green, Large

Using these code blocks with dynamic insertion of product details you can achieve a unique page. However you need to get creative in writing these blocks, and do some back end coding or extra work in getting them uploaded to the thousands of different products properly. Just to note I have no knowledge of t-shirts or how best to market them, I just used this for an example to help you identify possible areas of creativity in your product.

In summary I have laid out 2 options for this problem. You can use parameters with canonical and a single page, or get creative and make some unique content pages. Each option will achieve unique urls for your email campaign, and follow SEO best practices.

Hope this helps,

Don

I really appreciate all of you taking the time to tell me about your experiences.

I am only sorry I could only mark 3 of you as good answers. All your input was welcomed and helpful to me in one way or another.

I hope to continue to see you on the boards, maybe just not as much.

Don

Hi Thomas

Unless I'm mistaken. If you list multiple user agents before a rule all the users agents are subjected to the rule.

So what you have is a list of 3 user agents allowed "anything" disallowed 4 specific things.

In the end the rules apply to all.

Don

Hi Spencer,

As others said, as an IT guy I see so many people just go to Google and type a url then click whatever it gives them. I've even seen people go to Google and type Yahoo.com  shake head

I tend to agree with digihouse, however this was a recent question posted here at Moz where a Moz associate suggested proactively disavowing the links.

You can check the responses there for some additional guidance.

It doesn't look like there is a general conscience on what to do. So perhaps a compromise makes the most sense. You could document the domain link and page and if it ever starts becoming an issue you are already one step ahead of it.

Hope it helps and good luck,

Don

I don't want to distract others from possibly giving a better answer then mine.

I will say this, if you're primary target is France then you should build a strong keyword association with what your site says and what you expect your users to find or do. To me (again I can only read the English) I didn't understand what I was suppose to see or do on the site. Was I there because I wanted to see possible spots to visit? Or was I there to book a trip? I don't know.

My experience on the site was I was looking at a French blog spot. There is no call to action (Reserve Hotel, Book A Trip) so the only thing I could see was recommendations. With the translation to English made that hard to want to read.

Again since you are primary working in the France market I would suggest generating the keywords in French, outlining what your goals are for your viewers and implementing a strategy that attracts those types of users/readers. While following the SEO Basics.

After you have established your site in France, then come back and work on the English side of things.

Hi Timothy,

Short answer is content.

Easy to say hard to complete. Here are some strategy's I found helpful in the past.

Customer Reviews (moderated):  these provide additional details that customers appreciate reading before making a buying decision. It also adds long-tail keywords that you may have not thought of along with lots of unique content.

Product Schema / microdata: this gives search engines and shopping listing sites a workable schema to list your products on sources you may not have been aware of.

Research and Self Review: This is one way Amazon gets ahead of its competition to illicit customer reviews. They actually send their top reviewers free products to generate unique review content. (Amazon Vine). Most companies probably can't afford to do this, so is why I recommend self reviews. If you're not a strong writer possibly hire a copy writer to proof-read.

Customer Images (Moderated): Adding customer generated images is an easy way to get additional unique photos and alt text.

Some thoughts, hope it helps,

Don

I agree with Massimillano here.

Three things you should do for all common CMS systems (WP, Joomla, ect..)

First change the admin directory to something else. When doing this you likely have to edit configuration files to point to the new location which is pretty simple.

Second protect admin directory with .htaccess & .htpasswd.  There is a nice generator I have used on some of my sites in the past here.

Third create a honeypot / auto IP ban for malicious crawlers or script kiddies. There are several plugins for this if you search the keywords honeypot + cms.

Brendan's advice is pertinent if your are specifically buying a link, but there is a huge caveat to this information. It is not uncommon for other services such as Yahoo Local, or lead generating resources to provide a service of which includes a link to your website. In these cases you're not actually buying a link but a service.

Google has indeed cracked down on directory type listing websites because they really offer no value to anybody on the web. However when services are attached, such as lead generation, technical advice, consulting etc.. often times a link to your site is part of the service and shouldn't be lumped into calling it a purchased link.. per-say.

Hope this makes sense,

Don

Hi John

I thought I had seen a post about what percentage it takes not to be considered duplicate content. Try as I might I did not find it. No matter, my suspicion is the amount of unique content on each page. By having your "Delivery","Returns", "Why Buy From Us" text on each of these pages you have upped the amount of the exact same text on each and every description. When you have 3 bullet points and a 2 sentence paragraph that explains the product that doesn't really make for a high percentage of deviation.

My bet is that is where you problem is. A possible solution would be to make those 3 sections links to their own pages.

