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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?

Dear, Moz

We have been hard at work going some off site and on site SEO. However yesterday we got around 1600 404 errors from google, and ranking dropped from 7 in front page to 25.

What we did: I found an error in Htacces, where my partner had this (rewritebase with double // and rule with // - I quess this started creating urls for google, because twww.website.com//category-category-cateory

OK. But google says that they will not effect your rankings because 404s?

Second think i found was that we had some urls, which had canonical tag to a page called search. Now that search (duplicate of homepage) we 301 to our main homepage. Can that effect ranking? You have 404s that have canonical to a page that itselft redirects (301) to homepage.

We also removed the / splash. Nothing more.. Below is the htaccess, that had the double // error. Please comment.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase //
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (.+)/$
RewriteRule ^ %1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.website.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://website.com/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond $1 ^(index.php)?$ [OR]
RewriteCond $1 .(gif|jpg|css|js|png|ico)$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^(.)$ - [S=1]
RewriteRule .//index.php [L]
DirectoryIndex index.php

Hello,

Maybe someone has an idea? So my main site now is website.com and if i would make my main (homepage) website.com/keyword. Would that have an effect? What risks are there?

Thanks, helps a lot.

Hello,

There is so much contradicting information about the homepage canonical URL. Many websites have all the links without the trailing splash but their homepage URL still contains the splash. Now Moz is an example with this. Their urls don't have the splash, and their canonical does not have the splash.

Why is it so and why so much different ways people have it?

James, I think you are totally incorrect. You can not remove the training splash from your homepage. And all the canonical tags should also include that I'm pretty sure. (I mean here the homepage canonical)

Or am i undestanding something incorrectly? Because all links point to my "domain" www.example.com yet the index page has a lot higher authority then the domain. Am i looking it the other way around? Should i link to my other pages aswell, which would then increase my overall DA?

Hello, so our domain is website.com and we do not use www in our domain. Now moz shows our page authority as huge (website. Com)  and domain authority very low. But our domain is our page that we rank. Is this due to the fact that we use no www and we rank our main index page? Am I correct? Thanks!

Has anyone got any idea? All the top 10 ranking have it in their url. So im thinking doing a 301 from www.mysite.com to mysite.com/target-keyword

Hello, Im a bit confused. If i use a tool like majestic to look at my website links, www.example.com and www.example.com**/ have huge difference in their authority.** Do i need to make a 301 redirect to the site with the splash or not? Will google itself understand that they are my main site?

Is this the "http://www.website.com.com/"/> correct canonical? Meaning it has trailing splash and also

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [L,R=301]  - this one has trailing splash, correct?

Hello,

I started to doubt myself. We have a classified advertisements website. On the main www.website.com page, almost all the advertisements are shown. Now we take those advertisements and also split them into categorys

Category 1 / category 2 / category 3 / category 4

Now all those categories almost always have the same content as www.website.com except a bit less (because X amount of content is now divided also to 4-5 groups)

For raking should i actually tell google that those categories are a copy of www.website.com or they should still be as they are?

So yes, to clarify -we are an classified advertisements website. Everybody else has lets say website for spain and then they split that website into city-keyword. As we are only for one city, but in our domain name, there is no mention of the keyword, would making a 301 redirect of our main www.example.com to **website.com/target keyword **give us a ranking edge? I see everybody is doing that who ranks highly.

Hello,

thanks for the answer. So for raking it would be better to redirect the index.php as i understand?  The issue we have is that we use Os-class as our platform, and even if i set a new directory index sitehome.php and make a 301 redirect, our site breaks down and some functionality does not work..

Dear moz community

I have been analyzing the websites that rank in top 20 for our target keywords. All of the top 20 sites except us have their websites re directing to websites.com/target keyword. This is due to probably because they have multiple city's and one of the target keywords term is cityname + word.

My question is and idea -  make a 301 to our www.website.com to /city-keyword and start linking to that page with new links.

Would that bring any benefit? Seems that it's a very strong ranking signal. Any threats that I must take into account? We currently rank as #9

I would try to check their back link profile, either with moz or majestic. What type of links they have what you do not. How do they rank in this category in regards to their back link profile?

I would also make sure your own internal linking is correct as double content issues sometimes spread quite a bit of your link juice. (if you have index.php the directs have been done  also that your www has a redirect to your domain or the other way around depending  on your configuration)

Hello, we found recently quite a big error  our index.php file had no canonical tag nor was a 301 redirect. So we put a canonical tag to it that it's the main www.examle.com duplicate . Now is there any difference in regards to link juice or Google 301 vs canonical tag ? I read that moz did a 301 from their index php.  I understand one difference is that user then can Type in the URL if no 301, but I'm interested about ranking effect of it.

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions?

Dear Moz community,

We have made a great mistake.  Looking at keyword search volumes somehow Moz showed volumes for two keywords which only differentiate by an  '**s (plural) as same. **Now we optimized our internal links (all links have the keyword) for the singular word.

Now looking at other search volume estimations from competitors we see, that the plural has 5 times bigger volume.

Our issue: If we change some of the category links now to another keyword, we will loose our ranking with the singular word. Correct?

If we do not change any of our internal links, we will never rank in top 6 with the keyword. (currently singular is 6 and plural is 15)

What would you reccomend?

Dear, Moz community

We are an online advertising website / direcotry. Lately we discovered that our website due to technical error was in English rather than Spanish and was not ranking in the local Spanish google.es at all. After changing the main language we quickly climbed to 2nd page with rankings in google.es .

**My question is on top of regular SEO (Link building, content, blog) what could we do to help us rank quicker in local google.es. **

The same keyword ranks in google.com as #3 but not in Spain. Should we put in the effort to work with local directories? Google MyBusiness is not an option as we are not a bricks and mortar business.

Hello,

has anyone got an idea then? We get follow link we put rel=nofollow - is it better hat follow vs follow or for google, it still looks like exchange?

Dear Moz Community,

We are operating in a niche market, where there are not so many content marketing options. What we are left with are link exchanging with relevant sites that are on the same topic but to not directly compete with us.

Now we know that if we link back to site A and site a links back to us - for google this is not a very good link.

But, some of the sites we are exchanging links with, do not know the term follow vs no follow links.

My question - if your link is to site A is a no follow link but they give us a follow link - does it mean thats a better option than a follow vs follow.

Thanks for help!