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Hi We have just added a new layered navigation menu to our website. so for example we had Before : www.tidy-books.co.uk/chidlrens-bookcases  (this has the seo juice) And Now:  http://www.tidy-books.co.uk/childrens-bookcases-book-storage/childrens-bookcases Might be a stupid question but do I redirect the 'now' url to the 'before' url or the the other way round I look forward to hearing your thoughts Thanks

Hi all, Recently I created a website for a new client and my next job is trying to get them higher in Google. I added them in OSE and noticed some strange backlinks. To my surprise the client has about 20 domain names. All automatically poiting to (showing) the same new mainsite now. www.maindomain.nl www.maindomain.be
www.maindomain.eu
www.maindomain.com
www.otherdomain.nl
www.otherdomain.com
... Some of these domains have backlinks too (but not so much). I suggested to 301 redirect them all to the main site. Just to avoid duplicate content. But now the webhoster comes into play: "It's a problem, client has only 1 hosting account, blablabla...". They told me they could CNAME the 20 domains to the main domain. Or A-record them to an IP address. This is too technical stuff for me. So my concrete questions are: Is it smart to do anything at all or am I just harming my client? The main site is ranking pretty well now. And some backlinks are from their copy sites (probably because everywhere the logo links to the full mainsite url). Does the CNAME or A-record solution has the same effect as a 301 redirect, from SEO perspective? Many thanks,
Hans

I am wondering how you would choose which page to use as a canonical ? All our articles sit in an article section and they are called in the url when linked from a particular category. Since some articles are in many categories, we may have several links for the same page. My first idea was to put the one in the article category as the canonical, but I wonder if Google will lose the context of the page for it's ranking because it will not be in the proper category. For exemple, this page in the article section : http://www.bdc.ca/en/advice_centre/articles/Pages/exporting_entering.aspx Same page in the Expand Your Sales > Going Global section : http://www.bdc.ca/EN/advice_centre/expand_your_sales/going_global_or_international_markets/Pages/RelatedArticles.aspx?PATH=/EN/advice_centre/articles/Pages/exporting_entering.aspx The second one has much more context related to it, like the breadcrumb is showing the path and the left menu is open at the right place. For  this example, I would choose te second one, but some articles may be found in 2 or 3 categories. If you could share your lights on this it would be very appreciated ! Thanks

Trying to retire domain1 and 301 it to domain2 - just don't want to get stuck having to pay the old hosting provider simply to serve a .htaccess file with the redirect rule.

Hi, If I wanted to do a 301 permanent redirect on a domain to a page on another domain will this cause any problems? Lets say I have 4 domains (all indexed with content), I decide to create a new domain with 4 pages, one for each domain. I copy the content from the old domains to the relevant page on the new domain and set it live. At the same time as setting the new site live I do a 301 permanent redirect on the 4 domains to the relevant pages on the new domain. What happens if Google indexes the new site before visiting the redirected domains, could this cause a duplicate content penalty? Cheers

Google, 301 redirects, and multiple domains pointing to the same content. This is my first post here. I would like to begin by thanking anyone in advance for their help. It is much appreciated. Secondly, I'm posting in the wrong place or something please forgive me simply point me in the right direction I'm a quick learner. I think I'm battling a redirect problem but I want to be sure before I make changes. In order to accurately assess the situation a little background is necessary. I have had a site called tx-laws.com for about 15 years. It was a site that was used primarily by private resource and as such was never SEO'd. The site itself was in fact quite Seo unfriendly. despite a complete lack of marketing or SEO efforts, over time, SEO aside, this domain eventually made it to page one of Google Yahoo and Bing under the keywords Texas laws. About six months ago I decided to revamp the site and create a new resource aimed at a public market. A good deal of effort was made to re-work the SEO. The new site was developed at a different domain name: easylawlook up.com. Within a few months this domain name surpassed tx-laws in Google and was holding its place in position number eight out of 190 million results. Note that at this point no marketing has been done, that is to say there has been no social networking, no e-mail campaigns, no blogs, -- nothing but content. All was well until a few weeks ago I decided to upgrade our network and our servers. During this period there was some downtime unfortunately. When the upgrade was complete everything seemed fine until a week or so later when our primary domain easy law look up vanished off Google. At first I thought it was downtime but now I'm not so sure. The current configuration reroutes traffic from tx-laws to easylawlookup in IIS by pointing both domains to the same root directory. Everything else was handled through scripting. As far as I know this is how it was always set up. At present there is no 301 Redirect in place for tx-laws (as I'm sure there probably should be). Interestingly enough the back links to easylaw also went away. Even more telling however is that now when I visit link: easylawlookup.com there is only one link, and that link is to a domain which references tx-laws not easy law. So it would appear that I have confused Google with regards to my actual intentions. My question is this. Right now my rankings for tx-laws remain unchanged. The last thing I want to have happen is to see those disappear as well. If easy law has somehow been penalized and I redirect tx-laws to easy through a 301 will I screw up my rankings for this domain as well? Any comments or input on the situation are welcome. I just want to think it through before I start making more changes which might make things worse instead of better. Ultimately though, there is no reason that the old domain can't be redirected to the new domain at this point unless it would mean that I run the risk of losing my listings for tx-laws, ending up with nothing instead of transferring any link juice and traffic to easy law. With regards to the down time, it was substantial over a couple of weeks with many hours off-line. However this downtime would have affected both domains the only difference being that the one domain had been in existence for 15 years as opposed to six months for the other. So is my problem downtime, lack of proper 301 redirect, or something else? and if I implement a 301 at this point do I risk damaging the remaining domain which is operational? Thanks again for any help.

So here is the problem... We have setup a 301redirect for our clients website. When you search the clients name it comes up with the old .co.uk website. We have made this redirect to the new .com website. However on the SERPs when it shows the .co.uk it shows the old title pages which currently say 'Holding Page'. When you click on that link it takes you to the fully functioning .com website. My question is, will the title tags in the SERPs which show the .co.uk update to the new ones from the .com? I'm thinking it will be just a case of Google catching up on things and it will sort itself out eventually. If anyone could help I would REALLY appreciate it. Thanks Chris