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On two recent site crawls (9/27/14 and 11/4/14) for duplicate content the Moz tool did not ID the following 2 pages, which are 100% duplicate to each other:

http://www.hooksandlattice.com/planter-hampton-241212.html ; Screenshot: http://screencast.com/t/DdwWroUU

http://www.hooksandlattice.com/planter-hampton-721212.html ; Screenshot: http://screencast.com/t/8Lb1cJZmGrhX

As I'm working feverishly to re-write and update the site (goal is ZERO duplicates) I'm finding it challenging to use the Moz tool to get the project done. Does anyone have any feedback or help they can provide for how I can identify all duplicate pages associated with my domain?

Thank you!

Lindsey Pfeiffer

It looks like the url's being shown are unique categories. I don't know if switching to a flat url structure will help, or just change the url-ref (rho-1..).

I think Magento (at least community) needs a better canonical handler than what is built in, I find that Ultimate Seo from Mageworx takes care of most of these issues including ones caused by pagination and layered navigation. If these are unique Categories, then unique content should be created or you will need to overwrite the default magento canonical's with a module and point to one Rho category.

You might also want to consider making 'Collections' apart of your layered navigation instead of creating unique categories for each shopping style

As far as "search-engine-spider-stoppers" does this also go for "%" in on-page copy?

I think you broke the page!

If you have had a successful reconsideration request, would you be comfortable sharing the letter you sent? We are trying to draft ours and could use some guidance.

When an AdWords support rep says something that contradicts the AdWords Help documentation, it's hard to know what to believe. I usually point the contradiction out to the AdWords rep, and they will sometimes do more research to verify for me.

This sounds like expanded broad match to me: http://www.wordstream.com/expanded-broad-match

AFAIK, there is no way to "sneakily" no-follow a link. You no-follow a link by adding rel=nofollow. If rel=nofollow isn't there, the link is followed.

I would prefer that users end up on the blog version. So I am considering

CMS URL > 301 > Blog Post

CMS URL > canonical > Blog Post

Either way, the blog post would be the "correct" version of the content.

Our site has some useful information buried in out-of-the-way CMS pages, and I feel like this content is more suited to our blog. What's my best method here?

1. Move the content to a blog post, delete the original page, and 301.

2. Move the content to a blog post, leave the original page up, and rel canonical.

3. Rewrite the content so it's not a duplicate, keep original page up, and post rewritten content on the blog.

4. Something else.

Some of this content has inbound links and some does not. Quite a bit of it gets long-tail traffic already. It just looks kludgy because it's on pages that really aren't designed for articles. It would look much nicer and be much more readable/shareable/linkable on the blog.

Yes, a new website should claim its brand name on social media immediately, whether or not that improves its rankings. If you don't get your @companyname, someone else will.

I think you are misunderstanding something, yes.

On a website with a CMS, the URL is not "dynamically generated." The page is dynamically generated. Here's what that means. Whenever you type http://www.domain.com/page1.html into your browser, you are telling your browser to go to that website and pull up the HTML that corresponds to that URL.  URL stands for "uniform resource locator," meaning directions to the location of a resource. If you have an old-fashioned website, the URL points to an HTML file that you created, either by typing everything yourself of using a WYSIWYG editor. If you have a CMS, the URL essentially instructs your website to build the corresponding HTML page on the fly.

It's like ... okay, imagine that you walk into a bakery and ask for a chocolate chip cookie. They could either pull a pre-baked chocolate chip cookie off the shelf and hand it to you, or walk in the back and bake you one cookie from the ingredients in the kitchen. When we're talking about baked goods, option 1 is almost always better than option 2 because it's orders of magnitude faster and more efficient. The benefits that option 2 offers aren't worth the extra time and lost efficiency. But when we're talking about websites, that's no longer the case. The server can construct an HTML document almost instantaneously. Your browser gets the HTML just as fast as it would if it asked for a static HTML page.

In fact, your browser really has no idea that this is all happening. Here's another food metaphor. You walk into a fast food joint and order a hamburger. The cashier walks into the kitchen, and a minute later, walks out with your hamburger. Did the cashier pull the hamburger off a shelf of hamburgers that have been sitting under a hotlight for hours? Or did the cashier ask the cook to prepare a fresh hamburger just for you? Assuming the hamburger tastes great either way, you have no way of knowing. In this metaphor, the customer is the surfer, the cashier is the browser, and the kitchen is the server your website is hosted on. Either your server has a bunch of pre-made pages sitting around waiting for someone to "order" them, or your server has a clever program that makes the pages only when they're needed. That clever program, the CMS, is like the short-order cook.

