I'm not quite sure I understand what the other 10 translated products are below it, but my gut reaction is that, yes, I would probably canonicalize these particular pages. They're not going to be high-value pages in Google's eyes. From a user perspective, it's good to have a placeholder (until you can put up a translation), but you may want to keep it down to a single page in the index until the translated versions roll out.
Best posts made by Dr-Pete
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RE: Rel=Canonical - needed if part duplication?
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RE: Too many on page links
Ryan's right - nofollow wouldn't change the warning, and it's not effective for link-sculpting anymore. I wouldn't use it on main navigation links. 100 links is just a rule of thumb - it's a balancing act:
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RE: What to do about all of the other domains we own?
"It's important not to go overboard with this approach. The content should always be top-notch so that these smaller sites still have significant value to the visitor."
Exactly. The Devil is in the details. Strong micro-sites with unique value can work. 500 carbon copies of your home-page are going to make a mess.
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RE: Canonical
Did you make a change? I'm seeing the canonical tag in the header and not in the content/body (as Boomajoom mentioned). In my experiments, Google won't honor a canonical tag in the body.
I do see that the tag is reversed a bit, with the "href" attribute first and "rel" second. Although Google will probably honor this, I think it might be confusing our system, which can be a bit more literal.
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RE: Sitelinks (breadcrumbs) in SERPs
Yeah, it seems like Google is overriding the canonical, just based on the Google.ie connection, but it's really hard to tell. I'm actually conversing with some other SEOs about this same problem and Google's mixed signals on hreflang vs. canonical (or both together), and the answers aren't very clear. Different Google reps have given slightly different suggestions, and none of them are working consistently in all cases.
If you're going to drop the .ie website temporarily, I'd probably 301-redirect it. It's a little difficult to reverse, but at least you'll consolidate all of your link-juice and ranking factors for that site into the .co.uk site. If you just deindex the Irish domain, you'll lose what SEO value you've built to it.
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RE: Rel Canonical problem or SEOmoz bug ?
I'm not seeing any issues. Your canonical tags seem correct. The "Notice" level is the least severe, and we may just be seeing a mismatched URL or two (we're crawling the non-canonical, in other words). In many cases, that's fine. I see no signs of duplicate content in the Google index itself.
We sometimes to recommend preventive canonical tags, especially on dynamic sites, but they're not necessary on all page. I do highly recommend using it on the home-page, as home pages can easily collect variants ("www" vs non-www, secure/https, tracking parameters, etc.).
I think our system is being hyperactive on this one, though. I see no reason to worry.
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RE: Is it negative to put a backlink into the footer's website of our clients ?
Practically, I think Julie is right, but I have seen heavy devaluation of these footer links in the past year or two. They'll still count for something, but not a lot. The only warning I'd add is that I wouldn't create a situation where these are your ONLY links. You could risk looking like a link farm and even a potential penalty at that point. These easy links should be only one part of your link-building strategy.
I'd also highly encourage diversity. Mix up the anchor text, as long as it's relevant, and maybe even put the link different places. If you can get contextual links somehow (not footers or sidebars), that's a huge plus. The more you can mix it up, the better.
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RE: On Page SEO Tool
A desktop crawler will do most of that, too - Screaming Frog is a great option, but it's a paid tool over 500 pages (I think). I wrote a post last year comparing it and Xenu, another crawler:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/crawler-faceoff-xenu-vs-screaming-frog
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RE: Canonical URLs and Sitemaps
There's no "have to" in most of these situations, but it boils down to this - the more canonical your canonical URL actually is, the better chance you have of Google honoring it. In other words, if you set a canonical tag but then never use that in internal links or your XML sitemap, odds are pretty good that Google may ignore the tag in some cases. You're basically saying "Hey, this URL is canonical! No, this one is! No, this one!" - it's a mixed message, and they're going to try to interpret it algorithmically.
I definitely think pointing to yet another version in the XML sitemap is a problem. Ideally, it would be great to unify your URLs, but if that's not possible, getting the canonical version in the sitemap would be a big help (and introducing yet another variant isn't good, so you'd kill two birds with one stone). As Andy said, if you could create some kind of internal link to the canonical version, even if it's not the main link, that could also help. I only hesitate on that one, because you don't want to end up with a weird, artificial linking structure (just creating links to have links).
Please note, this isn't necessarily a disaster the way you have it. Google could honor the tags properly and generally rank your site correctly. In my experience, though, it's a recipe for long-term problems, and it's worth fixing.
