SEO Email, can anyone help decipher?

Hi all. I have a modx site up and running, and the other day I had the email below sent to me. It all seems friendly enough, but I am unsure whether it is a ploy to sell me their service or if what they are stating is true. Can anyone help?

Good Afternoon , My name is Sanket Deva, I was just browsing the internet and came across your website, which i really liked. I saw a small flaw with your website which if corrected should help you to get more traffic from Google and all of the major search engines online. You have Canonical URL issue in your website which means that google bot will see 2 versions of your home page. This means the google is dividing the authority amongst the 2 pages which are actually a single page. i.e. your main page : http://www.pawsforwildlife.co.uk and the page http://www.pawsforwildlife.co.uk/index.htmlIn effect the power of your homepage is being halved! You can read more about this issue here :http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/ Your web developer can easily correct this issue by making a 301 redirect from http://www.pawsforwildlife.co.uk/index.html to http://www.pawsforwildlife.co.uk/. We have worked on projects in various niches and have managed to achieve top 5 rankings for our clients for many highly competitive keywords. Let me know if you need our help to solve the canonical URL issue or if you need any tips or support to reach top of Google, we offer a trust based contract free SEO service, because we are confident in the work we do and results that we get for our clients !

Thanks in advance

hi,

one out of so many crappy spam we receive all day long... -> trash
which doesn’t mean you should not linkback to your homepage with "/" instead of index.html to avoid duplicate content

have swing

This email is pretty spammy.

Unlikely using the service of anyone like that would give your business much benefit.

The version of Modx you are using does support a better URL structure.

You should investigate setting up SEO Friendly URLs.

Then instead of http://www.pawsforwildlife.co.uk/index.php?q=discoveries.html
You would have http://www.pawsforwildlife.co.uk/discoveries

A little bit nicer for search engines and users.

Stuart

Thanks for the replies. I have turned on friendly urls, but I had to prefix with ’ index.php?q= ’ . I didnt know I could remove that index bit. How would I remove it to make it friendlier?

You don’t need to prefix the alias (or suffix for that matter if you don’t want to). Just turn on Friendly URLs in the Manager, and rename the ht.access file to .htaccess. The rewrite rules in the .htaccess file will take care of rewriting domain.com/alias to domain.com/index.php?q=alias.

OK, several things:

• This email is spam, but the issue it identifies is a real issue. Presumably they have a bot that crawls the web looking for sites that have canonicalization issues and then send them spam.
• Your site does not appear to be suffering from canonicalization issues of the homepage, however. Google seems to have correctly canonicalized the homepage at www.pawsforwildlife.co.uk so I doubt your PR is actually being split. Google actually handles canonicalization pretty well these days in most cases.
• I would not recommend you make any changes at all to your URL structure without thinking it through very carefully. The difference between the URLs you are using and "friendly" URLs might not impact your rankings much at all. You have a lot of pages indexed in Google and if you change all of the URLs without doing a redirect, you may experience a temporary loss of rankings and traffic. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, at least without making sure you don’t cause additional problems with your fix.
• The problem with switching to friendly URLs is that there may be external links pointing to pages on your site at the current URLs. So if you switch to using friendly URLs in your internal links, you may actually be creating a duplicate content problem that you didn’t have before. However, you can’t 301 redirect from your current URLs to the friendly ones, because that would create an infinite loop. The current URLs will still have to resolve in order for the friendly ones to work.
• I need to think about this some more, switching from your current structure to friendly URLs is actually a very difficult problem. My advice is don’t change anything at all, at least for now. I’ll see if I can come up with a good way to do it and get back to you, but I’m not sure there is a good way to do it and you may be better off just leaving well enough alone.
• It wouldn’t hurt to implement a standard canonical redirect from the non-www version of the site to the www version. I don’t think that’s urgent, but I think you could do it without creating additional problems. However, do not attempt to redirect index.php back to root as the email seems to be suggesting, that will break your site.

OK, question: how much traffic are you getting from search engines right now? In other words, do you have anything to lose? If not, you might as well go ahead and switch to friendly URLs anyway, as the only possible negative effect would be to lose the search traffic you’re getting right now. Might be best to do it and get it over with while the impact would be minimal, rather than waiting until later when you actually have traffic and then jeapordizing it.

I’ve thought of one way to switch from unfriendly to friendly URLs and still be able to redirect the old URLs to new ones (in Revolution). Just change your suffix for text/html documents -- in this case you could change it from .html to .php, for example. Then all of the new friendly URLs will end in .php, and you can 301 redirect from the old URLs with query strings ending in document-name.html to the new URLs of the form document-name.php without breaking the friendly URL redirect itself.

I’ll have to test this when I have time and then post the .htaccess code for the necessary redirect -- I wouldn’t want to post untested .htaccess code as that could have adverse consequences. However, the redirect shouldn’t be too difficult if you’re familiar with .htaccess - just take any request with a query string ending in xxx.html and redirect it to /xxx.php.

Does that make sense? I’m pretty sure it would work. However, I’m not really convinced it’s worth the trouble in your case, your site seems to be indexed just fine as is.

I think I may leav it as is then, I seem to get fair traffic at the moment. I have an issue with Yahoo, it only finds about 14 pages of my site (which is around 500 pages). I have now submitted my sitemap and am hoping this will cure the issue.

One question regarding SEO ranking. My text/content is not 100% fully grammatically correct. Not all sentences are complete as they are factual. For instance I would have

"Orange base colour with black stripes. Large feet and rounded face"

rather than

"The tigers base colour is orange, with black stripes along its back..."

Will Google and other search engines penalise me for this?