A few questions about SEO

[Captain Tycoon]

Hey, I've got a few questions about SEO, thought I would be better off placing them all in one thread instead of separate threads.

1. Whats better to have in terms of SEO, blog.domain.com or domain.com/blog/? (Which one would I use If i want "Site Links" - see Question 2)

2. How can I get my sites listing to have "Site Links" underneath it, e.g. search webmaster-talk.com on google and the first listing will have "Site Links" below it.

3. If I changed from /Test-Directory/ to /test-directory/ and the links are being indexed with the old structure, how can you get google to reindex to the new structure without using .htaccess?

Would appreciate any help / advice you can give, thanks! :wave:

 

[angilina]

1. I saw matt cutts in a video saying that, we should use sub directories instead of sub domains. Also, in some forums, I have seen people complaining about their subdomains not indexed by Google.
So my suggestion is subdomain:

2. Sitelinks generate automatically and I have seen people saying that: in order to get them, we need to have a 1+ years old domain, we need to have excellent internal link structure, and quality backlinks also help.

3. If your pages inside the mentioned directory rank good, then you may not do this change as you can easily lose all the ranking. If you have to do it, then remember to do a 301 redirect for old pages to new ones. You can use, I think, the conditional statement in .htaccess and just few lines will do all the redirects.

 

[Captain Tycoon]

2. Sitelinks generate automatically and I have seen people saying that: in order to get them, we need to have a 1+ years old domain, we need to have excellent internal link structure, and quality backlinks also help.

What would you recall as being an excellent internal link structure?

3. If your pages inside the mentioned directory rank good, then you may not do this change as you can easily lose all the ranking. If you have to do it, then remember to do a 301 redirect for old pages to new ones. You can use, I think, the conditional statement in .htaccess and just few lines will do all the redirects.

What if I cant use .htaccess and dont mind loosing PageValue.

 

[enlytend]

Sitelinks are given out on merit and I believe this feature is still in Beta.

I can tell you first hand that the domain doesn't HAVE to be over a year old and you don't need a lot of backlinks to get sitelinks (The sites I have which have sitelinks are only around a year old now and have had them for months - they also have comparatively few backlinks). Quality content and good internal link structure is probably a factor though.

Good internal link structure = intuitive for your visitors to navigate from one part of your site to other related parts.

 

[Captain Tycoon]

Sitelinks are given out on merit and I believe this feature is still in Beta.

I can tell you first hand that the domain doesn't HAVE to be over a year old and you don't need a lot of backlinks to get sitelinks (The sites I have which have sitelinks are only around a year old now and have had them for months - they also have comparatively few backlinks). Quality content and good internal link structure is probably a factor though.

Good internal link structure = intuitive for your visitors to navigate from one part of your site to other related parts.

Would higher priority pages in the sitemap effect Site Links?

 

[enlytend]

Sitemaps don't seem to play a part. Here's what Google has to say about them:

We only show sitelinks for results when we think they'll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn't allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don't think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user's query, we won't show them.

At the moment, sitelinks are completely automated. We're always working to improve our sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future.

Source: Sitelinks - Webmasters/Site owners Help

You can *block* any links you don't want shown, but currently there's no way to suggest which ones to show.