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RE: Would nofollowing the footer throw an unnatural blance between followed and nofollowed links?
I think John is spot on, but just wanted to add a couple of things:
(1) The 100-link "rule" is really just a guideline. Adding nofollow wouldn't impact how we count or, likely, how Google counts. Nofollows still dilute link-juice.
(2) If the footer links duplicate main-navigation links, then they may not be counted at all. Google discounts any additional links to Page B from Page A, and will more or less ignore them.
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RE: Is it negative to put a backlink into the footer's website of our clients ?
I'm actually not sure I agree. From a theoretical, PageRank-passing perspective, sitewide links are better. From a penalty/risk perspective, 1000s of sitewide links can lead to a ton of links coming from very few unique domains, which can start to look suspicious. I actually think you might see less devaluation by limiting the footer links to a couple of strong pages on each client site.
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RE: Do I need canonical link on target page?
I'm a little confused, because you gave different URLs for the target of your canonical tag and your "target page", so I just want to make sure we're referring to the same thing here. You don't typically need a canonical tag on the canonical version of the URL. Technically, you shouldn't put one there (Bing has specifically said they don't want that, but Google has eased up on it), but practically, I've rarely seen it cause any problems.
In other words, I wouldn't lose sleep over it
Just make sure that the "target page" doesn't actually represent multiple URLs. I've seen some people get confused on that. Typically, having a canonical tag on your home-page can help sweep up variants you might not think about, so I think it can make sense to have one, even on the target. In most cases, though, it's not necessary.
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RE: Wordpress error
That's odd: "008" appears to be the user agent for "80legs", a custom crawler platform. I'm seeing it in other Robots.txt files.
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RE: Rel Canonical problem or SEOmoz bug ?
I'd honestly leave it alone. I've never seen a preventive canonical (even if unnecessary) cause problems. As you expand the site, it could help prevent future problems, implemented correctly.
In terms of SEOmoz, I wouldn't worry about the notice - it's just a notice, which we put even below a warning. We're evaluating how to assess canonical for future versions of the software, because it is confusing to people.
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RE: Multiple H1 tags are OK according to developer. I have my doubts. Please advise...
I think Ryan's point about HTML5 is good to keep in mind, but the problem is that we don't have any great guidance on what Google thinks about HTML5 right now, at least at this level of detail. They're waiting for the standard to evolve into common practice, just like the rest of us. I suspect, though, that if HTML5 is changing the rules, they may scale back their judgment.
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RE: Do I need canonical link on target page?
It's not instantaneous, but yes, you should see that number drop over time.
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RE: Wordpress error
Google is seeing the same Robots.txt content (in GWT) that you show in the physical file, right? I just want to make sure that, when the site was hacked, no changes were made that are showing different versions of files to Google. It sounds like that's not the case here, but it definitely can happen.
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RE: Rel=canonical + no index
I wouldn't mix those signals - it's nearly impossible to tell what's working if you do. If the canonical on the test page isn't working, there may be a couple of issues:
(1) It could just be taking time. Honestly, it's never as fast as you want it to be.
(2) It may be that the test versions got crawled originally, but now aren't being crawled (on the canonical isn't being processed). Check the cache date on the test page.
The big question is how they got crawled in the first place. It's often better to use some sort of cookie-based implementation so that Google never even sees the B version. That's how most of the A/B test implementations work (specifically to avoid this problem).
If it's just a couple of URLs and you can't shake them, you could request manual removal in GWT. That really depends on the scope and URL structure, though.
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RE: What do you think of Theme pyramids for SEO?
Yes, every site potentially has a logical hierarchy to it (more than one, in most cases) that could make sense for both visitors and SEO. It's really the basis of all information architecture, in a sense.
In SEO, we usually refer to a "flat" architecture as an ideal where the home-page would link to every page on the site and every page would only be one step away. Of course, in practice, this can lead to unusable sites and massive dilution of internal PR. It's great for a 10-page site, but not for a 10,000-page site.
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RE: Is it ok to point internal links to index.html home page rather than full www
The 301-redirect that Mark and Nakul discuss is probably your best bet here, but if that's causing you implementation problems, you could use the canonical tag on your home-page (in the section):
That will help sweep up any duplicates. It is best to link consistently to the root version, though (without the "index.htm"). FYI, you've got another weird duplicate in Google's index:
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RE: Moved to a New Server IP Address
(1) How many 301s are you talking about? As Highland said, you could lose link-juice (especially over time), since the new home-page for the blog won't seem as relevant to the redirected pages. I've heard of issues with 301'ing 1000s of pages, but those wer eusually temporary.
