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"the plural seems to un-natural to fit in the content, or title"
In that case, I wouldn't use it. I can't speak for Portugese, but in English, in the last 2 or more years I can't remember any cases I've had where Google doesn't recognise the difference between plural and non-plural anyway.
What happens when you search for the keyword in plural? Do non-plural results show up? And vice-versa? Trying that out should help.
There's always a small amount of authority lost through a 301 redirect or canonical, but as long as you set the 301 redirects up correctly I wouldn't worry about it. It should benefit your site in the long-term.
I've overseen a few site migrations where unfriendly URLs (e.g. /product.php?id=1234) were replaced with friendly URLs (e.g. /category/product) and more often than not, immediately after the migration organic traffic and rankings remained consistent or improved. I think there was one where traffic and rankings dropped in the short-term but then recovered to a better level within a month.
If you go ahead with the URL change and 301 redirects, keep a crawl/record of your current website, then when you've completed the redirects, crawl the old URLs to see if they're redirecting as you expect. If they're not, fix them as quickly as you can.
I agree with Tom in terms of the URL structure and breadcrumb trail, though I am a fan of short URLs, so I'd shorten some of the category names when used in your URLs e.g.
/transport/air
instead of
/motors-and-transport/air-transport
Also be aware that
/transport/air
is different to
/transport/air/
It isn't wrong to use question marks in URLs.
However - as Thomas says, short and descriptive URLs describe what is on the page, whereas the query parameters you use currently don't. "Keyword present in the page's URL" was also believed to be an important ranking factor by the participants in Moz's Ranking Factors survey earlier this year: https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors/survey
By mirroring URLs, will each product then exist at 2 URLs? E.g.:
example.com/product.php?id=3624
and
example.com/category/product
If so, you don't want to do that as it creates duplicate content. Using canonical tags to fix the duplication doesn't solve the problem completely.
If you change URLs, you should 301 redirect the old to the new, so
example.com/product.php?id=3624
would 301 redirect to
example.com/category/product
Just in case you aren't aware - a "301" is a permanent redirect, so when using a permanent redirect, even if other websites have linked to example.com/product.php?id=3624 - the browser will automatically redirect to the new URL, passing most of the authority built up from the links you mentioned.
Whether I'd advise you to change the URLs of existing products depends on whether you can implement the redirects. In the short-term you'll lose a slight bit of link authority through the redirect, but in the longer-term, the frendlier URLs should benefit your website.
Also, there's always a risk when making large scale changes to URL structure - you need to make sure customers can still navigate the site without issues, and search engine crawlers understand the changes you've made - 301 redirects are best-practice to ensure this.
Ideally, when URLs are changed, all internal links should be updated.
" Launched in 2003, back then it wasn't such a bad idea to use keywords/tags in the URLs, so I did that." - it's not necessarily a bad idea now - I'd question why you feel the need to change them? Shorter is often better though.
If you do go ahead, 301 would be the best practice. Canonicals pass link juice too but they're not always honoured.
A couple of extra things - make sure to update all of your internal links to the new URLs as millions of 301s could negatively impact the speed of your server. And check a sample of the old URLs just to make sure everything is working as expected.
I would go with responsive. From experience, a separate mobile site might be easier to setup in the short-term but will cause more issues in the long-term (I haven't ever worked on anything like a video editing website, but I would imagine it wouldn't create many other issues).
Have you looked into why no one has purchased from a mobile device? I've seen conversion issues on mobile that don't impact the desktop version of websites - sometimes checkouts that don't work at all on mobile. But as you said, most of the traffic comes from desktop browsers so it could just be that.
Although separate mobile sites will still benefit from Google's mobile update (if they're mobile friendly), Google do recommend responsive over a separate site e.g. here in their starter guide: "Google recommends using RWD over other design patterns." https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/
There's also a useful white paper from Google here: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//intl/ALL_uk/think/multiscreen/pdf/multi-screen-consumer-whitepaper_research-studies.pdf
Nicknames are often put in quotation marks so you could just write James "Jim" Jones when introducing the person (title tag and h tag) and maybe the first occurrence of their name in the text. The most important thing is that and content reads naturally - if you wrote James "Jim" Jones whenever you referred to the person in a few paragraphs of text I doubt it would read naturally.
Depending on who they are, Google might even recognise them as the same person whatever version of the name is used.
I'm interested if it's just me that gets frustrated by this?
I've just Ctrl + clicked a few links to open them in separate tabs and then realised that none of them had opened. I know it's been like this for a while.
It's a usability issue as it goes against expected norms, and now I have to right-click and then click "Open in new tab" on each link, which is more time-consuming and frustrating.
More and more websites seem to be losing their Ctrl + click on links ability (JavaScript often breaks it). I don't know if there's a Mac equivalent...
Anyway, I hope that doesn't seem like I'm too angry. It just frustrates me a little and I hope it gets fixed. 
Edit - I've just realised these are getting blocked by Chrome's pop-up blocker - but why? It's only an issue on a small number of websites.
Even if you search on google.com? Have you tried other countries like google.fr? If google.com is redirecting to the Netherlands' version visiting www.google.com/ncr should stop it.
