Applies to Travel for sure. Personally I think if you have the "award" or proof that you own the status as No 1 then use it. Your title tag is like your sales pitch. If you sell shit to me and you are the No 1 or the Best and don't say it, you might have missed new customer. I am more likly to click on something that claims to be No 1 or the Best, however, if I get there and it isn't true then bey bey. So I don't think it could hurt unless it's not true.

Hi Mozzers

I would like to know how crawlers see the ampersand (& or &) in your URLs and if Google frown upon this or not? As far as I know they purely recognise this as "and" is this correct and is there any best practice for implementing this, as I know a lot of people complained before about & in links and that it is better to use it as &, but this is not on links, this is on URLs.

Reason for this is that we looking to move onto an ASP.Net MVC framework (any suggestions for a different framework are welcome, we still just planning out future development) and in order to make use of the filter options we have on our site we need a parameter to indicate the difference on a routing level (routing sends to controller, controller sends to model, model sends to controller and controller sends to view < this is pattern of a request that comes in on the framework we will be using).

I already have -'s and /'s in the URLs (which is for my SEO structuring) so these syntax can't be used for identifying filters the user clicks or uses to define their search as it will create a complete mess in the system. Now we looking at & to say; OK, when a user lands on /accommodation and they selects De Kelders (which is a destination in our area) the page will be /accommodation/de-kelders on this page they can define their search further to say they are looking for 5 star accommodation and it should be close to the beach, this is where the routing needs some guidance and we looking to have it as follow: /accommodation/de-kelders/5-star&close-to-the-beach. Now, does the "&" get identified by search engines on a URL level as "and" and does this cause any issues with crawling or indexation or would it be best to look at another solution?

Thanks,

Chris Captivate

Hi Dr Pete

Thank you so much for your input, I really appreciate it. Always fun learning something new

I also don't prefer the engine-specific approach. However, could it hurt implementing both solutions?

Regards,

Chris Captivate.

Hi Mozzers

I have a bit of thing I was pondering about this morning and would love to hear your opinion on it.

So we had a bit of an issue on our client's website in the beginning of the year. I tried to find a way around it by using wild cards in my robots.txt but because different search engines treat wild cards differently it dint work out so well and only some search engines understood what I was trying to do. so here goes,

I had a parameter on a big amount of URLs on the website with ?filter being pushed from the database we make use of filters on the site to filter out content for users to find what they are looking for much easier, concluding to database driven ?filter URLs (those ugly &^% URLs we all hate so much*.

So what we looking to do is implementing nofollow noindex on all the internal links pointing to it the ?filter parameter URLs, however my SEO sense is telling me that the noindex nofollow should rather be on the individual ?filter parameter URL's metadata robots instead of all the internal links pointing the parameter URLs. Am I right in thinking this way? (reason why we want to put it on the internal links atm is because the of the development company states that they don't have control over the metadata of these database driven parameter URLs)

If I am not mistaken noindex nofollow on the internal links could be seen as page rank sculpting where as onpage meta robots noindex nofolow is more of a comand like your robots.txt

Anyone tested this before or have some more knowledge on the small detail of noindex nofollow?

PS: canonical tags is also not doable at this point because we still in the process of cleaning out all the parameter URLs so +- 70% of the URLs doesn't have an SEO friendly URL yet to be canonicalized to.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Thanks,

Chris Captivate.

Applies to Travel for sure. Personally I think if you have the "award" or proof that you own the status as No 1 then use it. Your title tag is like your sales pitch. If you sell shit to me and you are the No 1 or the Best and don't say it, you might have missed new customer. I am more likly to click on something that claims to be No 1 or the Best, however, if I get there and it isn't true then bey bey. So I don't think it could hurt unless it's not true.