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I have to note, as with any SEO question, the answer is just my opinion and not knowing the full and specific scenario, take it with a grain of sale.

As a general rule in that scenario though I'd simply let the bots do what they will with it but make sure to canonical the page to itself so if the other sub you're CNAMEing gets picked up it canonical's back to the real one.

In essence, let the link weight flow as it will - just make sure you don't get hit with a dup-content issue on the page.

As for ranking ... I'd focus your energies on the main site unless there's a term that the page lends itself to. But then ... that's pretty much a global truth: focus on rankings a page with content that lends itself to the term you want to rank for.

Good luck !!!

Dave

Hey Scott.

I'd avoid it for two reasons:

1 - you'd have to be careful to avoid ranking for the same term so it's not viewed as spam, and
2 - you'd have to split your resources.

It can take a lot of work to rank, even for local phrases.  A lot of that work is external - citations, links, etc.  All of that will have to be duplicated.  Time that would be better used building out the office section of the site and focusing just on links and citations around business services to that section and starting off ahead due to the weight carried by the primary domain.

Obviously the answer may differ based on the real scenario - there are cases for multiple sites but that's in very specific cases like Search Engine Land having a different site for their conference - basically where there are two completely different offering and user intents.

This is spot-on correct.

Hmmm ... I've never used SAB for a national company so I'll let anyone else voice in.

I don't think you'd use it but hopefully someone else will voice in.

Will respond via PM ... just noticed multiple listings which is a direct violation.

Thanks to the OP for sending the info across.  For those who may be wondering what was going on to create this I won't give details obviously but in short, the site was setup as a Service Area Business (SAB) wherein their actual address is hidden but they've selected a radius they serve.

For those interested there's a page on it at https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038163.

Hi Rosemary, Dave here.

I like to think of it like our addressing system.  Because we all use the same system and format for our addresses on an envelope we don't need a code to tell us but as you know ... everyone displays their product information and other data differently on a page. Because of that the engines can have difficulty telling what bit of data is what.  Is "blue" the color of the product, the color of the screen or simply used on the page in a "Don't feel blue ... buy XYZ !"

Structured data, as Matt well-noted, is just an idea really of matching information with what it means.  Like saying "blue" = "product color".

Of course, that's all well-and-good but we can all build our own systems and many have been.  If we're all using different systems then nothing makes sense so folks got together and created Schema.org simply as a body that could help create a standard.  Like saying, "on an envelop you put the name first, then the address, then the city, then the state, then the zip code".  If we put things on the envelop differently things would get messy so Schema basically gives us the instruction on how to pass information across.  Schema isn't the idea or even the data, it's the instructions on how to tell Google what specific data means.

Clear as mud?

I'm pretty sure I've seen something like this but obviously not sure the exact details. Do you mind PMing me the competitor and the query so I can take a peek?  I don't need to know the client.

Followup.

I'm not sure if it's possible, will check tomorrow but if we can keep the page up with a "property no longer available" notice and a canonical to an appropriate category page and put it live if the property is re-added ... what do you think?

Not sure why I didn't think of that out of the gate.

I have a client who manages vacation rental properties and those properties get links. If an owner pulls their property off the rental market the current status given is a 410 which I instinctively want turned into a 301. The problem is, often those properties come back online with the same URL so the question is, when a 301 is turned into a 200 - has anyone noticed a significant delay in time for that page to rank?I know technically it should probably be a 410 or maybe a 302 but ... you know ... the link weight.

That's an amazing resource.  How have I not landed on that before !

Thanks Miriam !

I think you can actually do this with Yext but I'm not 100% sure as I haven't used them though I have looked into them recently as an option.  I know you can pretty easily delete duplication and from my understanding I can't see why you couldn't use the same system to remove old listings.

Obviously you'd want to ask them before committing though as it's not cheap but you should be able to get some volume discounts.

What you're referring to was discussed by John Mueller a while back and Andy's right ... it's devalued.

You can read a bit about what John said or listen to it yourself at https://www.seroundtable.com/google-hidden-content-tabs-19534.html.

Cheers.

Agreed it's not ideal but unfortunately from my experience you can't list two businesses with the same address meaning without a workaround one of them won't get a listing which is obviously a disadvantage.

Probably something Google should fix (perhaps an extra level of verification or some such thing) but until they do there's not much choice.

Good luck and hope it works out as well for you as it should.

Very good point to add.

I hit a similar issue with a client once.  A completely legitimate second business running out of the same address as the first.  We simply set the second one as "Unit B" and mentioned to the letter carrier that there would be mail delivered there.  As long as you've been nice to them and given them a nice Christmas card they'll probably do you the favor of delivering the Suite B verification card.

Not the whitest of hat things to do technically probably but ethically they were 2 registered and visited business and it wasn't their fault they both were run out of the same location so I didn't personally have an issue with it.