(2) Sometimes, post-Caffeine, Google crawls so fast that a 24-hour outage can cause some problems, but they're almost always temporary. You won't be penalized, per se - you could just see some rankings bounce while Google sorts things out.
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RE: What do you think of Theme pyramids for SEO?
I think this is really just an extension of site/information architecture in general - to some degree, a logical structure is good for people and bots. I also think there's no "right" answer when it comes to this kind of structure vs. a "flat" architecture. As Alan said, a flat architecture isn't usually practical on big sites, but I think it goes deeper. A flat architecture implies that all the pages on your site have equal weight. That's rarely true. Driving internal link-juice to major categories and drilling down focuses the most weight on the top.
Now, you can overdo it. I think the article you site goes a little too far these days, because if you apply that to any situation, you're going to end up with a ton of thin content. Post-Panda, created 100s of deep pages just to target 3-4 word phrases could backfire. Eventually, you're going to run out of content for those pages. So, I wouldn't create a pyramid frame and then start looking for bricks. Start with your pile of bricks and see what kind of pyramid you can make out of it. Good information architecture starts with the information you have.
I also tend to lean toward hybrid approaches. For example, you can set up a pyramid but then also link to your Top 10 Products from your home-page. That flattens your architecture for those key products and sends link-juice deep into your structure. There are a lot of useful variations on that theme.
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RE: Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical
Use the URL-encoded format (with "%20" in place of spaces) for your canonical tag, since that really is the canonical version of the URL. It's probably not a huge issue, but that should be a bit safer and more consistent.
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RE: Sanitary ware and accessories site with 1000s duplicate product titles.
I just want to add that the answer does depend a lot on the content. If it's just an issue of duplicate title and META tags, then any uniqueness does help. Generally, though, use the actual product names and information - you can easily generate the tags from the database for most data-driven sites.
If it's an issue of duplicate URLs for the same products, that's a different matter. In other words, make sure that your navigation (searches, sorts, paginations) isn't spinning out copies of your product pages. If it is, then you'll want to control those duplicates and canonicalize or de-index them. If you have 1000s of duplicate product titles and only 200 products, then you're creating duplicate product pages. If you have 1000 duplicate titles and 1000 product pages, then you just need to create unique tags.
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RE: Rel=Canonical
I haven't seen any evidence that it's a problem, but John's point is correct - Bing does officially say not to do it. Actually, Google originally said this, too, but then eased off (if I recall correctly). It's gotten so common that I don't think either engine can really penalize it, honestly. I do it all the time.
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RE: Big Rank Drop - Is My Site Spammy?
You have 101 unique root domains, and 95 of them are all the same spun article? Yeah, that's not good. If you can get the network to drop the article, I'd do it now. If you can't, build up some higher-quality, diverse links as fast as you can. If those numbers are accurate, you are in danger.
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RE: Canonical Tag for Ecommerce Site
It's always hard to speak in generalities, but my gut reaction is that Alan's right - if the canonical tags were implemented properly, having your rankings tank from this kind of implementation seems very unlikely. A couple of possibilities:
(1) Are your canonical URLs being used in internal links? If you tell Google that one version is canonical but then act as if another version is canonical, it can cause problems.
(2) Are you sending any other, conflicting cues, like 301-redirects or Webmaster Tools parameter handling?
(3) Is it possible that your canonicalization was too broad? In other words, did you end up de-indexing some product variations that were driving long-tail traffic? For example, let's say you had a product in red, blue and green and you canonicalized them all to the "root" product page. In theory, that might be a good thing, but if people were searching for specifics and you had a lot of long-tail rankings ("buy product in red"), then it could be bad.
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RE: Excessive navigation links
I'm going to disagree a bit. While I do think Google understands navigation links and generally views them a bit differently from contextual (on-page) links, there's still a fundamental problem of dilution. If you have 200 navigation links, you split your authority ("link juice") 200 ways, and you're treating the main pages, sub-pages, and sub-sub-pages as if they're all essentially equal from an SEO standpoint. If you prioritize everything, you prioritize nothing.
What this ultimately means is that you drive a bit more ranking power to your very long-tail pages but a lot less to your top-level pages. It's a balancing act and there's not one right answer, but generally this isn't going to be a good fit to your business goals.
