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I just checked, and it actually looks like you've got a potentially serious problem. All of your canonical tags that I've seen are pointing to the home-page, even archives and blog posts. This will essentially de-index those pages. Something is set up badly - that canonical tag should only appear on the actual home-page.

Since this is public, I won't reveal details, but look at the, for example, the canonical tag on your "About" and "Services" pages - they're pointing to the home-page.

Personally, I'd keep an eye on it. These things do have a way of expanding over time, so you may want to be proactive. At the moment, though, you probably don't have to lose sleep over it.

They link Corey cites has some good information - I think Matt Cutts' quote is dead on - it's unlikely to be harmed this way, but it's not impossible. I've seen 2 cases in the last year where we ruled out just about everything else and a very aggressive attempt by a competitor seemed to do damage.

So, how do you fix it? Unfortunately, there's no good way to cut a link you don't want, except to cut the page being linked to. Quite often, that's the home-page, unfortunately. I wrote about this in some detail last year:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-ways-to-recover-from-bad-links

In most cases, I'd recommend (1) Wait it out, or (5) Appeal to Google (see the post). Many times, these links are clearly unnatural and built up quickly, and Google will recognize and devalue them appropriately. It might just take them a little time. If they don't you can file for reconsideration.

If you file for reconsideration, explain the problem in detail and provide data. It really adds to your case. Also, be sure that you've cleaned house. If you file for reconsideration for this competitive attack, but then you have 50 paid links, you might be opening a closet you don't want Google to peek into.

One clarification one Vahe's answer - if these continue (?page=2, ?page=3, etc.) then it's traditional pagination. You could use the GWT solution Adam mentioned, although, honestly, I find it's hit-or-miss. It is simpler than other solution. The "ideal" Google solution is very hard to implement (and I actually have issues with it). The other option is to META NOINDEX the variants, but that would take adjusting the template code dynamically.

If it's just an issue of a bunch of "page=1" duplicates, and this isn't "true" pagination, then canonical tags are probably your best bet. There may be a Drupal plug-in or fix - unfortunately, I don't have much Drupal experience.

The question is whether these pages are being indexed by Google, and how many of them there are. At large scale, these kinds of near-duplicates can dilute your index, harm rankings, and even contribute to Panda issues. At smaller scale, though, they might have no impact at all. So, it's not always clear cut, and you have to work the risk/cost calculation.

You can run a command in Google like:

site:example.com inurl:page=

...and try to get a sense of how much of this content is being indexed.

The GWT approach won't hurt, and it's fine to try. I just find that Google doesn't honor it consistently.

Oh, got it - so this is a standard 301-redirect scenario, but Google just isn't honoring it for some reason. That's unusual, certainly. Have you checked the headers? I use the SEOBook tool, for example?

http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/

I don't mean this to be in any way condescending, but I always double-check them, across a variety of URLs. You have to make sure that the redirects are working the way you think they're working (and aren't chained to other redirects, etc.).

Did you redirect page-by-page, in the sense that every old URL has a new URL? Sometimes, the home-page or main-page redirects work, but deeper redirects fail (due to minor changes or incomplete .htaccess code).

Did anything else happen during the change? Did you change the URL structure, design, etc.?

Did the "new" (to you) domain have any existing history? Is it possible you inherited a problem, like bad links or a bad history?

Sorry, I'm still confused (read your reply to Ryan, who asked some good questions). The canonical, like a 301-redirect will consolidate link-juice, but only for the pages it's on and preferably only for actual duplicates.

If you put a canonical tag at the "/Spain" level, it doesn't impact "/Spain/Malaga.html" at all. It just makes sure that any stray inbound links to "/Spain" duplicates (like "/Spain?print=true") have their link-juice consolidated and don't show up in the index.

If you could give a couple of sample tags and how you're looking to use them, maybe we could dig in deeper. I feel like I'm missing something still.

The basic problem, and it's actually confusing to a lot of people, is that what you think of as a "page" is the physical file on your server (like your home-page). What Google thinks of as a page is a URL. So, if multiple URLs go to the same place, they look like duplicate copies to Google (who sees them as all different pages).

