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I just thought of something else, if I do a robots.txt disallow to this parameter, wouldn't it kill all the rankings from external links to pages that contain this parameter?

It's been at least 6 weeks since I set it up, probably more like 2 months.

Thanks for the robots.txt idea, I'll give it a shot. However I would still like to figure out what is going on with Google parameter definition.

Hey forum,

About my site, idealchooser.com. Few weeks ago I've defined a parameter "sort" at the Google Webmaster tool that says effect: "Sorts" and Crawl: "No URLs". The logic is simple, I don't want Google to crawl and index the same pages with a different sort parameter, only the default page without this parameter.

The weird thing is that under "HTML Improvement" Google keeps finding "Duplicate Title Tag" for the exact same pages with a different sort parameter. For example:

/shop/Kids-Pants/16//shop/Kids-Pants/16/?sort=Price/shop/Kids-Pants/16/?sort=PriceHi

These aren't old pages and were flagged by Google as duplicates weeks after the sort parameter was defined.

Any idea how to solve it? It seems like Google ignores my parameters handling requests.

Thank you.

For people who find this and want the final results, these are what I see at my site, YMMV:

1. Links from image maps are indeed followed, Google crawls pages that are only accessible via the image map. nofollow also seems to be respected, unless Google just decided not to index these pages for another reason, but I doubt it.

2. The images are indeed indexed for Google images as one image containing the entire map. This image gets the "alt" value of the entire image, not the individual map segments.

I hope this is useful.

I don't think it matters where the 302 is coming from, 302 means a ranking drop. The fact that you saw no effect probably means there were other changes to offset it, or that it just take Google longer to respond to it.

Regardless, I wouldn't leave a site with 302 on a ranking pages, it's just asking for trouble.

I hope this helps.

Thank you! Great info and suggestions. I'll take your advice and post here once I get the results, so others can benefit from it.

Hey forum,

I'm curious about Image Maps. Few things I'm not sure about:

1. Will the links be followed? If so, will Google respect rel="nofollow"?

2. Will the image be considered 1 image? (indexed as image, etc.) Or will each map segment be treated as a separate image?

3. Any other SEO pros\cons to consider when adding an image map to an existing page?

Thanks,

Corwin.

Without getting too technical, currently the user isn't really being redirected at all, because it's a dynamic page with the results, which can be any number, in this case, 0.

I will take your advice and indeed create a custom "out of stock" page that will be returned for all these cases. Maybe it will be clearer to Google. Obviously these won't rank well, but I'm fine with it, as long as I don't get ranking penalty for the entire site, for none existing pages. Under the circumstances I guess this is the best option.

Thank you very Daniel, you've been very helpful.

Thanks again Daniel.

I'm a web developer too

What would a "proper page" be though? Keep in mind at this point I don't know anything about this product. Each general "out of stock" page will be the same for each product making it a "soft 404" probably, unless I make it a real 404, which will solve the "soft 404" but will create a new problem, 404 pages for some previously valid URLs.

Both are not good, I'm aware of it, however, we are talking less than 0.05% of the site's pages.

Thanks for the reply Daniel. Here's an example link: link

Basically anything with a wrong number will return this page. I know it's not a great page for this purpose, just a regular product page with 0 items and a message. It's just rare enough that we didn't spend too much on it. How rare? According to the Webmaster tool, out of the last 296k pages crawled, 70 were found.

Basically at this point, I have no information on this item, all I know is that someone got here so it's probably a valid product code, which is true unless someone just edited the URL manually.

Thanks for the reply Kaushal. We actually don't have a system currently that lists similar products and considering we have over 20 million products, it's also not a minor thing to implement. Anyway I'm not sure I like the way other sites try to push products that aren't really what you were looking for.

Hey forum,

My site is a Price Comparison site. Lately I've been getting some "Soft 404" errors with the Webmaster tool. I'll try to explain the steps causing it:

1. There's a valid link to a product

2. At some point the product is temporary out of stock or unavailable.

3. Google crawls this product page, getting a valid page with a message explaining this product is unavailable at this time.

4. Google see this page for few different products and (I assume) figures it's a none existing page and so it's a soft 404.

The possible solutions I see are:

1. Return real 404, I'm not a fan of this solution, because these links will very likely be valid again when the product is back in stock.

2. Live with some "soft 404" errors in the webmaster tool.

3. Find another way to explain to Google that it's not a real 404. This sounds great but I'm not sure how this can be done.