Just in case someone lands here via a search I thought I'd add a solution/hack.  I found and just tested the method at http://www.richmcpharlin.com/seo/scalable-link-disavow-with-bing-free-tool/.  It works like a charm.

Are you referring to the toolbar PageRank (the green bar)?  If so, it hasn't been updated in ages and most likely never will be again.

That said, this was only a visual representation of what Google saw.  PageRank as a Google metric is still performed internally and as far as I know, in realtime so PageRank passes - you just don't see it.

If you're referring to "page rank" meaning the actual rankings of a page - for that we'd need to see the pages themselves to know why they're not ranking is the category pages are doing OK.

I really hope it helps and wish you luck.

And don't forget to set your holiday hours.

Hello SirMax.

Removing the "/page/" is easy enough with Mod Rewriting or I'm sure some plugin or another but the issue will have more to do with the weight the post is being given by the engines than the URL as the final URL is the same.  To illustrate, there's an article on Search Engine Watch at http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2179376/internal-linking-promote-keyword-clusters that outlines how the math of internal links work (simplified).  Essentially what's going on is that your homepage is the strongest page (at least I assume you're part of the 99.99% of sites like that) and even in a blog, the blog homepage will be the strongest page within the blog, so pages it links to get the most weight.  When one of your posts moves onto page 2 it's not the URL that causes the drop it's that the link to that post is now on a weaker page.

The related posts plugin is a solid idea but won't fix the specific issue you're having (though it will help in other ways).  What you probably want is something like this plugin that displays the most popular posts.  What you can do is place a widget on your homepage and set the posts to a reasonable number (10 or 20 max) and it'll display always your most popular posts on the homepage (read: blog homepage) helping insure their internal link weight is maintained.  This will weaken slightly the actual post links as they stand today by adding more links to the page but it should help you address the issue you're having.

One concern to be aware of here is that you do need to review these pages.  Some posts are popular simply by age and won't give the highest value for current traffic.  You'll want to occasionally review which pages are appearing and if there are posts with low current traffic that are blocking other posts (those just below the post number threshold you set in the plugin) then you could be losing traffic so you'll want to exclude them.

Hope that helps.

I'd be interested in hearing what someone else has to say about the way the canonicals are coded.  You're doing yours similar to the way I do DNS Prefetching with the double slash to start the URL:

It works fine with prefetching as all the browser needs to do is find the IP of the domain but I'm not sure here how it'll handle sub-directories including www and I hate variables even when they're "it should work".  The more common way to canonicalize your secured page would be:

/>

I'd be interested to hear if anyone has any direct experience with this but at the core of technical SEO issues I always lean to "most common usage" and "how Google shows it in their examples" just to make sure there is minimal chance of hiccups or issues.

That aside though, the developer is right though I'd always still prefer to just see the pages at a single URL.  Since that can't be done however ... canonicals are the way to go.

I'm not sure I entirely understand the scenario so let me note how I'm hearing it to make sure my understanding is correct to put the answer into context.  Please do let me know if my understanding of the scenario is wrong as that may well change my thoughts on it.

You note that your secure site and live site are creating duplicate content.  Of course a secure site can be live but I'm taking this to mean you have an area behind a login.  That it's creating duplicate content is making me think that a lot of the core information is the same and I'm guessing many of the same pages.

If this is all correct and you can't put the duplicated pages onto one URL only then the canonicals are the way to go and your developer is correct.

SEO aside ... how would you know how to answer the phone?

Depending on how you've coded everything you could try to setup a Custom Search under Configuration.  This will scan the HTML of the page so if the coding was consistent you could put something like href="http://www.yourdomain.com" as the string it's looking for and in the Custom tab on the resulting pages it'll show you all the ones that match the string.

That's the only way I can think of to get Screaming Frog to pull it but looking forward to anyone else's thoughts.

Always a good rule of thumb to follow Josh's advice here.  If Google gives you an opportunity to give them more info about your business or site ... drink the Kool-Aid and do it.

My pleasure.

I'm always hesitant to switch domains and you do have some good links in there that would be a shame to lose.  If you have a manual penalty (which i assume you don't) then it might be something to consider (though still not my favorite path) but with just an algorithmic kick in the butt I'd audit the links, disavow the low quality ones and build up from there.

As a warning I'm sure you're aware of, when you disavow the bad links you'll likely be disavowing links that are actually passing weight currently.  The site might see a small drop in rankings after but that's better than a massive drop with the next Penguin update.

Ah, I thought it might relate to links.  Did your client let them go in the spring of 2014?

As Josh will find out, it'll be hard to post a public response as it would likely require revealing more than I'd feel comfortable doing but interested to know if Josh and I ended up with the same general take on the potential cause.

Hey Karl, Dave here.

As I'm sure you can imagine, it's pretty tough to get a feel for the issue without more info.  If you'd like to PM me the URL I'm happy to take a quick look.  I may respond back here to help others but I won't list off any details that could be considered proprietary or confidential.