It's especially common with home-pages, where you can have www vs. non-www, root ("www.example.com") vs. the filename ("www.example.com/index.php"), etc. If those variations get crawled and indexed by Google, the duplicates can dilute your index and weaken your ranking ability. So, rel-canonical helps tell Google that those variations are all the same page.

This is a really complex topic and a special case of the canonical tag.. It also doesn't help that Google keeps adjusting their advice. See this thread:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

"When Google discovers a cluster of pages with a single canonical URL, our algorithms will use the title and snippet from the canonical version in our search results. Therefore, it's a good idea not to include region-specific content in the title and meta description tags of the canonical URL. For example, use "Example Widget Inc" instead of "Example Widget USA Inc" or "Example Widget UK"."

So, what about the non-canonical pages? Well, the implication is that, if you use hreflang AND canonical, you'll avoid dupe content problems but the proper pages may rank in the proper regions, even with the canonical tag. In that case, you'd want to include regional variations in the non-canonical META data (for regional searchers). Unfortunately, I haven't seen good data on this yet.

Like Istvan, my gut reaction is to try hreflang first, without the canonical, IF you're not having duplicate content issues or seeing regional variations cross over into inappropriate regions. If you are seeing that, then you'll probably need both.

I should actually add that Google doesn't condone using rel-canonical back to the main search page or page 1. They allow canonical to a "View All" or a complex mix of rel-canonical and rel=prev/next. If you use rel-canonical on too many non-identical pages, they could ignore it (although I don't often find that to be true).

Vanessa Fox just did a write-up on Google's approach:

http://searchengineland.com/implementing-pagination-attributes-correctly-for-google-114970

I have to be honest, though - I'm not a fan of Google's approach. It's incredibly complicated, easy to screw up, doesn't seem to work in all cases, and doesn't work on Bing. This is a very complex issue and really depends on the site in question. Adam Audette did a good write-up:

http://searchengineland.com/five-step-strategy-for-solving-seo-pagination-problems-95494

We don't generally condone paid links here on SEOmoz, because we feel the risks often outweigh the rewards. However, Eppie fairly notes that they do (too often) work. The problem is that, even putting ethics aside, most people just don't do it very well.

I actually think Shane makes a good point - some of these links aren't really "everlasting" in the full sense of the word. Article marketing and paid blog posts often get archived quickly, and while the links continue to exist, they get rapidly devalued simply by moving in the internal structure. These paid networks have to continue to sell new links, and selling new links often means archiving old links and diluting existing content. So, if you pay once, expect your link to be treated like a 2nd-class citizen down the road. That's just the nature of that business, IMO. With a monthly fee, they can at least afford to keep your link active.

There are "paid" options that Google tends to not view as critically, such as:

(1) Editorially-reviewed directories

(2) Sponsorships and membership organizations

(3) Paid press-release services (although not really "everlasting")

People tend to only think of the big ones for (1) and (2) and often overlook niche directories, smaller organizations, local organizations, etc. The nice thing about the smaller sites is that you may be one of a half-dozen paid listings/sponsors, as opposed to one of 10,000 articles in an article-marketing network.

I'll leave this open as a discussion in case others have constructive suggestions.

It's ahrd to address in blog comments, but these things can be very situational. In a perfect world, I don't like those phantom folder levels for 2 reasons:

(1) Someone will eventually try to link to or access one, including possibly Google, and that may lead to odd behavior. I've seen claims Google will extrapolate URLs, but have never seen clear proof.

(2) It just makes for long URLs that, in this case, look a bit spammy.

Practically, is it making a difference? They aren't being indexed, so that's certainly a positive sign - it indicates no weird extrapolation by Google and no inbound links to those levels. At the same time, as discussed in my post, revamping your entire URL structure does carry risk.

So, it's not ideal (IMO), but I'm not sure I'd mess with it unless you're changing URLs for other reasons (then, do it all at once).