I dig into it more in a post from last year:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many
Again, it's not a right-or-wrong thing, but a matter of prioritization. From what you're describing, I'm worried that this could expand to hundreds and hundreds of links, and on a new site that could spread your ranking power pretty thin.
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RE: Does having a page (or site) available on HTTP and HTTPS cause duplication issues?
Present day, Google has no issue with crawling/indexing secure pages, but Naghirniac is right - they will be seen as duplicates. The canonical tag is probably your easiest solution.
The best canonical solution, though, is to use the same URL consistently. Out of curiosity, why are you building links to the secure versions?
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RE: SEO best practice: Use tags for SEO purpose? To add or not to add to Sitemap?
Since you're talking about a site with <20 pages total, 12-15 tag pages linked through the entire site is a lot. It's just an issue of dilution - with a new site, you only have so much authority (inbound link power) to go around, and you're now pushing it to twice as many pages, many of which are just internal search results that Google could see as low value. It's not a disaster, but it's probably going to hurt your ability to rank in the short-term.
I assume you mean 12-15 tags total, not per post, right? The other issue with tags is just that they have a tendency to spin out of control as a site grows. You can easily end up with 50-100 tags linked from every page that are not only diluting your ranking power but that have very limited value for users (people just can't parse that many options).
All in all, I don't think tags are bad, but I do think it's worth being conservative, especially when you're first getting started. A site with <20 pages doesn't need a ton of fancy navigation options. A clear, solid site architecture will be better for visitors and Google, in most cases.
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RE: To Many Links On Page
Ah, got it - late to the party, as usual I strongly suspect it'll make a noticeable difference, but give it some time and collect data like a madman.
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RE: Removing Dynamic "noindex" URL's from Index
Hooray! Usually, I just give my advice and then run away, so it's always nice to hear I was actually right about something Seriously, glad you got it sorted out.
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RE: Which is best of narrow by search URLs? Canonical or NOINDEX
I generally agree with Alan (although I think NOINDEX, FOLLOW is ok, since these pages are unlikely to have external/inbound links), but there's no perfect solution for these types of pages. They aren't exact duplicates, but they may look low value to search. Given our current tools, canonical may be your best choice.
If you're talking about a couple-dozen pages, it's no big deal, and you could leave them alone. If the different filters are spinning out 100s of variants, then I would control them somehow.
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RE: Blogger Reviews w/ Links - Considered a Paid Link?
It can cut both ways, honestly. Look at paid links in general. If you buy a link from a site called "BuyMeSomeSEOLinks.com" that has "paid links" 50 times on the home-page with pricing, you're going to get caught. If you and I meet in a bar, and you agree to give me $50 for a link on my site, you'll never get caught, unless a Google employee happens to be sitting in the next booth. Now, I'm not condoning it either way, but I'm just being practical.
I think the key is a certain amount of subtlety. Google definitely, as a matter of policy, frowns on overt quid-pro-quo when it comes to links. If you send products to bloggers and actively solicit links (especially if you post that information online), you're at decent risk. If you send product to bloggers and make it easy for them to review those products but don't push the linking aspect too hard, it's a bit different, IMO.
Case in point - I recently had a weird situation where Amazon accidentally sent me a wireless headset. I thought it was a gift, only to realize they just screwed up a different order. I tweeted about the incident a few times, and then forgot about it. Two weeks later, the CEO of Headsets.com sent me brand new Sennheiser headset with a note that he saw my tweets. He didn't push me to promote it or ask for a link, etc. Of course, being a marketer, I did promote it on social media and told the story. To me, that's just smart marketing on their part. Of course, it's also a risk - I might've never reciprocated.
So, don't be too pushy - try to be creative, and make the experience fun for people. Make it something the bloggers want to talk about - not just a free product, but a unique and positive statement about your brand. That's win-win, IMO.
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RE: Multible Dublicate Titles & Descriptions
I looked at your campaign, and you've essentially got two options here:
(1) You could add a unique element to the title tag, like the availability date.
(2) You could canonicalize or de-index the variations.
Keri's warning is correct about the home-page, but it looks like this is a stand-alone page and rel-canonical would be viable. That would clean up your index gradually, but it would also remove the individual availability pages from the search index (and ranking contention), so it does depend a bit on your strategy.
