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Hi Gents and Ladies Before I get started, here is the website in question. www.moldinspectiontesting.ca. I apologize in advance if I miss any important or necessary details. This might actually seem like several disjointed thoughts. It is very late where I am and I am a very exhausted. No on to this monster of a post. **The background story: ** My programmer and I recently moved the website from a standalone CMS to Wordpress. The owners of the site/company were having major issues with their old SEO/designer at the time. They felt very abused and taken by this person (which I agree they were - financially, emotionally and more). They wanted to wash their hands of the old SEO/designer completely. They sought someone out to do a minor redesign (the old site did look very dated) and transfer all of their copy as affordably as possible. We took the job on. I have my own strengths with SEO but on this one I am a little out of my element. Read on to find out what that is. **Here are some of the issues, what we did and a little more history: ** The old site had a terribly unclean URL structure as most of it was machine written. The owners would make changes to one central location/page and the old CMS would then generate hundreds of service area pages that used long, parameter heavy url's (along with duplicate content). We could not duplicate this URL structure during the transfer and went with a simple, clean structure. Here is an example of how we modified the url's... Old: http://www.moldinspectiontesting.ca/service_area/index.cfm?for=Greater Toronto Area New: http://www.moldinspectiontesting.ca/toronto My programmer took to writing 301 redirects and URL rewrites (.htaccess) for all their service area pages (which tally in the hundreds). As I hinted to above, the site also suffers from a overwhelming amount of duplicate copy which we are very slowly modifying so that it becomes unique. It's also currently suffering from a tremendous amount of keyword cannibalization. This is also a result of the old SEO's work which we had to transfer without fixing first (hosting renewal deadline with the old SEO/designer forced us to get the site up and running in a very very short window). We are currently working on both of these issues now. SERPs have been swinging violently since the transfer and understandably so. Changes have cause and effect. I am bit perplexed though. Pages are indexed one day and ranking very well locally and then apparently de-indexed the next. It might be worth noting that they had some de-index problems in the months prior to meeting us. I suspect this was in large part to the duplicate copy. The ranking pages (on a url basis) are also changing up. We will see a clean url rank and then drop one week and then an unclean version rank and drop off the next (for the same city, same web search). Sometimes they rank along side each other. The terms they want to rank for are very easy to rank on because they are so geographically targeted. The competition is slim in many cases. This time last year, they were having one of the best years in the company's 20+ year history (prior to being de-indexed). **On to the questions: ** **What should we do to reduce the loss in these ranked pages? With the actions we took, can I expect the old unclean url's to drop off over time and the clean url's to pick up the ranks? Where would you start in helping this site? Is there anything obvious we have missed? I planned on starting with new keyword research to diversify what they rank on and then following that up with fresh copy across the board. ** If you are well versed with this type of problem/situation (url changes, index/de-index status, analyzing these things etc), I would love to pick your brain or even bring you on board to work with us (paid).

Hi We have a .com and a .co.uk Main website is .co.uk, we also have a landing page for the .com If we redirect the .com to the .co.uk, will it create duplicate content ... May seem like a silly question, but want to be sure that that the visitors cant access our website at both urls, as that would be duplicate content Thanks in advance John

Hi, Putting together a URL for a product we are selling. We sell IT Training courses and the structure is normally Top Folder=Main Courses section Sub Folder=Vendor Page Specific=Course Name + Term An example is courses/microsoft/mcse-training However I have a product where the vendor and course name are the same. How should I best organise the URL - double mention or single mention So a) courses/togaf/togaf-foundation-training or b) courses/togaf/foundation-training

