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Partial duplicate content can be OK if you provide your own product description. The main problem is writing a product description containing useful, unique content that is not already in the manufacturer's description.
If you have the budget to make these useful descriptions, do it and remove the manufacturer content.
Did launch a quick crawl on your site, these url were not found (but you have several broken links!). These strange URL usually come from bad robots, and may also come from the interpretation of javascript URL or redirects. GoogleBot gets really confused with them.
If you want to dig, check the servers logs.
Hi Jason,
With infos from the latest slideshare of Ian Howells, http://slideshare.net/ianhowells/life-after-penguin, I think some of these links are devaluated, and some are penalizing the site. You may remove them and confess to Google, or start on a new domain, or maybe use a new URL for every page, including the homepage.
This is a though question, penguin recovery is still an unknown process and nothing is guaranteed.
About content re-use, Howells did put the same content on another page, without 301 and it worked. Maybe you can put 404 or remove the content and put it on a fresh domain.
Google can detect same images used with different names on a site. But this not penalized by Google, this would create way too much change in the SERP results!
Of course, you should try to have great, unique images for every complex, user loves this.
Thanks for your answers, I think the first has more importance for Google, as it is for the user. Too bad the study can't be found anymore !
Hi, have you guys an opinion on this point, mentioned by Matt Cutts in 2010 :
Matt made a point to mention that users are more likely to click on the first link in an article as opposed to a link at the bottom of the article. He said put your most important links at the top of the article. I believe it was Matt hinting to SEOs about this.
http://searchengineland.com/key-takeaways-from-googles-matt-cutts-talk-at-pubcon-55457
I've asked this in private and Michael Cottam told me he read a study a year ago that indicated that the link juice passed to other pages diminished the further down the page you go. But he can't find it anymore !
Do you remember this study and have the link ?
What is your opinion on Matt's point ?
Page load time is a very small factor for website ranking, but this could be done :
Regroup CSS in a single file, same for javascripts. Make a CSS sprite for the background images.
Add expires and gzip in your htaccess file if you can :
<ifmodule expires_module="">ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/bmp "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/ico "modification plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/vnd.microsoft.icon "modification plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType application/ico "modification plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/icon "modification plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "modification plus 1 year"</ifmodule>
<ifmodule deflate_module="">AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/php text/html text/txt text/javascript text/css application/javascript application/x-javascript</ifmodule>
Writing useful comments on well trusted blogs obviously give you some sort of juice, even when the link are nofollow. Google surely recognize a link in a blog comment, I don't think he cares much about the rel attribute anymore, much more about the blog metrics and the comment quality.
Oh this is not worrying me, for sure. I just want to warn the SEOMoz staff about this difference of quality between the site design (and content) and the profile picture. No reason for such bad image quality.
I do agree with you, I did upload a big image, but this should not be the solution to have a sharp looking picture...
Well I posted this after seeing the photo of Hannah Smith on her blog post :
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/information-architecture-faceted-navigation-duplicate-content-oh-my
I have to say that my own picture was taken with very good camera and it looks really bad on seoMoz.
Also I'm on a mac and the screen quality is really good, on regular PC screens this is not the same.
Profile picture are really really ugly, it really as annoying as the rest of the site really nice and professional.
So why SeoMoz use a very high compression rate ? Bandwidth should not be a problem. The site is slow but only for generating the page content, not downloading the assets.
Probably a bug from Google, you should ask them to look manually a it :
http://www.google.com/support/websearch/?hl=en
You may also create a forum post :
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/label?lid=1d4d2553a95152c2&hl=en
Miranda,
Emails are great for new messages in a question you've responded to, but getting email for every new question is way too much. Daily digest would not be so useful as the majority of questions would already be answered. Maybe a new email for every new question for selected categories.
What would be obviously useful is a RSS feed for the latest questions, really easy to do and useful. Would make the Q&A more popular. I really want those Q&A on my Google homepage instead of clicking on a bookmark.
Have you looked into the server activity log ? You may check the referer, the IP used and more. If this is a well done DDoS your servers should be down. Check the traffic : does the increase is a direct traffic ? Does it comes from search results or referring sites ?
A DDoS has only one goal and will probably use a direct request. I doubt this is the case for your site.
You won't find any authoritative answer on this, some sort of bounce could be used by Google but you will never know the % for this specific bounce rate.
I agree, this is a bit annoying to have to come back a lot to the website. Moreover the page takes time to display !
Diversity is a sign of quality and will be a positive flag for GoogleBot. Having same head title, h1 title and h2 can't be a good sign nowadays.