For the site 9K pages, is quite a bit. The other thing you could do is change the system to only create links for dates with available events. I notice you have a lot of blank dates. Linking those serves no purpose, either for users or Google (and is just creating worthless pages, essentially). If you did that, a lot of these would clean up over time.
You might also consider just blocking the calendar links at some point - in other words, go back 3-6 months, but then don't bother. Don't make Google crawl 5 years worth of past dates.
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RE: Is my Company Blog Causing issues?
What kind of content volume are you talking about? It's true that more content isn't always better, and you can dilute your index, but if you've got a main site with hundreds of pages and a blog with a couple hundred pages (and that blog is attracting links that strengthen the domain), I wouldn't worry too much. If you've got a 10-page main site and a blog with 10,000 posts then, yeah, that could cause your trouble. In that case, though, I'd bet content quality is also a problem.
If you separate the blog out, you're going to lose the impact of those social shares and links. Whatever you're losing now from dilution is going to be a fraction of what you lose if you split one of your main sources of links, I strongly suspect.
If your content is spinning out of control, is there a way to prune it down? Could you drop some of your oldest or least relevant content on the blog (with no links, shares, etc.)? Could you focus on more product-relevant content moving forward? There may be some happy mediums between just splitting it off or not splitting it.
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RE: Rel=cannonical vs. noindex.follow for paginated pages
I actually find NOINDEX, FOLLOW a bit easier to implement and very effective in most cases. If you use rel-canonical, Google would prefer that you canonical to a "View All" version of the page (not to page 1 of search results). Practically, though, either will work.
I've also had decent luck with rel=prev/next, although implementation is very tricky. One other problem is that Bing doesn't honor it.
This subject can get very tricky, and no one (even Google's own reps) seem to have the one "right" answer. I find, in practice, that it depends a lot on the site and scope. Adam Audette has an article that shows just how complex pagination can get:
http://searchengineland.com/five-step-strategy-for-solving-seo-pagination-problems-95494
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RE: Website Vulnerability Leading to Doorway Page Spam. Need Help.
Unfortunately, even across the broader community, specific technical issues with specific CMS platforms can be really hard to find an answer to. You need someone who's been in exactly your situation, in most cases. I'm seeing multiple mentions on the web for Plone security holes:
http://plone.org/products/plone/security/advisories/20121106-announcement
If you think this is primarily an issue of these bad links, then using the new disavow tool is your best (if imperfect) option right now, most likely. Otherwise, you're left contacting each website to let them know they have a hole. If you think this is a new vulnerability, you could try to work with Plone directly, but that would rely on all of these sites patching the hole. In other words, even if Plone releases a fix, everyone has to actually apply it, and that often doesn't happen. So, cutting off the links via Google is probably more effective.
Given that you switched platforms, though, I'd really dig deep and make sure you haven't run into other problems. For example, did the WordPress switch introduce new duplicate content? Did any of your TITLE tags, URLs, or other on-page factors change? Are they links you're "duplicating" starting to look like a network to Google? It's entirely possible for one site to get hit and not others, especially in a competitive vertical. I'd look long and hard at your whole portfolio and make sure this isn't a signal that something worse is about to happen.
That's conjecture, but I've just seen too many SEO companies jump to the conclusion of foul play, only to miss something they had control over. Make sure you're looking at the whole picture.
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RE: Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical
Certain characters, like spaces, should generally be encoded in the URL. It's generally just a few characters, and honestly those characters would be better off not in your URLs.
If your site is creating encoded URLs, though, then you should use those URLs everywhere - internal links, canonical tags, etc. There's no real trick to it - it's just that you should use the same URL format everywhere.
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RE: Rel canonical on every page, pointing to home page
You need to fix it quickly. Yes, canonical is a suggestion, but in my experience it's a very strong suggestion. I ran an experiment a while back where setting rel=canonical sitewide wreaked havoc on one of my sites:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization
Now, Google may recognize it's a mistake and ignore it, but they also may just take days or weeks to process it, and the damage is just going to increase. I'd fix it ASAP and try to get appropriate (self-referencing) canonical tags in place.
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RE: Managing international sites, best practises
It's really tough to predict. I think Eyepaq covered the basics well - you'll consolidate your link-juice, but you may harm your UK-specific ranking slightly. Whether the consolidation offsets the loss really depends a lot on your link profile, how Google treats your UK site (sometimes, English content, even across countries, is seen as partially duplicated), and your market focus.