Hope that helps,

Don

Hi Stephen,

My general advice is yes, finish your page optimization before link building and here is why.

When you start your link building process it is likely that you'll be reaching out to other sites to ask for links or to submit pages. Those sites that you want links from, are likely going to review what they are linking to, as such they are going to grade your site in one way or another. You want to put your best face on those pages. Sites are more likely to link to you if you look good and have the content to warrant a link.

Hope that makes sense, and helps,

Don

To follow up on what Keszi has said, it is not uncommon for this value to fluctuate from update to update. The reason is because there are so many things that factor into this score. This is further complicated by the fact that the crawl will not crawl every domain every time. This means you may see less / more "linking domains", and "linking c-blocks" which are factors in DA and PA.

I know when you see a 10% fluctuation you may get a little worried. However, when DA is in the 20's the fluctuation will be more prominent than if you were up in the 40's. Reason being is it is exponentially harder to reach higher domain authorities, which means that there will be a larger swab of linking domains and less likely to change much if a few are missed on each crawl.

Hope this helps,

Don

Switching host you are then switching DNS which would force the spiders / crawlers to re-find and re-index the new location.

This should be of little concern unless you notice a traffic decreases as well. Your page rank and domain authority will drop but that is just temporary and indicative of the fact that re-indexing based on new DNS is not instant.

Other things that could effect rank in cases like this are:

New Urls -> were old urls kept? if not were they at least canonicalized?
New IP, did your domain have a static IP before? If so, then you must have got new IP which if the previous site using it had bad mojo ie somebody used it for malware or other nefarious activities you may inherit that bad juju.

Hope this helps

Don

Hello,

There is this post here on Moz which has some great guidance. But to adequately answer your question I wonder if you're using a CMS? If so there maybe a few nice add-ons / modules  to help with this task.

My basic advice would be to:

• Identify the pages top keyword and use it in the url.
• Short URLS are better
• Limit parameters
• Try not to go more than 2 folders deep (ie /computers/accessories/)
• Use Hyphens instead of Underscores
• Avoid Stop Words

I hope this helps,

Don

Hi Sarah,

It is a bloody mess. Here is a link to my issue with G+ here on moz.com: http://moz.com/community/q/google-what-is-up-with-results

I know this doesn't directly answer your question, but hopefully the information will help you sort through your issues. I really get the feeling Google is trying so much they haven't quite nailed down exactly how users / business should control their local / G+ pages and results.

My best,

Don

We got similar notices about SSL certs needing renewed, PCI compliance needing purchased and more recently PCI complaint certification needing filled out. All phishing attempts trying to scam.

The one company for the pci compliance seemed like a legit company that somehow got roped into a very "used cars" sales tactic. (SecurityMetrics) trying to scare you into using their service, and sounding like we were already their customer.

Sample:

"... We appreciate the opportunity to assist with your PCI compliance.

Your PCI compliance service with SecurityMetrics has expired. It is our

understanding that this will result in your merchant processor charging

a monthly non-compliance fee ranging from $19.95-$39.95 for each merchant

account that is not PCI compliant. We understand that you will be charged

this fee for each merchant ID that is not compliant by the 25th of each

month."

Interesting post there Brent, I would say in the case outlined there, it appears that apostrophes are not needed. Google Keyword tool does in fact return no results for the correct spelling for "boy's clothing". Other keywords I would not say that holds true.

An example from my industry is an o-ring

If you use Google Key Word Tool you'll see (all possible spellings)

• o'ring
• o ring
• o-ring
• oring

all have the same global monthly searches which to me means they are all being treated as the same word.

Now take the word o-rings

If you use Google Key Word Tool (all possible spellings)

• o'rings
• o rings
• o-rings   are the same BUT
• orings   is different

All this tells me is before I decide on the keyword and spelling of such keyword you should probably look it up.

As for the OP question, it is very interesting and I'm sure nobody can say for sure which is correct. Here in the past we tried to optimize for both variants, but I feel this runs the risk of being potentially spammy. So, we decided to spell the word correctly, and let the search engines decide if they wish to return us on SERP's to grammatically challenged searchers.

I would also urge you to look at the Google insta results, if you type in boy's clothing you get the "showing results for boys clothing" search for "boy's clothing" instead? message. Though both keywords will give you the same company as #1.

Hi Mark, sounds like you grasp the basic concept of what the SEO Campaign entails as such, out of curiosity what would be a better name for it?

Other things the Campaign does not mentioned in your description is providing weekly updates on page optimizations reports, traffic via source type (brand, organic, paid), crawl reports, link analysis and competitive analysis.