I recommend you make a SEO / CTR optimized HEAD title and a more verbal and more informative H1 title. At least make it slightly different. This won't make a huge difference although 
You should get all the url of the old site with Xenu's Link Sleuth, then create a PHP array of oldUrl => newUrl and put it in your redirect script.
So you have in the htaccess :
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/home/newscontent.asp
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} id=([0-9]+)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ redirect.php?id=%1 [L]
In the redirect.php file, you have :
$redirect = array("/home/newscontent.asp?id=1133" => "/name-of-the-article"); // 800 times (for all url)
if(isset($redirect[$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']])) {
header("Status: 301 Moved Permanently", false, 301);
header("Location: http://www.mydomain.com/".$redirect[$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']]);
exit();
}
// Send a 404 if you don't have a redirect
This is impossible to know, it depends on the site. Different types of site on different themes may have completely different stats. E.g. a blog can get most of his traffic from blog articles and a webservice can have most of his user visits the homepage.
YSlow for firebug is very useful, don't forget to run SmushIt (Tools in YSlow) to have optimized images. Spites + GZip + 1 single packed CSS + 1 single packed JS + expires headers are very effective. Use media domain if you have a lot of pictures on the page.
See the real load time in the Net tab of firebug as Gary said.
Think about how would you take Bounce into account. IMHO, a negative flag would be : a lot of user click on your result in the SERP results, see your page a very short time, then come back to SERP results and click on the next result.
BUT even then, this can't be applied to the whole algorithm, maybe on very specific types of queries. I wouldn't think too much on this.
Hi Rolf,
Making 2 - 5 whitelabel shops target to the exact same market is a bad idea. You should at least target different niches or users.
Anyway if you plan on doing replicas of the site, you will have to change every texts on the different sites. I recommend to change the HTML and everything that could link the different sites.
This is a difficult task however, SERP domination is extremely hard.
As you have only 800 urls, I agree with Damien, you should generate an associative array in pure php, associating every ID with the new url.
The redirect script will only test if the ID is an array key, if it is you 301 to the new url. Otherwise, display a 404 page.
To be clear about the different roles of the files in my solution, the .htaccess file will redirect every old url (whatever the id is) to a redirect script written in php.
This script will get the old url Id, load the article (to get the article name) and then redirect 301 to the new url. Only in php can you access the database.
Damien gave another solution, only based on htaccess. You have to write (or generate with code / software) 800 redirect directive for the htaccess file.
Can you be a bit more precise about the new url ? Does every old article with id has to 301 to a page with a unique name ?
This is not a normal behavior, you should respond to robots.txt, put the sitemap link in there or simply :
User-agent: *
Disallow:
The actual robots.txt gives :
GET robots.txt 302 Found, which redirects to :
GET 404error.html 200 Ok, which redirect to the home with browser behavior :
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=/">
You better change this to a normal response
That's right but htaccess was asked. Thumbed up your answer so it goes first
True ! The good syntax is :
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/home/newscontent.asp
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} id=([0-9]+)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ redirect.php?id=%1 [L]
Hi mozllo,
You won't be able to create a .htaccess for such urls, because the original url only has the ID of the article and you want the name of the article in the new url. This requires database access to know the new url.
I would suggest to put in your htaccess file :
RewriteRule ^home/newscotnent.asp?id=([0-9]+) redirect.php?id=$1 [L]
Edit : see good rule below
The redirect.php file will load the article (or category as I understood) and do a 301 to the new url.
HiMEldridge,
Stopwords can be removed from the title but it's always necessary. For the case you gave, I would dig into search volume of product base name, or brand name, with your additional features : black frame and anti-fog lens.
You get a more clean title with the focus on the main article (DeWalt Dual Comfort Safety Glasses) and you can put the additional properties in the page, close to the page title. You may also use your lengthy title on the H1/H2 of the site and use the smaller one for the head title, giving your page more variations on the product name.
Of course if the search volume for product + property exists, I would only remove the stop words.
The search engines see the page without the tabbed style. On the page, use view source to see what search engines see most of the time.
On your page, all tabs are indexed, not as separate pages though.
Multiple K, you will have to dig into SEOMoz tools, various SEO tools to get site history and see what was the site in waybackmachine.
I can't give any advice on the time it will take, this depends on so much parameters, before you buy it and after you buy it !
I suppose your site's primary target was Austria and that Google understood it. Now for making it rank in Germany you will need to build some backlink on .de websites, and also have german targeted content (specific topics, outlinking to .de sites).
