Google doesn't need to see your sitemap to crawl your site. And you don't want the URL's to stay in the old sitemap, any "redirected" sitemap URL's will be rejected.

Either way should be fine, as long as your 301 redirects are working, and are recognized by the search engines as 301 (and not 302).

What do we do here at Guru of Search? When we transfer a page, we 301 redirect it, submit the new sitemap to Google, and unpublish the old pages and sitemap links.

I'm trying to 301 redirect pages from one website to another. I know I need to add the new pages to Google Webmaster Tools and my website's sitemap. The question is - should I leave the old pages up, and in the old sitemap, until they're transferred, or is it safe to take them (the pages and the sitemap links) down right away?

Goes without saying that I'd like to keep as much link juice as possible during this transfer!

I'm thinking the best approach is to have footer links link first to an internal page, describing the external site, and then linking to the external site from there. That also gives your users a heads up as to where they're going before they go there.

What I would do is write unique copy for this internal page if it appears on multiple websites, so it's not tagged as duplicate content.

Try this plugin: http://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/nicer-permalinks/

I've a big fan of bbPress so far - it's easy to use, and appears to be one of the most light-weight and SEO-friendly forum platforms out there.

The one thing I don't get it is why the /forum/ and /topic/ sub-directories are added to the URL? That effectively makes none of my pages link directly from the root.

And in Google Webmaster Tools, "forum" and "topic" and "post" are my top three keywords. That can't be good for SEO... any ideas on how to remove the /forum/ and /topic/ from bbPress forum URL's?

A follow up - in Webmaster Tools I see my "designed by mysite.com" footer links registered thousands of times by Google. In the index, however only a few pages show up. They must recognize it's a footer link.

I've done some experimenting with this myself, and it appears that it's not a problem to link to external sites in the footer - especially if you're the web designer or have provided the theme for that site.

I find that if I plug "link:mysite.com mylinkinthissitesfooter.com" into Google, it will return not all, but multiple pages from the site. That means it indexed more than one page that my footer link appears in. If I linked the footer page to an internal page first, there would only be one (it might have much higher PR, however, I'm not sure).

Then there's also the question of the mylinkinthissitesfooter.com sites not being in the same "relevant" group/ industry as my site, and therefore not being regarded highly by Google?

I've been pondering the same exact question for months now, and I keep putting it on hold.

While I don't think there's a need to nofollow footer links, it can help the user to link footer links to an internal page, give them information on the site, instead of simply sending them to an external site without a heads up (you could do a pop-up window I suppose). Then again, would that create a bunch of identical pages on multiple sites and not be as effective as footer links? Hmmm...

What's your guys opinion on SEO for footer links? Should I not have footer links pointing to external sites, or should I point them first to an internal page which describes the external site and then links to it, or should I have them only pointing to internal pages such as "about us," "contact," etc. or - should I avoid footer links altogether?

I totally agree. Think about your user's experience, don't worry too much about the search engines. Your user won't notice the presence or absence of nofollow.

Our rule of thumb on nofollows is simply to use them as they were originally intended: to block comment spam. So we don't worry about "sculpting" the flow of PR (link juice) on our internal pages with nofollow. We add them to comment links, and that's it. I'm pretty sure that's what Google intended, and that they'll take care of the rest.

No need to nofollow them in our opinion. Keep in mind that Google is smart enough to filter out these problems on most pages, since they want site editors to focus on creating content, not trying to beat them at their own game.

From reports we've received, it appears that, for duplicate links on the same page, Google only follows the first link. Why? Because the Google spider removes duplicate links automatically. If, however, you nofollow the first link, it will not follow either, because the second link will already have been removed as a duplicate.

In our opinion, the danger of Google mixing up your nofollows and not following either link is greater than that of having your PR "juice" split amongst both pages. Since Google takes care of duplicate link removal for you, we would therefore not worry about nofollowing read more links.

I'm trying to decide if I should nofollow duplicate links on my front page? Specifically, I have the heading (subject) of each article teaser linking through to the full article page. In addition, the "read more..." link at the end of the teaser paragraph also links through to the same page.

I see some pages nofollowing the second link for "SEO purposes" (so Google only follows the first and doesn't divide link juice in half among both links). I'm also noticing that the Drupal "Read More Link" module is offering this as an option - I check a box and it nofollows all my "read more" links.

Should I use this or not?

I wouldn't necessarily hide the date from the search engine, or your users - as it can prove useful to both. However, you might want to change the date variable to reflect the last modification date of the page, as opposed to the creation date.

To do so, simply open your page.tpl.php file, and change all instances of $node->created to $node->changed. This will update the date on your individual pages to the last time the page was edited.

If you also make the change in your node.tpl.php file, it will update the dates you have listed on your front page, assuming you have teasers with "read more" links to your articles, as many Drupal front pages have setup. We tend to leave these dates as $node->created so they remain chronological and it's easier to see when a page was first published.

I'm noticing that on my Drupal website, the description of my indexed pages in Google search results starts out with the date, despite the fact that I'm not including the date in my description meta tag.

This doesn't really help me get leads from users, because it makes the article look old, even if it's been updated recently. Why? Because Drupal prints the date of article creation (not modification). So even though an article may be new and up to date - the first thing a searcher sees is the original posting date, which is very old...

A meta title tag is used to specify the title of your listing in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). It's similar to the meta description tag, which is used to specify the description below the title.

From our experience, the title tag accomplishes this purpose, and therefore using both a meta title tag and a title tag is superfluous (ie. unnecessary). We recommend simply sticking with the title tag.

Has anyone ever heard of a meta title tag? I know a title tag is vital to SEO, but I've never heard of anyone using a meta title tag, until just recently. Specifically - an SEO company in India keeps insisting that I add meta title tags to my page, and that they influence the page title.

Any opinions on this?