Any thoughts which would be the best method? Or maybe another solution I haven't thought of?

Thank you.

Thanks Owen, I hope you are right.

I'm doing a major URL rewriting on our site to make the URL more SEO friendly as well as more comfortable and intuitive for our users. Our site has a lot of indexed pages, over 250k. So it will take Google a while to reindex everything.

I was thinking that when Google Bot encounters the new URLs, it will probably figure out it's duplicate content with the old URL. At least until it recrawls the old URL and get a 301 directing them to the new URL. This will probably lower the ranking of every page being crawled.

Am I right to assume this is what will happen? Or is it fine as long as the old URLs get 301 redirect?

If it is indeed a problem, what's the best solution? rel="canonical" on every single page maybe? Another approach?

Thank you.

Thank you very much Matt.

Now I get it

Thank you Matt,

From the article: "The takeaway here is that whenever possible, it is better to internally link to the version with the backslash."

Just to be clear, does this mean that all my internal links should not contain a trailing slash and I should make sure links with a trailing slash are internally redirected to the same page?

If I remember correctly, when I did this SEOmoz marked it as duplicate content, but Google seemed to be fine with it.

I know I'm being very picky here, I just want to make sure I don't loose ranking because of something that seems so minor.

Thanks.

I keep reading contradicting information, so I figured I'll ask here.

What's the best practice for slash '/' at the end of a URL?

Should it be idealchooser.com/search/laptop/ or idealchooser.com/search/laptop (no trailing slash)?

The options:

1. Accept both equally

2. Accept 1 and redirect the other with 301

3. Accept 1 and treat the other as a wrong URL returning 404

Which would be the best for SEO?

Thank you.

Thank you for the reply Megan, just what I was looking for.

Is there a way to slow down SEOmoz crawl rate? My site is pretty huge and I'm getting 10k pages crawled every week, which is great. However I sometimes get multiple page requests in one second which slows down my site a bit.

If this feature exists I couldn't find it, if it doesn't, it's a great idea to have, in a similar way to how Googlebot do it.

Thanks.

And now I'm back to the top SERP results for my main keywords. For example "price drop alerts" now returns my site as the 4th results after being gone from the first 5 pages for about 10 days. No major changes to the site or links to it that can explain it. I can literally pinpoint the exact hour it happen, yesterday between 6 and 7pm NY. Suddenly my Google organic traffic multiplied by 50 or even 60.

I'm obviously very happy to get decent traffic again, but knowing the past patterns, this will only last for few days followed by few more days of being gone again over and over.

If anyone has a clue what can cause this, I'd be very happy to know about it.

Thanks Kristina. I believe there's something else I'm missing here, not just regular back links, because of the length of time it's been going on for and the huge fluctuations I'm seeing.

On the other hand, since I can't figure out what's going on, I guess it could be anything

Sure, "price drop alerts" without the quotes, about 10 days ago I was the 5th results, now I'm practically not there at all. If the past is any indication I'll be back up at some point.

Thanks for the reply Kristina.

Yes, very much so, when I'm low I barely see any traffic from Google and when I'm high I see reasonable numbers, at least numbers I'm fine with considering the site is relatively new.

Yeah, very much a rollercoaster behavior, just an example: 12 days high, 10 days low, 11 days high, 10 low, 5 high, 8 low, 3 high, 7 low and it just keeps going randomly.

I made few changes to titles and URL structure, but nothing major and I've seen this up and down behavior even between changes. Every change to a page URL was replaced with 301 to the new URL, no 404 from Google crawl.

Thanks for the reply Travis, but that's not it. I'm using a proxy server to test my real position, so I'm not getting personalized results. Also SEOmoz PRO who I configured to track this keyword for me was saying I'm the 5th result and later that I'm not at the top 50.

I'm working on iDeal Chooser, a Comparison Shopping site and we've been having a weird problem with some of our major keywords on Google for the past couple of months. We keep moving between the first page of the results to disappearing completely. For example a Google search for "price drop alerts" returns idealchooser.com as result 3-5 for a while and suddenly doesn't return us at all, then we are back to the top results only to disappear again later.

We can't figure out what causes it, we didn't see any pattern and it seems completely random. We can be the 4th result for 2 weeks and suddenly we are gone for another 2 weeks. SEOmoz PRO had some good SEO suggestions which we implemented, however nothing that could explain this and even after fixing these issues this weird behavior continues.

Any idea will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.