Hi, Apologies in advance for the long winded question... we need some guidance with our category/product/options structure in our shop. We primarily sell car parts and lots of our parts have multiple fitments for what is basically the same part. Some ranges can have 1,000s of products. We can't work out what is an appropriate level of information and granularity for our product structure.We recognise the importance of having fitments and specific terms in the product title and URL, but we also know that having loads of almost identical product pages is a definite negative and fragments our SEO potential. But where's the happy medium? For example, let's say we have a specific brand of brake pad (we'll call it Brako) with 4 different product-models (Super1, Super2, Super3, Super4), each fits 100 different cars, which are made by 10 different manufacturers. We have a few different ways of presenting/splitting up these 400 simple products: (ignore the URLs here, this is just to illustrate the browsing structure & likely product page titles) 1 category for the Brake Brand with 400 product pages inside, 1 product page for each specific combination of brake product-model and car-fitment. /Brako/Brako-Super1-brakes_BMW-M3.html 1 category, 400 product pages, 0 choices on each product page. 1 category for the Brake Brand with 40 products inside, 1 product for each specific combination of brake product-model and car-manufacturer. Each product page would then let you choose from a dropdown which of the 10 specific cars you had. /Brako/Brako-Super1-brakes_BMW.html 1 category, 40 product pages, 10 choices on each product page. 1 category for the Brake Brand with 4 sub-categories inside for the brake product-models with 100 products inside each, 1 product for each specific combination of car-fitment. /Brako/Brako-Super1-brakes/Brako-Super1-brakes_BMW-M3.html 1 category, 4 sub-categories, 40 product pages, 10 choices on the product page. 1 category for the Brake Brand with 4 sub-categories inside for the brake product-models, with 10 products inside each.1 product for each specific combination of brake product-model and car-manufacturer. Each product page would then let you choose from a dropdown which of the 10 specific cars you had. /Brako/Brako-Super1-brakes/brakebrand-Super1-brakes_BMW.html 1 category, 4 sub-categories, 40 product pages, 10 choices on each product page. 1 category for the Brake Brand with 4 products inside, 1 product for each brake product-model. Each product page would then let you choose from 2 dropdowns, each with 10 options: one for car manufacturer, the next for car model. /Brako/Brako-Super1-brakes.html 1 category, 4 product pages, 100 (10x10) choices on each product page. 1 product page containing options to choose all 400 Brako products using 3 drop down boxes: Car Manufacturer, Car Model and Product-Model /Brako/Brako-brakes.html 1 category, 1 product page, 100 (10x10) choices on each product page. Or we could mix it up and split the sub-categories by manufacturer: 1 category for the Brake Brand with 10 sub-categories (1 sub-category for each of the car manufacturers with 40 products inside each), 1 product page for each specific variation of car-fitment and product-model. /Brako/Brako-brakes-BMW/Brako-Super1-brakes_BMW-M3.html 1 category, 10 sub-categories, 40 product pages, 0 choices on the product page. 1 category for the Brake Brand with 10 sub-categories (1 sub-category for each of the car manufacturers with 10 products inside each), 1 product page for each specific variation of car-fitment. Drop dowjn box on the product page lets you choose product-model (Super1-4) /Brako/Brako-brakes-BMW/Brako-brakes_BMW-M3.html 1 category, 10 sub-categories, 10 product pages, 4 choices on the product page. 1 category for the Brake Brand with 10 sub-categories (1 sub-category for each of the car manufacturers with  products inside each), 1 product page for each specific variation of product-model. /Brako/Brako-brakes-BMW/Brako-Super1-brakes_BMW.html 1 category, 10 sub-categories, 4 product pages, 10 choices on the product page. Obviously, option 1) is going to be the best search match for someone searching for 'BMW M3 Brako Super1 brakes' but that page will have almost identical content to 100 other pages and very similar content to a further 300 pages, which takes it's quality ranking down a lot. At the other end of the scale of complexity is option 5) which concentrates all search potential for the Brako Super1 down to a single page, which can be well written and have great content, but wouldn't have a match in the title, url or product name for anyone searching for 'BMW M3 Brako Super1 brakes'. 'BMW M3' would be mentioned in the page, but only once in a drop-down along with 100 other cars and possibly once in the content if there's something noteworthy about that application. So which option would you go for and why?

Ladies n gents Which sort of URLs do you suggest for Webshops with a deep structure of categories: http://www.yourdomain.com/cat1/cat2/cat3/cat4/cat5/cat6/ (could get really long) or better use just the last 2 categories: http://www.yourdomain.com/cat5/cat6/ ? thanks for your suggestions seth