If 80%+ of your market is US-based, you're not ranking that well in the UK, and you don't have the resources to really push two domains, my gut reaction would be to favor consolidation. If you have two separate marketing efforts int he two countries and half or more of your sales are UK-based, then you'd be taking a real risk.
I would check out the newish rel="alternate" hreflang="..." option:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077
It's specifically for helping same-language content rank correctly across regions, and Google seems to be pushing it publicly.
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RE: Rel Noindex Nofollow tag vs meta noindex nofollow
A couple of options here. First off, though, there's really no rel="noindex" at the link level. You can "nofollow" a link, and that generally disrupts indexing, but it's not guaranteed. You're right that it can look like PR sculpting, although that's not a huge issue if your usage makes sense. In other words, if you're using rel=nofollow to keep the crawlers away from content with low search value, I generally think that's ok.
You could META noindex, nofollow the target pages, although then Google has to crawl those. The advantage is that I find the META Robots approach to be a bit more powerful.
The other option is to use parameter handling in Google Webmaster Tools (Bing has a similar function) to tell Google to ignore the "?filter" parameter. The purist in me doesn't love the engine-specific approach, but it's easier, you don't need to change the site itself, and it typically works fairly well.
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RE: Pagination solution
Just following up on Matthew's comment. The reason for the canonical to Page 2, in that example, is to cover any kind of additional duplicates, like sorts. For example, if you had URLs like:
...where those pages sorted by price or product rating. Then, you'd want to canonical all sorted versions to "/2". In that case, the rel=prev/next tags should actually include "/price" and "/rating", depending on which page you're currently on. It's a mess, honestly, and I'm not thrilled with Google's implementation, but it seems to work fairly well.
Bing's implementation is limited, unfortunately.
FYI, if there are no other duplicates (just pagination), you don't really need the canonical. It won't hurt you, but it's unnecessary.
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RE: Can I redirect duplicate blogs to give credit to one?
Sorry - have to chime in here. Canonicals DO work cross-domain, and they often do pass link-juice, but it's somewhat at Google's discretion.
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RE: Best method of redirecting http to https on homepage
301 is probably best here. There are two tricks here, though, and it can get messy:
(1) You'll need to link to the HTTPS version in your internal links as well.
(2) If you use relative links (like "/about.aspx"), then all the navigation links from your secure home-page will cause Google to crawl the rest of the site with HTTPS, possibly creating mass dupe content.
Practically, there's a fair amount of risk in just securing your home-page, and it goes beyond the home-page itself. I'd proceed with caution and really evaluate the pros and cons.
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RE: Rel Noindex Nofollow tag vs meta noindex nofollow
I'm not a fan of doubling up, but only because it makes the results really hard to measure. If you implement both, you won't know which one worked, ultimately. I'm not sure it's actually harmful - it just can be hard to track.
If you're just trying to prevent future problems (and don't have any immediate issues), I'd probably pick one and give it a few weeks.
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RE: Should I use rel=canonical in this case
GIven that you're talking about 5-6 pages, I'd tend to agree with Davinia. It sounds like these pages have a shot at having unique value, and you could probably beef them up with solid content relatively easily. If you were spinning out 100s or 1000s of thin, geo-targeted pages, that would be different (and that can cause Panda problems), but for half a dozen pages, the canonical would have very little impact here. If they're valuable to users, let them work for you and make them valuable to search.
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RE: Can I redirect duplicate blogs to give credit to one?
My gut reaction is that this is starting to sound too complicated, and you may be shooting yourself in the foot, but I don't understand the nature of the two sites, to be fair. I assume that they each have a unique role, since they currently have no duplicate content.
When it comes to canonical vs. 301-redirect, I think the core difference is what you want to have happen to users. A 301-redirect will take the user to the other site, whereas a canonical won't. If you essentially want to syndicate content to your own site, then a cross-domain canonical is a valid way to do that. This has to be done on the level of each individual post, though.
Google can ignore cross-domain canonical - it's just a hint, and definitely don't abuse it. For two sites, though, it should be reasonably effective. Again, the situation still sounds a little overly complex to me, and I can't say there's not a better solution, but I think the canonical is viable here.
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RE: URL rewriting causing problems
This is really tough to tell from generic examples, because the first thing you need to get at is the root of why these different URLs are being crawled in the first place. If "B0054QAS" is a unique product, why is it reachable by "playstation-vita", "playstation-vita-psp", etc.? That architectural problem has to be solved first, or any canonicalization is just a band-aid.