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Glad we're not the only ones freezing here, it's -3 here in the north west too!

I've just taken a quick look at barrettsteel.com and whilst there aren't any duplicate content issues listed within SERPs currently, there's nothing stopping canonical issues arising in the future. You can currently view the homepage via the following URL's:

http://www.barrettsteel.com/default.aspx

http://www.barrettsteel.com/Default.aspx (you can change the case for any of the letters, as-long as it says default.aspx (EG DEFAULT.aspx also works).

http://www.barrettsteel.com/

If someone links to /default.aspx for example, there's a chance that /default.aspx could get indexed. Therefore it's a good idea to add a canonical tag now before you do run into any issues. It doesn't take much to add it anyway, right?

I also like to implement a canonical tag so that if someone completely rips a page, the benefit will hopefully be given back to the site that the page was ripped from due to the canonical tag.

Also unrelated to your question but I found this within the SERPs: http://barrettsteel.netconstruct-preview.co.uk/ Whilst it now has no content, I'd recommend that you 301 redirect all pages from this site to the relevant page on the main site.

I'd advise you firstly look at the purpose of the nofollow attribute to answer this one. When you nofollow, you're telling Google that you don't want to pass your page's reputation to the pages linked to.

There's therefore no reason why you would want to nofollow the social profiles.

You want to give reputation to these pages, you want them to rank for the brand etc.

It wouldn't cause "over-optimization" signals but it's pointless nofollow'ing such links.

Hi Tyler,

From an SEO point of view, this is useless and you'd be better spending the time elsewhere.

Don't panic, but it does look like you've been hacked. Using Yahoo! Site Explorer you can see where that page is linked from:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/uk/search?p=www.reflexologyonline.co.uk/reflexologyonline.php?Action=Webring&bwm=i&bwmo=d

^ 34 links to your page, all from other pages that have "Action=Webring" in the url. If you've never heard of a webring before then here's a primer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring - but basically it's a shady SEO tactic (from around 2000), the idea being that if everyone in the Webring links to each other on their page then that will give SEO benefit to each page in the ring.

If you hadn't said you knew nothing of it then I would have assumed you'd signed up to such a scheme but if not then someone has planted that page there

Solution:

1. Log into your FTP and delete reflexologyonline.php

2. I can see from this link that you're using Wordpress: http://www.reflexologyonline.co.uk/wp-admin/ so upgrade to the latest version.

3. If you notice this problem comes back then it is likely one of Wordpress plugins you have installed that has a security issue. In that case you're best disabling everything not-essental, and updating the essential ones to the latest version.

Of course your SEO agency/web developer will be able to do this for you if you're not part of the tech squad - at least I know we'd do it for our client.

Any more questions, give me a reply.

• Jon

Hi Mark,

It's a bit pointless having the same links in the menu at the top and then again within the footer. It's unlikely that users will click the links within the footer and as an SEO, you want to minimize the amount of links on a page as much as possible.

In reply to your question for whether Google disregards the second set of links, it depends how you interpret "disregard". Google will still crawl, follow (and the links will still count when it comes to pagerank calculation). Google will however disregard the anchor text - have you heard of the first link counts rule?

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts

There are however 3 methods to avoid the 1st link counts rule:

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/3-ways-to-avoid-the-first-link-counts-rule

Good luck!

Hi Anthematic,

Google does recognize these anchors, see this blog post from the Google blog detailing a search snippet for in-page anchors, you may have seen them in the SERPs before:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/jump-to-information-you-want-right-from.html

In reply to your second question, yes, they will be counted.

Both; 301 all pages from xyz.qc.ca to the corresponding page on xyz.ca and then set a change of domain within WMT's too.

You might see a dip in rankings initially however you can expect the rankings to return as previous over upcoming weeks.

Good luck!

Hi Naghirniac,

When you pay for a directory listing, you're paying for the review not the actual link. That being said, unless the directory is quality, don't go for it - money can be better spent elsewhere.

Good luck!

<code>This should work fine:</code>

<code>User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /development/</code>

<code>User-agent: rogerbot 
Allow: /development/</code>
```

Hi TT,

This should 301 redirect all pages without a trailing slash, to a version with the trailing slash:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /+[^\.]+$``RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [R=301,L]

Hi Patrick,

That section is simply there to advice on any URLs that Google feels are wrongly excluded within the robots.txt

If the URLs are not wrongly excluded, don't worry about it showing in WMT's - it's there just as an advisory.

Good luck!

Should you continue link building? Yes.

Should you continue the same strategy as you previously had adapted? No.

Look at building quality, natural links, it's more important that you build these links now than ever to be honest.

Good luck!

Hi Perri,

No, this is compeltely different. Have you seen the search queries tab in Google Webmaster Tools? Or pehaps if you have Google Webmaster Tools you'll have seen keyword postion data in Analytics too? This is what the change affects - the data within these two sections.

SEOmoz is completely separate to these tools; they have their own tools to track positions so in short, no, SEOmoz reports will not be affected by this change in any way.

Hi Loïc,

I'd recommend that you give a tool called Xenu a try. You can download it free here:

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

The tool will basically crawl your entire site and it'll detail the status of each page that it's crawled. You can then view where the page was linked to, so you could go through all of the pages that are 404 and see exactly what pages are linking to that 404 page for you to then action upon.

Good luck!

Sure Marisa, it's perfectly normal for the sitemap.xml to be indexed.

Just to confirm for you, view SEOmoz's sitemaps within the SERPs:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?num=100&hl=en&site=&q=site%3Aseomoz.org%2F+inurl%3Asitemap.xml+filetype%3Axml&btnK=Google+Search&oq=site%3Aseomoz.org%2F+inurl%3Asitemap.xml+filetype%3Axml&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=461l461l0l744l1l1l0l0l0l0l43l43l1l1l0

Hi Shaz,

I'm guessing the parameter displays no alternative content, it's simply there for tracking, right?

If so, the canonical tag should simply be added to http://www.mysite.com/products.php

You can also set how you want Google to interact with parameters via Google Webmaster Tools.

Good luck!

Hi Nicholas,

Unfortunately not. The sitemap reference has to be absolute. (You can confirm this by using the crawler access tool within WMT's)

I'd suggest that you create a PHP script to create a robots.txt file with the correct domain rather than having to do it manually.

Good luck!

"Pages shared by friends" are the pages your friends have +1'ed

Hi Noah,

I've just checked the source for the example page that you've mentioned and within the source, the canonical URL is set to http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/broward-county/dania-beach-fishing-charters-and-fishing-boats.html which is the duplicate URL that you mentioned.

I'd recommend that you download a tool called Xenu:

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

This tool will crawl your entire site and you'll be able to find out what other pages within the site are linking to each specific page.

Good luck!

Perhaps you could add the London based address to all of the pages which Google is showing the map beneath the listing in the SERPs and mark the London address with rich snippets.

Hi Mike,

I'd personally say that you're fine, depending how you impliment it.

I personally believe that as long as the text that you add reads what the image contains, you're fine.

SEOmoz even use image replacement!

Good luck!

Hi Rob,

I personally use a tool called Xenu to identify broken links. Give it a whirl yourself, it's free:

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

Good luck!