The thing to remember is, the search engine spiders are customers, just like the surfer. They don't know what's going on in the kitchen. They don't care. They "typed in" a URL and got some HTML back. They now know that that URL produces that HTML. They remember that. When they see a link to that URL, they know it's pointing to that HTML.

Clear as mud?

Do you have the resources to create unique content for all those pages? Because adding 500,000 pages of duplicate content will absolutely damage your site.

Absolutely. If he was logged into a Google account, that can have a big impact. Even if he was logged out, though, a cookie on his computer stores information about his search history, and that can have a big impact, too. Then there's location -- not necessarily where you are, but where you've told Google you are. I've told Google that I'm in the U.S., so unsurprisingly, I see your .co.uk site toward the bottom of the 2nd page.

How competitive are the keywords you're targeting? If you're trying to get onto page 1 or 2 for something like "women's shoes," that could take years. On the other hand, if you're targeting something like "cthulhu pajamas," you could end up on page 1 right off the bat.

Remembering that rank is a combination of relevancy and authority. It's pretty easy to make a site that's relevant for a keyword, as long as you know the basics of KW density, title tags, img alt tags, and so on. At that point, Google will try to determine how authoritative, trustworthy, and popular you are. Is anyone linking to your site?

I'm confused. This page is the definition of thin content. It's short, it's valueless, and it's poorly written. Sorry to be harsh, but that's the way I see it.

I don't know if your current ad arrangement and ad sizes will cause Panda problems, but until you get some real content on your pages, I suspect the ads are the least of your concerns.

The main concern is whether or not the spider can read the HTML. If something's broken, the spider may get confused. It's a good idea to check the site's W3C compliance and correct what you can, but I'm certain the search engines don't ding you if you're not perfectly compliant.

The real problems with bad HTML are load times and cross-browser compatibility. (Although, frankly, great HTML can have cross-browser compatibility issues, since IE still refuses to get with the program.) Make sure the site looks good in all major browsers.

Absolutely not, for a few reasons.

1. Google says they've de-emphasized keywords in the domain, meaning the benefit you'd get would probably be extremely minimal.
2. Changing domains can be a complete nightmare. There are several steps in the process where a single screw-up can have a huge negative impact.
3. If your current domain has been around for a while, that may be a positive ranking signal. This is a controversial issue, but everyone can at least agree that an established domain is definitely NOT a bad thing.
4. When you have to redirect all your old URLs to your new URLs, you will lose some of the value of links to the old site. If the old site has zero inbound links, this isn't an issue, but if it has some high-value inbound links, this could be a big issue.

Plus, you'll have to reprint your business cards and letterhead.

Ideally, guest blogging should be #RCS that introduces your brand to a new audience, and also happens to have an inbound dofollow link. It's possible that authorship markup will make you choose one or the other -- sign it and get the branding, or don't sign it and get the inbound link credit. But that's speculation at this point. Maybe Google will think "Well gee, the blog owner wouldn't have let that person write on their blog unless they were a fan of their work. That counts as a vote for their website."

If it becomes an either-or proposition, I would just treat guest blogging as a branding/inbound traffic strategy with no direct SEO benefit.

The two results you're referring to, the ones with people's names and photos next to them, are blog posts where people have used the rel=author markup to link their blog to their Google+ profile. That can influence rankings. I don't think anyone is sure how much influence we're talking about; part of the problem is that the people adopting this new markup are probably already doing good basic SEO stuff, so correlation and causation can get mixed up. In any case, it's likely that this author markup will become more influential in the future, so adopting it now is a no-brainer.

If you consider the meta-description field "important as a ranking factor," you're simply incorrect, I'm afraid. It can have an extremely small effect inasmuch as it impacts click-through rate and pogosticking, but there are about 8,000 better things you could do that would make a bigger splash than optimizing meta-descriptions.

If this is what your client wants, by all means go for it, but make sure they understand that this will not change their rankings significantly.