Cheers !

Dave

Provided that there are no links to http://clientname.com/products/ and obviously it's not part of the breadcrumbs you're fine though you may want to consider adding these pages to give you a point to all products (of a list of categories of products), etc.

But no ... the structure itself isn't inherently going to cause problems.

Might be my favorite answer of all time.

Glad to hear.

Personally I'd start with a link analysis to answer the question, "Are they stronger than you?"  You'll want to look at their sheer volume as well as the quality and when they were built to get a feel for their current activities. After that I'd obviously look at your content.  Does your content comply with current SEO best practices in it's type and formatting and down to the technological questions such as "Do you have clean and fast code?" and "Are you formatting properly?"

If you're looking for assistance in the process Moz actually offers a list of their recommended SEOs.  It's a good list.   You'll find it at https://moz.com/community/recommended.

I do agree that by the guidelines taken verbatim you could make a good case.  My concern is that it's not some guy at Google sitting down and judging sites and asking, "Does this violate the guidelines?" it's a bot and as I'm sure everyone here can attest ... Pandas and Penguin aren't perfect.  One can just ask Barry Schwartz of the very credible SE Roundtable about getting hit with a Panda false positive on content issues and about the cost in traffic it causes.  Or you can read his post on it here.

Or maybe I'm just paranoid.  That could well be.

There are always exception to rules but for safety I would highly recommend blocking the .com site until you can get some real unique content on it.  It does stand a high chance of taking it's own devaluation (almost certain) and may impact the .co.uk site (and really ... why risk it).

If the scenario was mind I'd have simply built in customized pricing and other relevant information based on IP but if that's not your area (and fair enough as that can get a bit complicated) then the redirection you're doing now to just get them to the right site is the logical option.  I'd just block the .com in your robots and put the noindex,nofollow meta in there for good measure and start working on some good unique content and if you won't have time for that - just enjoy your UK rankings.

_When is the right time to just start over with a new domain name? _ Hindsight being the 20/20 that it is it's very hard to know until it's too late.  I always suggest to try to work with your current site as it's generally easier to repair that to replace (generally ... not always).

The variable at play now is that after two years your site may have recovered BUT not be ranking as the competition may well have upped their game or other algorithmic factors may be at play.  I've seen that a number of times where sites don't bounce back not because they didn't do the right thing but because while they were busy repairing their issues, their competition was busy moving their sites forward.

To know what to do I'd start with a round of competitor analysis.  Don't compare your rankings with where they were but rather compare what your site's strength is relative to the people ranking today. And of course, try not to think of your content or links as better simply because you like it - try to look at it all as a bot would.

Glad we could help.

Agreed.  There's some good folks in that list.

They will recrawl it but equally important is that traffic following links to your site will get where they're supposed to go. A good rule of thumb with search engines as well as humans ... it's never too late to do the right thing.

(Of course, with a Penguin penalty you might go bankrupt before they get around to rewarding you for good behavior)

Hope that helps !

There's basically two ways to look at it and John is right - testing is key.

Getting new business is critical obviously and if they're not yet bidding on your brand then I'd focus there BUT it's worse to pay for that first click and then lose the visitor when they find a competitor on the second query.  So if your competitors are bidding on your brand you need to grab it, the cost per click is less and you can't afford to lose the conversion after you're paid for the first click but you of course don't want to use some of the limited budget on a second click if you could have had it organically.

Then there comes the discussion over the cost to monitor competitor activities vs the cost of just bidding on the brand.  If it costs more to manage it and monitor then just bidding would be the way to go obviously.

Worse case you can test bidding on your brand and monitor the assisted conversions to see how that works out for you.

Part of what I'd be asking is whether your competitors are bidding on your name.  If no one is bidding on your brand name and your site comes up #1 organically then it might be best to put the budget to new visitor acquisition whereas if your competitors are bidding on your brand then you need to protect it.

There area  lot of moving parts to the questions but based on the limited information, that's how I'd look at it.

You're certainly not the only one dealing with that issue.

Fortunately it doesn't negatively impact your rankings but it sure does mess with Analytics.

Jared Gardner did a great post on just this subject that covers why it exists and more importantly, how you can block it right here on the Moz site at https://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data

And it's probably good to know too that if it's the subject of that type of article ... you're not alone.  You know ... because misery loves company.

Hope that helps !

As Dimitri notes, you can click the lock to get info.

I've also found https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html helpful.  I use it regularly to diagnose specific oddities.

For different details you can also try https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html.

What month did it drop?

That's the route to go.

Dimitri beat me to the suggestion.

It does take a long time but at least you'll know the correction itself has been picked up if you Fetch it.  You're now making me curious to get some issues like that generated on purpose and then time the removal of the warning when both a natural crawl and Fetch are used.  Is it different timing in Webmaster Tools?  Odd that I've never thought to ask that but now looking forward to a simple and easy to run test.