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I've pulled out all the stops and so far this seems like a very technical issue with either Googlebot or our servers. I highly encourage and appreciate responses from those with knowledge of technical SEO/website problems. First some background info:

Three websites, http://www.americanmuscle.com, m.americanmuscle.com and http://www.extremeterrain.com as well as all of their sub-domains could potentially be involved. AmericanMuscle sells Mustang parts, Extremeterrain is Jeep-only.

Sometime recently, Google has been crawling our americanmuscle.com pages and serving them in the SERPs under an extremeterrain sub-domain, services.extremeterrain.com. You can see for yourself below.

Total # of services.extremeterrain.com pages in Google's index: http://screencast.com/t/Dvqhk1TqBtoK

When you click the cached version of there supposed pages, you see an americanmuscle page (some desktop, some mobile, none of which exist on extremeterrain.com http://screencast.com/t/FkUgz8NGfFe

All of these links give you a 404 when clicked...

Many of these pages I've checked have cached multiple times while still being a 404 link--googlebot apparently has re-crawled many times so this is not a one-time fluke.

The services. sub-domain serves both AM and XT and lives on the same server as our m.americanmuscle website, but answer to different ports.

services.extremeterrain is never used to feed AM data, so why Google is associating the two is a mystery to me.

the mobile americanmuscle website is set to only respond on a different port than services. and only responds to AM mobile sub-domains, not googlebot or any other user-agent.

Any ideas? As one could imagine this is not an ideal scenario for either website.

Any other insights?

I appreciate the response.

The issue with a 301 is that the homepage needs to exist along with the new page, www.grasscare.com/grasss-seed.html. I don't simply want to redirect users to the new page from the home page, or vice versa.

The homepage is going from being our primary landing page for "grass seed" and related keywords to being a type of doorway page that splits traffic between those looking for grass seed or sod.

Since both pages need to exist (the homepage and newly created www.grasscare.com/grasss-seed.html), I'm looking for a way to transfer the link equity I have built up on the homepage to www.grasscare.com/grasss-seed.html without redirecting users or doing anything that might be considered cloaking in Google's eyes.

A small amount of grass seed related content (along with a small amount of content on sod) will be placed on the homepage--the only reason I mentioned a canonical is that if I duplicate this content on both the homepage and www.grasscare.com/grasss-seed.html, could I possibly get away with using a canonical to transfer link equity?

It would be kinda like using duplicate content to my advantage, if that makes any sense?

I would like to know if it is acceptable (or even possible from Google's standpoint) to canonical your homepage to a different URL on the same domain?

For example, my homepage is www.grasscare.com (it's not) and I've built links to that page for years for terms like "grass seed" and "buy grass seed" because all I sold in the past was grass seed. If I then decide I want to sell both grass seed and sod, can I canonical my homepage (grasscare.com) to a new URL www.grasscare.com/grasss-seed.html to preserve the link value I've built up for "grass seed"?The new homepage would turn into a doorway page of sorts, forcing users to select either grass seed or sod before going further. Whatever content there is on the new homepage about grass seed would also be present on grasscare.com/grass-seed.html, though it would only be a small amount of content.

Can a canonical be used to point the homepage to this new page and also, will this canonical pass all of the link value and ranking signals it help in the past to the new URL?

Thank you in advance for any help or insight.

Perfect, appreciate the help!

Hi All,

An eComm site has product pages where only 10 customer reviews are found in the source code on the product page, no matter how many reviews the product actually has. ALL reviews (including the 10 displayed on the product page) are located on a subdomain, split into many pages dependong on how many reviews a certain product has (some have well over 100 unique reviews).

Reviews page: http://reviews.americanmuscle.com/0065-en_us/charcoalamr-18x8-0512-pirelli-stan/american-muscle-wheels-amr-charcoal-wheel-pirelli-tire-kit-18x8-05-14-all-reviews/reviews.htm

Corresponding product page: http://www.americanmuscle.com/charcoalamr-18x8-0512-pirelli-stan.html

I'm fearing a Panda related problem here, especially since thousands of products have only 1 or two reviews, duplicated on the reviews.americanmuscle.com page and the corresponding product page. I also do not want to lose the unique content on the second and third reviews pages simply by noindexing/canonicaling them to the product page.

My question is whether or not I can paginate the reviews.am pages in a way that the product page is "page 1" and the first reviews page is "page 2," second reviews.am page is "page 3" and so forth. Are there issues associated with domain-to-subdomain pagination? Can I utilize the pagination tab in this manner in the first place?