These could be mostly internal links - are you linking to "/index.aspx" from your navigation, logo, etc.? In OSE, select "from [only external]", and you won't see your internal links. That can really skew the count.

Honestly, submit and forget it. You could wait months, and I don't know of any secret way. If you're following the DMOZ rules, then no submission service is really going to help. In many cases, there just aren't enough editors.

The other issue is that many new DMOZ links are on deep pages, some of which aren't even getting indexed. No indexation means no link-juice. See my blog post from last year:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wheres-the-love-dmoz

At the end of the day, it's just one link. It's nice to have, but your efforts are better spent elsewhere, IMO.

I'm working on a couple of cases now, and it is extremely tricky. Google often doesn't re-crawl/re-cache deeper pages for weeks or months, so getting the canonical to work can be a long process. Still, it is generally a very effective tag and can happen quickly.

I agree with others that Robots.txt isn't a good bet. It also tends to work badly with pages that are already indexed. It's good for keeping things out of the index (especially whole folders, for example), but once 1000s of pages are indexed, Robots.txt often won't clean them up.

Another option is META NOINDEX, but it depends on the nature of the facets.

A couple of things to check:

(1) Using site: with inurl:, monitor the faceted navigation pages in the Google index. Are the numbers gradually dropping? That's what you want to see - the GWT error may not update very often. Keep in mind that these numbers can be unreliable, so monitor them daily over a few weeks.

(2) Are there are other URLs you're missing? On a large, e-commerce site, it's entirely possibly this wasn't the only problem.

(3) Did you cut the crawl paths? A common problem is that people canonical, 301-redirect, or NOINDEX, but then nofollow or otherwise cut links to those duplicates. Sounds like a good idea, except that the canonical tag has to be crawled to work. I see this a lot, actually.

It's very likely that the "index.html" version is more authoritative because you're using it in internal links. The problem is that that often creates a duplication issue - you refer to the root (non-index.html) version in inbound links, social, etc. (and people tend to link and bookmark the root version), but then link internally to "index.html", so Google will end up indexing both.

If the authority is coming from internal links, and you:

(1) Switch the internal links to the root ("/")

(2) 301-redirect "index.html" to the root ("/")

...you shouldn't lose any authority, as you'll have re-routed it by doing step (1). You'll also consolidate your signals and be better off all-around, IMO.

Kane's right, though - it's a bit tough to tell without knowing the specifics.

There is some evidence that keywords beyond 65-70 are read by search engines, but practically speaking, Alan is absolutely right. Every keyword you add dilutes the power of other keywords, and trying to cram in extra keywords is almost never worth the trouble.

The only exception I'd make is if you have auto-generated titles - let's say product names, and those product names are by themselves over 65 characters on rare occasion (1 in 100 products). In that case, I wouldn't worry about it - you could leave a few of those alone without harm.

More often, though, people try to cram in "Product | Category | Sub-category | Brand" and it spins out of control. Shorter titles, focused on the unique keywords for that page, are going to be more effective in 95%+ of cases.

I should be clear that I'm absolutely in favor of building relevant links - I think they're better for traffic, conversion, etc., and are a future-proofing quality signal. I just don't want to tell you that relevance is critical to SEO/ranking, as it just seems that's not as true as I'd like it to be.

There are no hard limits, but it really depends on quality. For example, if you attract links through content marketing or social media, you could get 100s of links in a day and have no problems. There's no limit on "natural" links. If you're pushing the quality boundary or manually link-building, you do have to be more careful, but that depends on the nature of the link-building. The best I can tell you is to diversify. Don't rely too much on any one tactic, especially when you're starting out. A new link profile is a lot more vulnerable than one with a solid base of high-authority links.

This is one area where I am 99.99999% confident saying that Google's past statements are incorrect and even irresponsible. Panda is, in many ways, an assault on thin content, and duplicates are worse than thin. I've seen many large-scale sites take massive hits from duplicates (as much as 80% traffic loss).