It is a little funny when you think about what words mean, it is almost relative to the person whom hears them. We recently started labeling our production workers locations to help us track inventory, after much debate we decided to name the locations as manufacturing cells, or cells for short. All was great until the production workers showed up and said they now have an underlying feeling they are in prison.

Just to follow up with you Daniel,

I would always use the correct spelling and hope that the search engines can determine a searches intent.

Hi Will,

I'm of 2 minds when it comes to directories. My general advice would be to ignore them all together, unless there are some very industry specific ones that make sense. I say general advice because the vast majority of industries I have researched have only 1 known good directory (Dmoz.org), the rest are at best, relic sites that have basically run their course in usefulness and give little to no value in terms of traffic or link juice. Why? because it is atypical for somebody to use anything other then Google / Yahoo / Bing / Baidu to find anything on the internet.

That being said, I do place some value on directories for some specific industries and lead generation. For example, in my current industry there is a site that has been around since the 90's and many people before the rise of search engine dominance found it as a great resource for finding business to business partnerships. Many of those people who got acclimated to the site are still working today and use it as their go to source for specific project requirements. In other words they have used it for so long and it has worked for so long they never found the need to branch out and rely on search engines. And in all honesty even Google would have a hard time returning pertinent results for lets say a rubber manufacturer who has experience with over molding fda approved buna-n rubber to an aluminum substrate. But the good directory sites can list those sorts of capabilities.

Because this is a public question I had to give both my opinions on directory sites.  Again I wouldn't seek them out as any form of link building, but I also wouldn't ignore ones that seem capable of delivering either traffic or leads, I will say with the exception of Dmoz.org any of the good directories sites I have run across are very industry specific and they are certainly not free.

Hope that helps

Don

Adam is correct,

When I was hired at my company 3 years ago everything was underscores, so I had to evaluate if renaming would be beneficial. At the time I came across this video from Matt Cutts

What I took away from this is the following, which I use today as general guidelines.

If the page already exist and is performing well
I leave it as it

If the page already exist but isn't performing well and only has 2 keywords separated
Content Update, and re-evaluate a month of so later

If the page already exist isn't performing well and is separating 3 or more keywords with underscores (red_delicious_apples.html) Content update, and switch to dashes and 301 direct old page to new page

If the page is a new page
Just use dashes

That is my general strategy for handling pages. There are other things to consider such as site uniformity, some owners/marketing directors don't like their sites urls to be mixed, and some sites which use CMS systems may have to go for an all or none approach.

I hope that helps.

The Grades are assigned by Keyword & Page.

To save others some time I believe we're talking about Google.co.uk not Google.com

Spy Devices = Your Home Page Rank #4
electronic surveillance = Your Home Page Rank #2
spy systems = Your Home Page Rank #1
surveillance systems = Your Home Page Rank #2

Your domain has a high authority and your home page enjoys a nice page authority. This helps you rank well for I would assume a lot of keywords on google.co.uk

Now that said, if you're evaluating a specific page for a specific keyword the grade report expects that the page is optimized for that specific keyword. When you start looking at multiple different keywords for a single page there is no way to optimize perfectly for each one.

This is because you can't put every keyword in the first part of your title, description, use it atleast 4 times on the page, emphasis it with bold or strong tags and give it top location in the h1/h2 tags.

The short, is you can't expect that a page can be perfectly optimized for anything but a single keyword with the grade reporter, by the nature of what it looks at.

Also remember if you were grading a non-homepage on the keywords listed, you actually don't know where Google is returning that page for that keyword because your homepage is more relevant then any other page according to Google.

Hope that helps, and there are some other things I noticed as far as SEO goes on the homepage, but the site looks good and  imagine it has done well for you.

Yep,

This code inside your .htaccess file should fix that.

``RewriteEngine On 
RewriteBase /` RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.(html|php)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]`

Hope it helps,
Don

I should also add that when you look at a company that provides link building services you should have them evaluate your site for content. What I would do is show them a couple so so pages, and a couple real good ones. Allow them to pick which ones they are willing to promote, if they choose the good ones you know you have the right people... my thoughts,

Don

Hi Scott,

I will comment on the template part first. There is no problem with using a template, most websites do. I looked at your site, the content on each page is different enough not to warrant any concern.

I do wonder why you asked the question other then that, are your worried about Google Ad Ratings, or just keyword optimization or just general seo?

