Moz,

Hi Moz,

Can multiple hreflang tags point to a single URL?  For example, if I have a Canadian site (www.example.com/ca) that targets French and English speakers can I have the following:

or would I use:

Any insight would be very helpful and greatly appreciated!

Thank you in advance!

Thanks for the responses!

@Kevin: Our main concern here is getting back that lost page rank, since javascript redirects don't pass page rank. We used http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/ and _SEO Tools for Excel _to check whether the hashbang URL examples were using 301 redirects.

The correct URLs are

http://twitter.com/#!RobOusbey
http://www.sherrilltree.com/Saddles/#!Saddles

@iNetSEO

These pages were indexed by Google before somehow, I suspect using escaped_fragment? the hashbang URLs would show up in search results

Hi Moz,

Here's more info on our problem, and thanks for reading!

• We’re trying to Create 301 redirects for 44 pages on site.com.
• We’re having trouble 301 redirecting these pages, possibly because they are AJAX and have hashbangs in the URLs.
• These are locations pages. The old locations URLs are in the following format: www.site.com/locations/#!new-york and the new URLs that we want to redirect to are in this format: www.site.com/locations/new-york
• We have not been able to create these redirects using Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v.1.5.3.2.
• The CMS is WordPress version 3.9.1
• The reason we want to 301 redirect these pages is because we have created new pages to replace them, and we want to pass pagerank from the old pages to the new. A 301 redirect is the ideal way to pass pagerank.
• Examples of pages that are able to 301 redirect hashbang URLs include http://www.sherrilltree.com/Saddles#!Saddles and https://twitter.com/#!RobOusbey.

Hi Moz,

I'm trying to redirect www.site.com/locations/#!city to www.site.com/locations/city. This seems difficult because anything after the hash character in the URL does not make it to the server thus cannot be parsed for rewriting.

Is there an SEO friendly way to implement these redirects?

Thanks for reading!

Hi Moz,

I'm working on an ecommerce site with categories, filter options, and sort options – teacherexpress.scholastic.com.

Should I have canonical tags from all filter and sort options point to the category page like gap.com and llbean.com? or have all sort options point to the filtered page URL like kohls.com?

I was under the impression that to use a canonical tag, the pages have to have the same content, meaning that Gap and L.L. Bean would be using canonical tags incorrectly. Using a filter changes the content, whereas using a sort option just changes the order.

What would be the best way to deal with duplicate content for this site?

Thanks for reading!

Thank you very much Federico!

I saw a couple of articles warning against canonicalizing if the content isn't extremely similar. Can you help me understand how this doesn't apply?

e.g. Searchenginewatch: "The most common misuse of the tag is when it's implemented on pages that don't include a large percentage of the same content as the canonical page. Unless they contain considerable chunk of duplicate content, rel="canonical" probably shouldn't be used."

Google:

Must the content on a set of pages be similar to the content on the canonical version?

Yes. The rel="canonical" attribute should be used only to specify the preferred version of many pages with identical content (although minor differences, such as sort order, are okay).

For instance, if a site has a set of pages for the same model of dance shoe, each varying only by the color of the shoe pictured, it may make sense to set the page highlighting the most popular color as the canonical version so that Google may be more likely to show that page in search results. However, rel="canonical" would not be appropriate if that same site simply wanted a gel insole page to rank higher than the shoe page.

What would be the best way to add canonical tags to an ecommerce site with many filter options, for example, http://teacherexpress.scholastic.com?

Should I include a canonical tag for all filter options under a category even though the pages don't have the same content?

Thanks for reading!

Is there an easy way or any way to get a list of all deindexed pages?

Thanks for reading!