I would suggest to try this strategy on a few pages (try different strategies on the differents keywords) and see what works (if it works!). I'm not really experienced in this so I hope you will get other answers.
Depends on the price, if it is affordable you should buy it and work on it to get the reputation back, even if it takes time.
If you want to make visits ASAP, I wouldn't recommend to buy a banned domain.
You won't get any SEO impact, think about it for all the form with JS interaction on big sites
One easy solution is to use ajax post of the form only, very effective BUT you won't be able to get contact from visitors without javascript enabled. Maybe a good alternative.
Otherwise, you can use Recaptcha : http://www.google.com/recaptcha
This is free and easy to setup, works well with bots and access to everyone !
You can't have 2 HTTP codes on a page.
I don't know what platform you are using for your products, but I would delete everything on the old site and put one (or several) scripts that does nothing but redirect 301 to the new site corresponding page.
This requires some programming skills, htaccess + regular expressions and this should be done
No I meant use /blogs/ as the first page and /blogs/pX for the next pages, X being the pagination number. These pages are valid and are not 301 of course.
BUT, /blogs/p1 is the same as /blogs/ so you should 301.
AND you must be aware of inexistent pages in the pagination (p10000 because you don't have 10000 pages of paginated results; /blogs/p01 or /blogs/p02 because these pages should not exist)
If the actual site have decent keywords in the url and is old enough, you should keep it.
Switch to another domain if the domain name is extremely good.
What domain authority do you have on the actual domain ?
This won't make much difference, I usually use these urls though :
/blogs/
/blogs/p2
Remember to 301 /blogs/p1 to /blogs/ and to 404 pages with a page too big /blogs/p10000 or strange urls /blogs/p01
1 - A tool that may give a hint : http://builtwith.com/
2 - Being a coder will help but it may take time to understand the old database. Software solution may exist but are probably not free.
3 - You can use opensiteexplorer's top pages, but if you have a developer to make the database migration, he will be able to create a redirect script to have ALL pages redirected to the new url
I would recommend keeping the old page forever, if possible, with the 301 to the new site.
For the products which were not redirected, I would add the 301 over time or put a link to the site with appropriate text in the top of the content. These pages need to be kept forever if possible.
Google can keep the pages in the index for months or even years if they have backlinks, so you should keep the 301.
Example for the NYTimes :
Q: A 301 REDIRECT QUESTION! How long do you leave up the redirect?
Forever.
Marshall managing 301s forever isn't easy but necessary. We've moved entire parts of NYT movies and understand we have to manage 8 million redirects for ever. If tech doesn't understand don't move forward
source : http://www.seroundtable.com/smxw11-seo-tech-13054.html
Got disconnected by seomoz as I posted so here is the short answer :
You were affected by Pand so you may pages with almost no content. These pages may be the one using crawl budget, much more than the paginated results. Worry about these low value pages and let Google handle the paginated results
I would not dig too much in the crawl budget + pagination problem - Google knows what is a pagination and will increase the crawl budget when necessary. On the 'thin' vision of your site, I think your right and I would immediately allow pages > 1 to be indexed.
Beware this may or not impact a lot on your site, it depends on the navigation system (you may have a lot of paginated subsets).
What tells site: requests ? Do you have all your items submitted in your sitemaps and indexed (see WMT) ?
On a side note, if you were impacted by Panda, I would strongly suggest to remove / disallow the empty pages on your site. This will give you more crawl budget for interesting content.
I would put noindex,follow on those page and wait a little until they disappear for Google index. Of course, if you have only a few pages, I would do it manually in GWT. If you have rather big site with a good crawl rate, this should be done in a few days.
When you don't see them anymore, you may use DISALLOW */beerbottles/ but this could be annoying later. I would recommend to use the meta robots as you have more control on it. It will allow page rank to flow in the beerbottles pages too !
If you have pages on your site without any internal link to them (I mean pages reachable by Google Bot when he visits your site), they won't rank well, and your site won't be ranking well too.
That's because your pages will only be visible to Google through the sitemap. The Google Bot will think "Hey these pages are not accessible to the user through the site links? I should not rank them then."
You will penalize your whole domain too because you will be losing additional pages in the site. Especially if those pages have good content (I suppose this the case anyway).
BUT, given your example, Google Bot should be able to access them with you strange link. Question is, what is the anchor text ? Is the anchor a generic text or a good keyword for each page? If you have bad anchor text, I would make a specific section on the site which allows the user and GBot to access theses pages with good anchor text.
Maybe a HTML sitemap, as you may see one on rotten tomatoes :