Overall I will just add this, if you're trying to rank in the top SERP's for YMM (Year / Make / Model) you may have trouble because those are hugely contested keywords. And your service really isn't something that "most" people would expect to see when searching for their YMM. However, it is something they may want to see if they search for YMM + warranty or extended warranty. Which is why I would suggest evaluating the long-tail keywords and seeing if I can get those to rank first.

Hope that helps,

Don

Hi Str8

**user-agent: rogerbot
disallow: /*mobile=**

I think may do the trick... somebody may need to confirm this.

Hello,

The one thing popular CMS sites have in common is they are primary targets. This is especially true to open source or free systems like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Oscommerce, this is because the hackers are available to download and review the source code. In addition to this, many people contribute to these projects which provides additional opportunities for security holes.

There are whole websites out there that share techniques to hack these high profile CMS, complete with scripts and how to guides. Its unfortunate, but some people "enjoy" other people's pain.

The one thing you must do when you choose a CMS like this is to continue to upgrade versions and stay on top of the latest security vulnerabilities and fixes. If you hired your build out, you should factor in a continual support package because you will always need to upgrade and patch.

My suggestions is to visit your sites help forums, chances are there are some answers there for you. There are many precautionary things I could suggest but the primary thing you need to do take your site offline, identify the security hole, restore from a backup and patch it.

Good luck,

Don

Hi Nik,

The answer to the question is very simple, the fix maybe not so much.

Q: Does anybody know why we don't rank well without the city added to the keyword?
A: Google returns what they fill is the most relevant results for any search. In such case using the keyword in the city of Perth for example, the site is not the most relevant.

Okay maybe that is a bit crass, but what is actually going on may help take the sting out of it. Understand Google's goal is to give searchers the very best result for any search term. To do this they have to understand not only what each search term means but also try and interpret the searchers intent. So in your example when a person in Perth searches for Outdoor Mirrors Google may choose to show local results, national results, images, or combinations thereof.

It's quite clear there are differences in what type of results you'll see, for example in the US (Dayton, Ohio) Google thinks I want to view images of mirrors (2nd result images), followed by Pinrest results rank 3, and 4. The number 1 result is shows me outdoor wall art, but offers no outdoor mirrors whatsoever. Further research shows that term "outdoor mirror" has a bit of a negative connotation here as I'm seeing results about dead birds and other wildlife.

Culturally Australia maybe a bit different which Google may interpret the intent of the term "Outdoor Mirrors" as being somebody wanting to buy them locally. In which case they would show localized results.

I hope that helps you understand what is going on there...

So onto the fix.. how do you get your site to rank in these cities? First, you need to understand what Google thinks people want to see when they type in the keyword in those areas. Analyze the results, are they showing local retailers, local showrooms, just images? Once you understand what Google thinks people are looking for with that term, you can then develop content to become more relevant then the competition.

For example, if they are showing local retailers. You could write content that highlights delivery cost, time in transit, and local area installations for each city.

I hope this helps,

Don

This is one, I think people worry about way to often. I understand SEOMoz will warn you if you use anything over then 15, but like most tools that should only serve as a heads up not a chiseled in stone rule.

Technically, you would look at percentages and not just the occurrences.

Take for example Wikipedia's Beaver Page and the keyword Beaver or Beavers

Total Keyword Usage for this Page = 274Which is about 8% of the words on the page. That is a little higher then I expected but still in what I would call an acceptable range.That said, you shouldn't get hung up on keyword density either.The best advice, keep the text natural sounding. Reviews have a tendency to not always follow this rule. Amazon has a great solution for this, which is to allow a review rating system. Then only show the highest rated reviews unless the user request otherwise. You'll find that your better written reviews are the ones that also sound natural and thus get top spot and displayed on page.Hope that helps,
Don

Add this to your .htaccess file

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html?\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html?$ "/$1" [R=301,L]

This will redirect attempts to hit index.html back to root.

Hi plinggtre67,

This should have no direct effect on SEO. The reason is, PHP is server sided script, which is usually outputted as HTML anyway. HTML is what the browser actually reads.

If you are referring to some pages having .html extensions and some having .php, then from user's perspective that may have a slight impact on some users not knowing whats going on, but in general it shouldn't matter. If you would like a consistent look on the page extensions you can use an Apache URL re-write to remove the extensions all together (just like Moz does). You should notice no pages on Moz site have an actual .extension appended to them.

Example Code: @ StackOverflow

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.)$ $1.phpRewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.)$ $1.html

I hope this makes sense and helps,

Don

Hi Aoife,

Vadim posted Google's official response. As a web developer who has worked on many sites over the years I can say it usually takes 1 to 3 weeks for those types of changes to be reflected in the SERP's.