There are currently more than 57,000 of these review.americanmuscle.com pages in the index that I would like to clean up so any/all suggestions are appreciated.

Sharing the page that contains the link you want indexed on Google+ is a quick and easy way to signal Google to come crawl that page and re-index it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybc3gYIVcow

The second one (/business-mailing-lists/dog-stores-mailing-list.html) just reads a bit too spammy for my tastes. If Business is the category, "dog-stores-mailing-lists" lets someone reading that ID know it's probably dog store mailing lists for a business. Repeating "mailing lists" twice seems redundant and doesn't add any additional value or insight as to what those pages contain.

Now, will Google see this as spammy across 80,000 pages? Maybe, maybe not. Personally, I'd choose something like this "www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists/business/dog-stores-address-list.html" which shows the hierarchy of the site, reads clean, and gets multiple keywords in without being redundant.

I hope that helps

If it makes sense to the user and it reads naturally (does not sound spammy), then you're probably fine (the separation makes sense--dog store mailing list is a sub-section of the mailing list category). It's also good that "mailing-lists" and "Dog stores mailing list" are separated in the url, indicating it's part of the site structure.

You would want to avoid something like this: www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists-dog-stores-mailing-list.html

have you given thought to changing "Dog-stores-mailing-list" to "Dog-stores-[keyword]-[keyword]" where the last two keywords are synonyms for mailing lists like "address list" or something similar. This diversifies what you're targeting while still telling the search engines the same basic thing--you're page is a mailing list for dog stores.

All in all, your URL/page IDs aren't going to make a huge difference when keyword targeting, just make sure it's relevant and makes sense when you read it aloud.

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How are date ranges interpreted by Google - ie if you type "1993-2003" does Google know 1995 is incl. and should be referenced for a query? What is the best practice for an ecomm site when it comes to a landing page for multiple years? Should be list out each year (looks spammy, "2003,2004,2005...), go with a full range (1993-2003 ), or is a two digit range suffice (88-95)?

For our users it is ideal the entire FAQ is answered at the top (and within) the article and as a separate FAQ page living in a different area of our site.

We would also like the article to be the only page ranking for those questions, so as long as Google does not view using a canonical tag for pointing subsets to a superset of information as improper, the canonical solution would definitely be ideal.

Thank you for your answer, Mike. I believe by using the canonical to point a subset to a superset we should have a perfect solution.

I have a domain with two pages in question--one is an article with 2,000 words and the other is a FAQ with 300 words. The 300 word FAQ is copied, word-for-word and pasted inside of the 2,000 word article.

Would it be a proper use of the canonical tag to point the smaller, 300 word FAQ at the 2,000 word article?

Since the 300 word article is identical to a portion of the 2,000 word article, will Google see this as duplicate content?

Thanks in advance for any helpful insight.

If you take a look at this page: http://www.americanmuscle.com/2010-mustang-body-kits.html

You will notice we have a little "Read More" script set up. I have used Google Data Validator to test structured data located behind this 'Read More' and it checks out OK but I was wondering if anyone has insight to whether or not the spiders are even seeing links, etc. behind the 'Read More' script.

I was wondering if you have any insight as to why my star ratings are yet to show up in google SERPs. I've set up a test (months ago) just to test the formatting, my code looks like this:

<span typeof="<a class="attribute-value">v:Review-aggregate</a>" xmlns:v="<a class="attribute-value">http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org/#</a>">There are currently <span property="<a class="attribute-value">v:count</a>">15span> reviews for <span property="<a class="attribute-value">v:itemreviewed</a>">Ford Mustang brakesspan> with an average rating of <span rel="<a class="attribute-value">v:rating</a>"><span typeof="<a class="attribute-value">v:Rating</a>"><span property="<a class="attribute-value">v:average</a>">4.50span> out of <span property="<a class="attribute-value">v:best</a>">5span> stars.span>span>span>

Any ideas why it hasn't show up yet?

How would you handle multiple pages using the same video content? As sometimes it does not make sense to have new videos for every product so you re purpose.

Will you still get the effects in search results if the thumbs and video location is duplicated for some product urls?

Has anyone ever used the snippet tool and gotten the following error "could not fetch website"?

When using the tool and placing an url that does not have markup present it will show that as the error. Or if part of markup is wrong, it will diagnose it accordingly.

Did a search online and found limited info...one of which someone had this error but when other users tested it, they were not getting the same error.