The "myth" is that duplicate content causes a Capital-P Penalty, but Google uses a very narrow and self-serving definition of that term. Duplicate content does not cause a manual penalty and they probably don't consider Panda to be a penalty internally at Google. However, the consequences are very severe.

Even before Panda, I saw cases studies where reducing duplicate content greatly improved rankings. I had a client whose "product" pages (it was an event site) were being filtered out due to massive duplication. Once we fixed the problem, their search traffic tripled over the course of 3 months. This was well before May Day and Panda (2007, if memory serves). Today, it's 10X worse.

When you get into e-commerce, the problem is almost inevitable and needs to be managed. Now, does that mean that you're currently facing ranking issues, Panda, etc.? No, not necessarily. You have less than 2K indexed pages, which is hardly excessive. If each product page has one duplicate, and you know that can't spin out of control, the consequences are limited. Still, you're diluting your ranking ability to some extent. I think it's well worth addressing the problem and being proactive.

I'm not seeing any signs of indexation problems or issues with true duplicate content (duplicate URLs of the same page, essentially). I'm also not seeing many direct links to this page, so a link-based penalty (just on this page) is very unlikely. Unfortunately, we often don't report deep or low-quality links in OSE, so it could be that there are links we're not seeing that look spammy.

The other possibility is an anchor-text penalty, if you were hitting "bet365" too hard, but again, I'm not seeing evidence of that. Even across the whole site, your anchor text is fairly diverse.

I'm seeing you at #11 for "bet365" on Google.dk for this page:

http://www.betxpert.com/tvguide/bet365

Realistically, it's got a shorter URL, hits "bet365" in headers and text, and seems to have higher Page Authority. I think your internal links to that page might be stronger. I think your just making that page look stronger to Google.

It's really dangerous to try to de-rank a page - you can end up harming it in other ways. You could tone down the on-page cues a bit. You could also link this page directly to the page you want to rank. Currently, though, you're sending Google subtle cues that this page is stronger. You could also just try to build a few inbound links to the desired page - since neither page has many, a couple of links can make a difference.

I think @cgman and @Nakul are both right, to a point. Technically, it's fine. Google doesn't penalize shared IPs (they're fairly common). If you're cross-linking your sites, though, it's very likely Google will devalue those links. That tactic has just been abused too much, and a shared IP is a dead giveaway.

Now, is it worth splitting all these out to gain a little more link-juice? In most cases, probably not. Google knows you own the sites, and may devalue them anyway. Chances are, they've already been devalued a bit. So, I don't think it's worth hours and hours and thousands of dollars to give them all their own homes, in most cases (it is highly situational, though).

The only other potential problem is if one site were penalized - there have been cases where that impacted sites on the same IP, especially cross-linked sites. It's not common, and you may not be at any risk, but it's not unheard of. As @Nakul said, it's a risk calculation.

It may be tedious, but you need to do it, one way or another. Theoretically, these product duplicates could be severely harming your client's ranking ability.

Practically, I'm not seeing much evidence, though, of these duplicate paths or duplicate products in the Google index. I am seeing other duplicate pages, like search results and https: versions of your product pages. You have a few canonicalization issues going on.

Ideally, no matter what category path, you'll land on one URL. The very small usability consequences of the path change (in my experience, at least) are far outweighed by the risks of spinning off dozens of duplicates. As @activitysuper said, there should be a way to do this dynamically - you're changing a couple of templates, not individual product pages.

I would have to see the duplicate product URLs in action, though. I'm not finding that specific problem.

Google seems to have a strong preference for the root domain, and I've seen this before. Unfortunately, ASP/.NET can be really stubborn about going for the "index.aspx" or "default.aspx" page. You're probably still getting credit for the back-links, but it can be tough to tell. A couple of things:

(1) Make sure you're linking internally to the canonical version (in this case "index.aspx"). Otherwise, you're sending a mixed signal and that can disrupt the 301.

(2) Add a canonical tag to the "index.aspx" page. It can't hurt to double up, in this case.

