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Hi Moz!

My client has messy URLs. does it make sense to write new clean URLs, then 301 redirect all old URLs to the new ones?

Thanks for reading!

Hi Moz!

My client wants to redirect users to a basic or professional version of their site based on cookies.

What do we need to do/know to make sure implementation is SEO-friendly?

What if a user has cookies turned off? Are there any other obstacles?

Thanks for reading!

Hi MOZ!

How are ratings and reviews rich snippets are showing in search for "sephora Urban Decay Naked On The Run" when they don't have that data in their structured data?  -- verified with Google Structured Data Testing Tool

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sephora.com%2Fartist-shadow-P387670Thanks for reading!

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!

We have old locations pages that we can't redirect to the new ones because they have AJAX. To preserve pagerank, we are putting canonical tags on the old location pages.

Will Googlebots still read these canonical tags if the pages have a javascript redirect?

Thanks for reading!

Hi Moz!

I'm working on a site that has thousands of pages of content that are not relevant to the business anymore since it took a different direction.

Some of these pages still get a lot of traffic.

What should I do with them? 404? Keep them? Redirect?

Are these pages hurting rankings for the target terms?

Thanks for reading!

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,

Do search engines really treat subdomains as separate domains in this regard? Or are we more likely to get more real estate on the first page with a new domain?

Our goal is to have our main site and this new subdomain or domain ranking in positions 1 and 2 for our company name.

This is going to be a careers site/portal.

Thanks for reading!

Hi Moz,

Is it better to have products and reviews on the same or different URLs?

I suspect that combining these into one page will help with rankings overall even though some ranking for product review terms may suffer.

This is for a hair products company with tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of reviews.

Thanks for reading!

Hi Federico,

I have a follow-up question that maybe you can help with.  What would be the best way to prevent these product pages from showing up in search results?  One of their products that's only available in Canada is showing up as a top page for US users.

Thanks!

Thanks Takeshi!

I'll have to find out for certain when the 301 was implemented, but we believe it was a long time ago -- over a year.

One more item: This business occassionally runs tv and radio ads sending traffic to drhobelt.com, leading me to suspect this might be the reason drhobelt.com is still indexed and is even taking rankings away from drhonow.com. Does that make sense?

Thanks again Takeshi, I love reading your responses whenever I see you on Moz!

Hello,

I have a site, drhobelt.com, that 301 redirects to the main site, drhonow.com.

Not only is drhobelt.com still indexed, but it recently stole rankings from drhonow.com for "decompression belt" related terms.

What could be causing this? How do I reclaim the rankings for drhonow.com?

Thanks for reading!!

Thanks for the response Fedrico.  Your recommendation is what I was leaning towards as well.

Thanks again for the help!

A client has some products on their site that are only available in Canada.  When a user in the US accesses the product listing, it results in a 404 error page.

Are there any work-arounds for something like this?

Thanks in advance!

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!

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!

If so, what could the reasons for this be? Maybe because of Google auto-filling URLs?

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!

These error pages are being redirected to the most relevant page, not mass redirected to the home page.

Thanks for reading!

I'm not sure what my client means by this question. I assume he's talking about "not provided" traffic. Is there something I'm missing?

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for responding!

The site wasn't deleted. I will have to investigate what caused all these 404s. I suspect a redesign.

Is there a way get a full list of 404 pages with backlink information if possible for each URL?

Thanks!

My thinking is to make a list of most linked to and most trafficked error pages, and just redirect those, but I don't know how to get all that data because i can't even download all the error pages from Webmaster Tools, and even then, how would i get backlink data except by checking each link manually?

Are there any detailed step-by-step instructions on this that I missed in my Googling?

Thanks for reading!!

sorry for the confusion -- they're only doing white hat from now on. thanks for responding!

Sorry for the confusion. White hat is here to stay! Previous agency used only black-hat. What I'm getting from your answer is that we should spend less time doing on-site optimization for pages that were hit hardest? Thanks for responding!

I’m working with a company that got hit by Penguin 2.0. They’re going to switch to white-hat only for a few months and review analytics before considering repairing the penalty.

In the meantime, would it make sense to focus less SEO effort (on-site optimization, link building, etc.) on any pages or keywords that were penalized or hit hardest? Or are those the pages we should work on the most?

Thanks for reading!

I'm working on creating content for top category pages for an ecommerce site. I can put them under the left hand navigation bar, and that content would be near the top in the code. I can also put the content at the bottom center, where it would look nicer but be at the bottom of the code. What's the better approach?

Thanks for reading!

I'm working with a site that had over 700 500 errors after a redesign in april. Most of them were fixed in June, but there are still about 200. Can 500 errors affect rankings sitewide, or just the pages with the errors?

Thanks for reading!

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

Thanks for reading!

I have duplicate description tags, but they make sense for the pages they're on. Is there anything wrong with this?

Thanks for reading!

This is for an ecommerce site, and the company I'm working with has started selling a new line of products they want to promote.Should I make a new URL just so it can include a target keyword, then 301 redirect the old URL?

One of my concerns is losing a little bit of link value from redirecting.

Thank you for reading!

I'm working with a company that that is doing a lot of black-hat link building, and they got hit by Penguin 2.0. Should they stop all spammy link building immediately or slowly, over time?

Is it possible that stopping all the spammy link building immediately will hurt the site?

Thank you for reading!

I haven't been able to find any articles to back this up, but I remember hearing that having backlinks from diverse geographic locations is a positive ranking factor.

Thanks!