Hi,

Since it said that search engines treat subdomains as different stand-alone sites,

** Search engines could treat subdomains as different stand alone sites.  Usually they don't. A good example when they do that is the blogspot subdomains - and that is because those are in fact separate stand alone sites.

In your case however, since it's about users, similar with blogspot somehow - google can treat them at som point as separate websites.

whats best for the main site? to show multiple search results with profiles in subdomains or subdirectories?

** My personal opinion is that from a user point of view you should go with the subdomains as you do right now - it make sense, it's easy for them to use those urls, to link to them and so on.

You could lose some link equity for the main domain if some or all subdomain will be at some point treated as separate domains but if you put everything on a scale, it will balance as advantages on the subdomain approach anyway.

What if i use both? meaning in search results i use search directory url for each profile while same time each profile owns a subdomains as well? and if so which one should be the canonical?

** To be honest I do see the point / advantages in doing that.

One other advantage is that if you go with subdomains and google will count them as separate websites, if one of your user is ding something stupid (trying to rank with it and start building gambling and porn links to that sub domain you will be safe with the root domain and the other users won't be affected.

Hope it helps.

Edited to underline the word could 

Hi,

I would assume you are referring to Site Search - see what people are looking for one landed on your site ?!

If that is the case you need to setup Site Search in Google Analytics - it's not set by default and you also need to add a pice of code to the backend of the site - but that's a copy and paste job.

See more here: http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1012264 

(it's easy to follow)

You can also look for setting up site search if you will need more resources.

On the other hand if this is not what you meant and you are referring to queries performed in Google when your site is showing up, for those you either need to check Web master Tools  at Traffic -> Search Queries or if you have your Web Master Tools connected with your Google Analytics account, you can see the same data directly from Analytics under: Traffic Sources -> Search Engine Optimisation -> Queries.

Hope it helps !

Hello,

Please let me know what are the exact right steps in order to get rid of the duplicate content issues related with:

www.domain.com/index.html same as www.domain.com  without creating an infinite loop.

Do you have a step by step guide posted within seomoz including 301 redirect for non www to www for all urls and index.whatever to main domain name without going into a infinite loop ?

btw how to you spot the loop ? is it obvious like never ending refresh of the home page ?

thanks a lot !

Hi,

In order to deindex you should use noindex as content=none also means nofollow. You do need to follow now in order to reach all other pages and see the no index tag and remove those from the index.

When you have all of them out of the index you can set the none back on.

This is the main reason "none" as attribute is not very wide in usage as "shooting yourself in the foot" with it it's easy.

On the otehr hand you need to see if google bot is actually reaching those pages:

• see if you don't have any robots.txt restrictions first

• see when google's bot last have a hit on any of the pages - that will give you a good idea and you can do a prediction.

If those pages are in the sup index you can wait for some time for Google bit to revisit.

One last note: build xml sitemaps with all of those pages and submit those via WMT - that will help at 100% to get those in front of the firing squad and also to be able to monitor those better.

Hope it helps.

We work with load balancing a lot using multiple IPs - there are no issues SEO wise however you must be certain that those IPs, in the past, didn't got associated with spam or are on any black lists from previous users as in this case you can get a red flag for bad neighborhood.

In my personal experience this is the only down side - if this is ok - there is no reason for concern - only good things can happen.

Hope it helps.

I think is worth it to develop the proposal in a custom manner for each client based on his needs, KPIs, current status and so on.

We usually touch the bellow point in each proposal:

• general status of the domain and general guidelines on what can be improved

• on page optimisation improvments (from url structure, code, ux, nine relining, meta tags and content

• link profile analysis, improvement channels

• social media in correlation with SEO.

depending on the client and status of the proposal (initial, strategy etc) you can get into details with all or some of the points.

Hope it helps.

if the articles are good - then there just might be value to the user . Depending on the niche / industry those old articles could be very important.

Google dosen't like those as you probably have a lot of impression but no clicks (so mainly no traffic) or maybe the "score" is bad (bounce rate - not Google analytics bounce rate, but Google's bounce rate - if they bounce to serps that is).

Since you got hit by panda, in my opinion, I see two options:

1. No index those old pages. The users can still get tho those by navigation, site search etc but google won't see them. Google is fine with having content (old, poor, thin etc) if it's not in the index. I work with a site that has several million pages and 80% is no index - everything is fine now (they also got hit by Panda).

2. Merge those pages into rich, cool, fresh topic pages (see new york time topic pages sample - search for it - I think there is also an seomoz post - a whiteboard friday about it). This is a good approach and if you manage to merge those old pages with some new content you will be fine. Topic pages are great as an anti panda tool !

If you merge the pages into topic pages do that based on a simple flow:

1. identify a group of pages that covers the same topic.

2. identify the page that has the highest authority of all.

3. Change this page into the topic page - keep the url.

4. Merge the other into this page (based on your new topic page structure and flow)

5. 301 redirect the others to this one

6. build a separat xml sitemaps with all those pages and load it up to WMT. Monitor it.

7. Build some links to some of those landing pages, get some minimum social signals to those - to a few (depending on the number). Build an index typoe of page with those topic pages or some of them (user friendly one/ ones) and use those as target to build some links to send the 'love'.

Hope it helps - just some ideas.

You go be fine without one. You only need one if you want to manage that subdmain: add specific xml sitemaps links in robots.txt, cut access to specific folders for that subdomain.

if you don't need any of that - just move forward without one.

Normally for this type of flow you won't get any value for that link.

That is because that iframe is in fact a page that is displayed within another page and use for this purpose alone - to link to you that is. That page doesn't have any authority because no one is linking to it - not even the site that part of - this page won't be in any navigation, sitemap or any other linked source - so it will have almost no value. Maybe a little value as part of an authority site but I doubt it will cont.

Just to underline the above - you will have a link from an obscure page, a satellite that for the user will look like is part of an important page but for Google and friends (since they see beyond the smoke screen) this page won't pass any link juice.

This is the reason why for link building one of the most important requests is : the link shouldn't be within an iframe or using a javascript.

My personal opinion is to move away from this concept as it can eat up a lot of resources with only a small to none amount of benefits.

Hope it helps as an outside advice.