This works on any localised version of Google (at least those I've tried!). So you can go to google.de and enter Berlin as the location, google.co.uk and enter London etc.
For Facebook your answer is here: https://www.facebook.com/help/131671940241729
Firstly, nice work in setting something like this up. Personally I'd edit your post and give the background information after you get into the nitty-gritty of what you want from your site - the reason being people don't have much time - so you may get more help that way. I'm disappearing in a moment so here are some thoughts that come immediately to mind:
Have you used the Google Keywords Adwords tool? You might find some of the terms you want to rank for don't get enough traffic to bother with. It will also give you suggestions for other potential keywords: https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal
On your website I'm unsure what the various menu options mean. I wouldn't have known "Noah's Minute" was a set of videos for example, if I hadn't seen you mention it above. The 'Family' and 'Mom MD' options on the menu - I don't know what they are. I say this as usability is very important for SEO. If people don't find what they're looking for on your site they'll go elsewhere - and a high bounce rate can have a negative effect on your rankings. So keep adding the great content, but find a way to organise it in a more user-friendly way.
Maybe (if you haven't already) you could get other parents to write guest blogs on your site about their own experiences. If they or friends have websites/blogs of their own, ask if they'll link to their own posts. In today's celebrity obsessed world, it might be worth seeing if you could get one or two involved - by writing a blog, if they have experience with children with down syndrome. It would be a good way to raise awareness and get more attention (therefore links, therefore increased rankings).
It would be a massive effort, but a great thing to do would be to make the best page on the internet for down syndrome information. Make it factual, with sources. Making something better than Wikipedia and the BBC is usually a good start (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_syndrome / http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/physical_health/conditions/downssyndrome1.shtml). Perhaps it would be possible to do it in conjunction with a charity or organisation, who could verify what you've written (e,g, http://www.downs-syndrome.org.uk for here in the UK), or perhaps your personal experiences added to something like this would make it stand out over the more information-driven pieces. Maybe some down syndrome organisations could link to you anyway? See if they have links pages.
I hope that helps, sorry if I've been quick to the point on some things!
Google now class a subdomain as pretty much the same website as the main domain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MswMYk05tk - so backlinks to the existing blog subdomain will also benefit the overall domain.
I didn't know this until last year either - it'd be useful if Google updated their help pages!
If I was you josh330, I'd only move to www.example.com/blog if the cost and hassle isn't much for you. Although a subdomain and subfolder are considered roughly equivalent to Google, I'm not sure how other search engines see it.
There's no substitute for hard work. How about concentrating on your best converting products to start with, then that 10,000 will seem less daunting. Also, it might make more sense to test changes on a smaller range of products first - if you make changes en masse and they don't work you could end up doing the opposite of what you want to do.
Wikipedia editors often delete pages about individuals or businesses if they deem that the individual or business isn't notable enough to have their own page. So in most cases probably not a good idea.
Without - it's more user-friendly and if you ever change the coding behind the website the URLs will remain the same. It doesn't matter whether it's a 'normal' website or a blog, without is the way.
Matt Cutts stated that only in 1 out of 100 searches does page speed show a noticeable change in rankings, and there are only 1 in a 1000 sites which have slow speed as a big issue: www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO4YuDAkplU
I have a page on one website which has on-page SEO close to perfection for a relatively competitive term, and a few relevant links coming in. There was a query in the SQL on the page that slowed it down - I think the load time was about 4 or 5 seconds. After a few weeks (it wasn't an important page and I knew it would be an interesting test) I fixed the problem and got the load time down to around a second. The following day the page jumped from nowhere (not even the top 20 pages) to page 4 on Google, so that must have been one of the 1 in a 100.
I still think it's better to have exact match. The Google Adwords Keyword tool shows far more searches for office refurbishment over office refurb for exact, phrase and broad in the UK (and globally) - both with 'High' competition.
Unless you're a really well known brand in your target market I don't see it as a problem if your brand is cut off at the end of the title tag on search results.
Nicknames are often put in quotation marks so you could just write James "Jim" Jones when introducing the person (title tag and h tag) and maybe the first occurrence of their name in the text. The most important thing is that and content reads naturally - if you wrote James "Jim" Jones whenever you referred to the person in a few paragraphs of text I doubt it would read naturally.
Depending on who they are, Google might even recognise them as the same person whatever version of the name is used.
1. I think a canonical loses a similar amount of link juice as a 301 redirect would, so 100% of the juice would not flow back to john.long.com
2. If Google sees the canonical link is different to the content of the page it is on, Google will ignore it - Matt Cutts has said as much.
Check this out: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/rel-canonical-html-head/
Are you sure the URLs are exactly the same? The following are all different URLs:
If they are different it's best to 301 redirect one to the other, or if that's not possible - add canonical tags to the two pages linking to your preferred version. Other than that, make sure you only use one unique URL throughout your site to link to one page.
8/17/2022
In this article, Alex shows you how and why to use Google Chrome (or Chrome Canary) to view a website as Googlebot. Viewing a website as Googlebot means we can see discrepancies between what a person sees and what a search bot sees – useful for technical SEO and content audits.