What I have found to be true is the more traffic you site has, the more likely Google is to be crawling it. Once crawled however, it still takes time for Google to update the results.

Hope this helps,

Don

Webmasters love of sub-domains... shake fist!

Hi Jonathan,

Didn't realize this was possible now. For the reasons you stated it still would be advised to get a dedicated IP. The last time I looked at prices they were relatively in-expensive.

It is very unlikely that you would receive any penalties for having 404 errors in such a short time frame. It is common for 404 errors to happen, from others linking to pages on your site that don't exist or removed content. Search engines typically just ignore the pages and move on.

It would only be problematic if your site continually creates new 404 errors. This would show a pattern of bad site design and may hurt you.

Hope this helps,

Don

Apple could being doing it, to make other webmasters try it.

Apple is Apple I mean they could probably pass on most of the little stuff that so many people obsess over. They could be running a nefarious plot to make other sites follow bad seo practices thus diluting those sites rankings. Who knows, but it would be hard to hurt their selves with little things.

Hello Again,

Okay so it looks like what is happening is:
the http www version is 302 to the https.www version and the https.www version is 301 to the non-www. So what you have is one redirect pointing to another redirect.

This is likely confusing Moz, or Moz has in the past crawled a different version and has more data for that so it wants to show you it instead.

The headers are:

http://www.a-fotografy.co.uk/

---

302 Found

Status:    302 Found
Code:    302
Date:    Thu, 31 Dec 2015 12:43:08 GMT
Server:    Apache
X-FRAME-OPTIONS:    DENY
X-XSS-Protection:    1; mode=block
Location:    https://www.a-fotografy.co.uk/
Cache-Control:    max-age=0
Expires:    Thu, 31 Dec 2015 12:43:08 GMT
Vary:    Accept-Encoding
Content-Length:    214
Keep-Alive:    timeout=10, max=200
Content-Type:    text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Connection:    close

https://www.a-fotografy.co.uk/

---

301 Moved Permanently

Status:    301 Moved Permanently
Code:    301
Date:    Thu, 31 Dec 2015 12:43:08 GMT
Server:    Apache
X-FRAME-OPTIONS:    DENY
X-XSS-Protection:    1; mode=block
Location:    https://a-fotografy.co.uk/
Cache-Control:    max-age=0
Expires:    Thu, 31 Dec 2015 12:43:08 GMT
Vary:    Accept-Encoding
Content-Length:    234
Connection:    close
Content-Type:    text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

https://a-fotografy.co.uk/

---

200 OK

Status:    200 OK
Code:    200
Date:    Thu, 31 Dec 2015 12:43:08 GMT
Server:    Apache
X-FRAME-OPTIONS:    DENY
X-XSS-Protection:    1; mode=block
Accept-Ranges:    bytes
Content-Length:    21886
Cache-Control:    max-age=0, public
Expires:    Thu, 31 Dec 2015 12:43:08 GMT
Vary:    Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
X-Powered-By:    WP Rocket/2.6.15
Connection:    close
Content-Type:    text/html; charset=UTF-8

What you want to do is get all your redirects to 301 to the correct version.

This should cover it in your .htaccess file
EDIT 01/07/2016: Please see the below responses for corrected code.

#If http is requested (ie https off) then redirect to https none www
  RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.)$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]
#If https is requested (ie https on) then redirect to https none www
  RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.)$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.)$ https://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

Hope this helps,

Don

I looked at Magneto many years ago and I think it was one that was kind of spun off of oscommerce. If that is true there is a plug-in called easy populate that lets you do just as Monica suggested. Even if not Magneto is so widely used now there has to be a plugin for it. Easy populate allowed you to download or upload files via CSV files which can be easily made in Excel or OpenOffice.

Hope it helps,

Don

1000 quotes isn't that much, I'd push it out asap.

Please see Matt Cutts from Google response to this same question.

As for your options, I'd certainly try to keep it on the same domain and utilize it on the appropriate pages.

Hi Peter,

If you want to grab all the data, sure I would make a new one with all members.

You can email me at my user name just as it appears @gmail.com

Don

Hi Kashif,

Following this structure should get it done.

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

For your example it would be like

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

For less then 100 redirects it "may" also be prudent to do them individually. I say this because it makes it very obvious what is going on if you ever need to edit it again. I would use Excel or OpenOffice to create a spreadsheet then just concatenate the cells together, following this example;

Redirect 301 /path/to-old-url    https://www.mydomain.com/path/to-new-url

Ref site: http://coolestguidesontheplanet.com/redirecting-a-web-folder-directory-to-another-in-htaccess/

Hope this helps,

Don