Oh, sorry - just saw your follow-up. That 301/302 chain could exacerbate the problem, although it would typically leave link-juice after the 301. It's a bit complex, though. You could consider moving your English home-page up a level and only redirecting other audiences. That is a tricky proposition, though, and carries risk.

I'd also grab a header checker and just make sure Google is seeing what you're seeing. It's always best to verify that your redirects are working as expected.

I'm going to come somewhere in the middle. I think the data supports Eppie in that relevance doesn't matter nearly as much as we think it should (except for anchor text). Relevant pages typically don't pass more link-juice than irrelevant pages, and Google probably doesn't have the capacity to test relevance on every single link (that's a huge computational task).

On the other hand, chasing only low-relevance links can bite you. Too often, low-relevance means low-quality in other dimensions, and it can be a negative signal or even lead to a penalty. Diversity is very important. I wouldn't worry about relevance in terms of any given link - if you could get a link from CNN.com and it wasn't very relevant, for example - do it. No question. If you only have low-relevance links, though, you're probably doing something wrong.

Keep in mind, too, that links have other value, including traffic and lead-generation. Low-relevance links probably have no value beyond SEO. If Google devalues them, you're left with nothing. If Google ignores a high-relevance link, but it's driving traffic, you're still making money.

I'd like to be able to make a strong, white-hat argument against what Eppie is saying, but the data just doesn't back it up. Relevance doesn't have the impact we often think it should. His warning is important - lack of relevance can have an impact. If you're clearly getting a lot of irrelevant links, it's often a sign of deeper problems that could even lead to a penalty. On the other hand, getting a "highly relevant" link doesn't often have much SEO impact.

A couple of additional points, though:

(1) It's not just about SEO. Links drive traffic, ideally, and eventually conversion. Relevant links have more impact to human visitors, and they do matter, even if they won't impact ranking that much.

(2) There's a lot more to the value of a link than authority and relevance. Rand has an excellent article about that topic and how complex it gets:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links

I'm seeing the bad canonical tag gone now. Are you seeing the same thing? Maybe just had a short-term caching issue.

I find Google is usually good about UTM parameters, but not always - for use in Adwords, they're almost never a problem, but when you use them for custom tracking, they can start to cause duplicates. Bing/Yahoo also don't handle them very well.

I'm not sure on the scope of your site/usage right now, so it's hard to give a definitive solution, but my gut reaction is that I would use canonical tags on the affected pages. If you want to double-check, you can test for the URLs in the Google index. Use something like:

site:example.com inurl:utm=

If they're not being indexed, you're probably ok, and can just keep an eye on it. If it's just a few landing pages, though (and not a massive, site-wide issue), I'd be proactive and put a canonical tag in place, if it were me.

I'd agree with the general consensus that, while a nofollow on the links could cut the crawl path, it's no guarantee that deeper pages won't be followed or indexed. Any stray internal links, inbound links, etc. could trigger a crawl, or Google could just go exploring and then not be certain about your indexation signals on the deeper pages.

Nofollow'ing the "/product" level could definitely disrupt link-juice flow to the "/product/review" level and may impact rankings. I'm having a hard time envisioning how you're set up, but I suspect there's a way to block the affiliate links without blocking the entire "/product" level. My gut reaction is that this isn't set up quite right.

Just tried a different browser. Weird thing is that I'm seeing it on some pages, but not on others. For example. it's here still:

http://noahsdad.com/medical/

Are there any admin settings in your theme itself? You may something built in that's re-adding the tag at a higher level in the code. Could be an admin flag needs to be reset.

Oh - yeah - that definitely doesn't look good. Probably a holdover from the template. You could just comment it out, but dumping it completely is fine, I suspect.

Unfortunately, I'm still seeing the canonical in the pages I'm checking (?)

Unfortunately, I'm not a WordPress expert by any means. I'll ping the team.

I'm seeing the 2 canonical tags, but unfortunately, there's almost no way to tell from the outside why the top one is being added. It looks like your plug-in is working correctly. This is a WordPress-based site, correct?