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Has anyone any experience with HTML snapshots? We have a recruitment client that has HTML snapshots against all job pages as they are built with AJAX. The pages naturally die after around four weeks (the job vacancy runs out) and whilst the AJAX version of the page hard 404s, the HTML snapshot version returns a soft 404. How can we get it to mirror the dead page with 404 status?

If you search "venn digital" then the correct meta description is pulled through, but if you search "venndigital" then it pulls through our twitter feed from the bottom of the page. My only suggestion is that it is doing it because there is no mention of " Venn Digital" in the body of the copy, so it is going to the twitter feed at the bottom of the page where Venn Digital is mentioned to pull this info through.

Hi guys I have had a UK site that has been indexed in Google for some time. Recently we started targeting Ireland and so I created a folder to do this (domain.com/ireland/) As well as adding an /irland/ folder I created a hreflang sitemap and in Webmaster Tools I specified that .com/ireland/ targets Ireland and .com targets UK. However this was all two weeks ago and Im still not seeing the Irish pages start ranking in Google.ie and was hoping one of you guys would be able to help me out? How long should it take for these pages to start appearing in the relevant country specific search engine? Deepcrawl states that the Hreflang is correct as well so Im just a bit worried that Ive missed something glaringly obvious! Thanks

My client, Pareto Law, have set themselves up with a Google Local Business listing:
https://plus.google.com/+paretolaw, and when searching for the Pareto Law brand this page appears a bit like a site-link under the main search result. I've noticed that other companies, such as moz.com, have their G+ page ranking seperately on page 1 of the SERPs. This is especially important for my client, as we're trying to push down other sites rankings for our brand. In an ideal world I'd want only their twitter, G+, linkedin, & facebook pages ranking amongst wikipedia entries and the like, as opposed to forums discussing my client. The question is, are Pareto Law able to set themselves up with a G+ business page as well as the G+ local listing page they presently have. Is that an acceptable setup, or are you supposed to have just one or the other? I'm struggling to differentiate between the 2.

Hi I have a job board site and the way the site is built means that I cant 404 job pages once they have expired. To combat this Im looking to 301 the pages into a 404 page.Do any of you have any experience with this? Are there any potential pitfalls to doing a 404 this way? Thanks

We have a client who is adamant that during the rebranding of their company and website, a holding page is put in place from August 5^th till go-live date on August 21^st. They don’t look like budging on the matter, therefore we are looking to set up a 503 HTTP code on the holding page to tell Google the site is down for maintenance and redirect all pages back to the holding page. The general consensus is that implementing this for such a long period of time will see Google de-index all pages and the site will lose masses of traffic as a result for a substantial time afterwards. It would be great to get some insight on best practice for this situation, how Google will determine the situation and the consequences of such actions. If you have any case studies of similar situations or have firm knowledge of how this scenario would affect the site, I would be delighted to hear from you!

I want to be able to add canonical tags to http headers of individual URL's using .htacess, but I can't find any examples for how to do this. The only example I found was when specifying a file: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-advanced-relcanonical-http-headers N.B. It's not possible to add regular canonical tags to the of my pages as they're dynamically generated. I was trying to add the following to the .htaccess in order to add a canonical tag in the header of the page http://frugal-father.com/is-finance-in-the-uk-too-london-centric/, but I've checked with Live HTTP headers and the canonical line isn't showing : <files "is-finance-in-the-uk-too-london-centric="" "="">Header add Link "<http: frugal-father.com="">; rel="canonical"'</http:></files> Any ideas?

I have a client who has one main service website, on which they have local landing pages for some of the areas in which they operate. They have since purchased 20 or so domains (although in the process of acquiring more) for which the domain names are all localised versions of the service they offer. Rather than redirecting these to the main site, they wish to operate them all separately with the goal of ranking for the specific localised terms related to each of the domains. One option would be to create microsites (hosted on individual C class IPs etc) with unique, location specific content on each of the domains. Another suggestion would be to park the domains and have them pointing at the individual local landing pages on the main site, so the domains would just be a window through which to view the pages which have already been created. The client is aware of the recent EMD update which could affect the above. Of course, we would wish to go with the most Google-friendly option, so I was wondering if anyone could offer some advice about how would be best to handle this? Many thanks in advance!

I'm currently working on a live version of a clients website which has duplication issues. With .htaccess, I need to rewrite URL's of the following format: vacancy.php?id=802 to vacancy/?id=802 I tried adding the following line but it returned a 500, and don't want to keep taking the site out. RewriteRule ^vacancy/?id=([0-9]+)$ vacancy.php?id=$1 [R=301, L]

We’re using wordpress, and we have the following in the .htaccess: BEGIN WordPress RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] END WordPress We have a URL like http://subdomain.example.com/select-a-card/?q=fuel, and I want to rewrite it so that it becomes http://subdomain.example.com/fuel-card/ What do I need to add to the htaccess to do this?? Thanks,

I'm having real trouble with getting working redirects in place to use on a site we're re-launching with a modified url structure. Old URL: http://www.example.com/example_folder/ New URL: http://www.example.com/example-of-new-folder/ Now, where the old URL's have a trailing slash the web.config simply will not accept it. It says the URL can start with a slash, but not end with a slash. However, many of my URL's do end with a slash so I need a workaround. These are the rules I'm putting in place: <location path="example_folder/"></location> Thanks

We're launching a new site for our client on their existing domain, and as many of the URL's are changing we need to create some webconfig redirects. However, rather than create a webconfig file which redirects each page on the existing site to a corresponding page on the new site, I was hoping to create redirect rules for the top landing pages only, and then have a catch all which redirects all other URL's to the homepage. How would you set this up in a webconfig file?

My client would like to integrate one of it's smaller websites into its main website. I've identified around 20 pages which I'd like to 301 redirect to specific pages on the main website, and this is simple enough. The problem I have is that I am not sure how I can then put a catch-all to redirect all other pages on the site to the homepage of the main website. I'd originally though something like this would work: redirect 301 / http://www.mainwebsite.com/ (catch-all)
redirect 301 /about.asp http://www.mainwebsite.com/about (specific redirect 1)
redirect 301 /latest.asp http://www.mainwebsite.com/news (specific redirect 1)
etc. Any ideas?