Welcome to the Q&A Forum

AndieF

I'm building an eCommerce website which has an advanced filter on the left hand side of the category pages.

It allows users to tick boxes for colours, sizes, materials, and so on. When they've made their choices they submit (this will likely be an AJAX thing in a future release, but isn't at time of writing).

The new filtered page has a new URL, which is made up of the IDs of the filter's they've ticked - it's a bit like /department/2/17-7-4/10/

My concern is that the filtered pages are, on the most part, going to be the same as the parent. Which may lead to duplicate content.

My other concern is that these two URLs would lead to the exact same page (although the system would never generate the 'wrong' URL)

/department/2/17-7-4/10/
/department/2/**10/**17-7-4/

But I can't think of a way of canonicalising that automatically.

Tricky.

So the meat of the question is this: should I worry about this causing issues with the SEO - or can I have trust in Google to work it out?

AndieF

If you're a pro member - you could use the Keyword Difficulty Tool: http://pro.moz.com/tools/keyword-difficulty

AndieF

I've looked into this very briefly and it looks as though Google doesn't index the domain http://feeds.feedburner.com/* so they'll not find these links to provide 'juice' your way unfortuantely.

AndieF

Interesting question. I can't run the experiment now but it would be interesting if people could check their server logs to see how many people viewed the homepage, and compare that for the same period on Google Analytics and post the percentage of people not tracked in Analytics here.

That would give us a pretty healthy insight into it. I'll try to find some time to run it on a couple of our sites later this week.

AndieF

I think you've correctly identified a couple of things here. Firstly that you shouldn't be running multiple domains for the same website, and secondly that US customers are unlikely to click on a .ca domain for a local branch.

I think the .com domain would be best for you here. You might want somebody to back me up on this, but I believe if you 301 redirect .ca to the new .com address appropriately the good SEO juices from the .ca domain will be transferred to .com. I don't think this is an overnight thing, but I imagine that as soon as Google realised ".ca now lives at .com" they'll work out the rest quite quickly.

If the US and Candidan websites aren't the same then consider having the different regions as subfolders on your .com domain - for example yourclient.com/us/ and yourclient.com/ca/

AndieF

It's definitely not the end of the world. Google knows that this is often unavoidable, especially with hosted website services such as WordPress or Squarespace.

I don't think there's any evidence that Google punishes you from having too many links from one IP address. However, I'd argue that if you have 'too many' from one IP address it might suggest you're going after quantity of links over the quality.

Quality would probably be diverse, having a bunch of sites on one IP address is a signal that perhaps your links are.

AndieF

Hi Demetrios,

It's difficult to say exactly how it'll affect your DA or PA - like PageRank there's a considerable number of factors and contexts that build that ranking.

Domain Authority is in part built up from your MozTrust score. The MozTrust is roughly calculated by measuring how many sites sit between your website and a trusted website. Educational and Government websites tend to be considered trusted websites, so if they link to you directly the MozTrust there is very high indeed.

Be aware though, you shouldn't build your site's success on the back of one or two trusted links. You need diversity and as many trusted relevant sites as possible to "back your credentials up" to Google and other search engines.

I know that's vague, but I hope it helps. Learn about how MozTrust works.

AndieF

Hi Juan Miguel Callejas Romero,

It looks to me as though those two websites are identical. I would definitely settle on one of those domains and then set a 301 from the 'discontinued' domain to the new one.

If you have a market outside of spain, I'd probably advise you go with the .com. If I'm in the UK and see an .es domain I'm unlikely to click on it. Conversely, if you're exclusively in Spain and as a Spanish resident I see .es in a sea of .com's I'd likely click on that.

In summary: select the TLD which you think will have the best click-through rate (analytics may shine a light on this) and then 301 the other to that domain.

Andrew

AndieF