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Thank you a lot. Those are some superb ideas! We will be sure to implement.

Hello,

i have two questions. Issue 1 is that we are a classified ads site. I started thinking, analyzing why im not ranking even tho i have a lot more content than others and my backlink profile is also better. Googling the advertisements i see that 95% of it is duplicate content. People usually who advertise, add the same add to 10 maybe 30 sites. For google this is duplicate content. Any ideas what to do? I can manually edit ads, to write a bit of unique content, but that is not a long term startegy.

Question 2: My titles are all the same - Unique Name - Keyword im trying to rank for. There is around 1000 of such pages. Should i mix the titles up or it is still better to have 1 keyword which will help me to rank?

My idea was to either put a canonical to the categories for homepage (so the category 1 would have a canonical to homepage) or to move all of the category one ads to homepage (speed would suffer) and remove category 1 at all.

Hello, I was reading hobo s post on duplicate content. Our web is in the classified advertisement industry and our site is built up like this

Homepage (last 200 ads)  category 1(has the name we want to rank our homepage and around 350 ads) category 2 (around 100 ads)  category 3 (around 60 ads)

Now our homepage has 200 ads that also appear mostly in category 1 but also in others. We are ranking our homepage as 11 th now on Google.

I'm worried a bit that the 200 ads on the homepage are not unique, because they will appear in one other category. Is this OK? Is this duplication? Should we do something? Issue is that we at first started ranking our homepage where all ads were, now there are too many so we show 200 latest on homepage and then they are split into category pages.

Our main keyword is ranking at the moment as 15th for the homepage, (Keyword + region name). The keyword is not so hard in the country im ranking it.

But the question is still the same. Should I link back to homepage using the exact match anchor im trying to rank, and what to do with this category 1 which is the same target keyword. I think it might compete with homepage in the future.

**If im not linking back to homepage with the keyword, how can google rank me strong is my question? **

Hello,

Our site is an basically advertisements / listings website.

Structure is as following

<last 200="" adds="">  (homepage trying to rank) < category 1 > < category 1 > < category 1 > < category 1 > < category 1 ></last>

My question - each of the categories links back within the  menu back to homepage. The link text currently is last 200 adds. Can i use exact match anchor? Or should i use just last 200 ads?

The issue is that one of my categorys (category 1) has already the exact match anchor im trying to rank for. So i can not use the same to link back to homepage.

Im worried that google does not see any exact keyword anchor texts back to homepage hence will rank my homepage with lower strenght for that keyword . Im also worried that the category 1 page might now compete with the main homepage for this word (even tho at the moment category itself does not rank for this keyword)

Can i link from footer back to homepage with an alternative keyword then to give some "context" to google more? Would this be spamming?

Hello,

you know when you search for your brand on google for example nike.com . It shows usually the pages that are importan. Our brand however shows totally random URLs under the brand. There should be however our category pages. How can i add those? Some html code i presume?

Any ideas follow MoZers? I can not find myself any other way to do it and think that would be the best and quickest way to fix?

Hello,

We found a critical error in our site internal link structure and the way Google indexes it. Website has 1000s of URLs that are basically 50% match to homepage. They all start the same example.com/category/random/random

I can do a redirect match and 301 them to homepage. This way 1000s of bogus url are not indexed and no value given. Is it OK to redirect so many URLs to homepage?

Platform is creating these URLs because of search query, where it adds all site content to one page. Currently this search page /category / has own canonical and all those duplicate content URLs have canonical to that /category /.

To fix my plan is to a. Remove canonical from /category / that way all those duplicate URLs don't have it either. B.  Redirect match all URLs that have /category / in them to homepage. (this is most important page where 50% of that content is and should be the main page).

Is this plan ok?

Thanks Greg. I think it was. Now we back at 10th and 12th but still some way to go.

But is it then true, that if i have some page(that now is 404) which had a canonical to another one which then was 301d, this is bad and mixed signals? There should be never any 404 that have canonical to your page which is 301d to main website. Correct?

Hello,

We found a critical error in our site internal link structure and the way Google indexes it. Website has 1000s of URLs that are basically 50% match to homepage. They all start the same example.com/category/random/random

I can do a redirect match and 301 them to homepage. This way 1000s of bogus url are not indexed and no value given. Is it OK to redirect so many URLs to homepage?

Platform is creating these URLs because of search query, where it adds all site content to one page. Currently this search page /category / has own canonical and all those duplicate content URLs have canonical to that /category /.

To fix my plan is to a. Remove canonical from /category / that way all those duplicate URLs don't have it either. B.  Redirect match all URLs that have /category / in them to homepage. (this is most important page where 50% of that content is and should be the main page).

Is this plan ok?