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Sorry for the misunderstanding Axello, but I was asking from which site account did you set up the DNS record for verification. If you did this from the www.mydomain.com account when setting it up to be verified it is possible that the code given would not work for other subdomains, since technically "www" is a subdomain. This is all relatively new for everyone, including myself, but I would try using the DNS verification method from the http://mydomain.com GWT account if you haven't done that already.

Does this make sense? I am very curious to know what the issue is too. Please keep us posted. In the meantime, maybe someone else from Moz can provide some input as well. I will ask our team if any have dealt with this.

Regards,

Everett

Axello,

In regard to my other question: Did you set it up on http://yourdomain.com or from the http://www.yourdomain.com GWT account?

If the link is not an href and is javascript there is no need to add the rel nofollow attribute. However, if it is an href link, or an href tag is contained within the javascript on the page it is best to add a rel="nofollow" attribution within the href tag. I wouldn't rely on putting it within the div to work.

A lot of results for singular/plural and synonyms are so similar as to be nearly identical for the first page or two, which is what really matters, and which is what  Gregory Baka is referring to. You will notice a lot of times if you search for something you'll see synonyms and variants bolded in the description and title in the SERPs. That would be your signal that one is being treated as synonymous with (though not "identical to") the other.

In terms of singular vs plural I tend to include both variations naturally within descriptions and on-page copy. External links tend to contain both versions too unless you're buying the anchor text. I would think, based only on common sense and experience, and not any quantifiable study, that Google looks for a natural variation. If you have two different landing pages, one targeting singular and the other targeting plural, that would not only be wasting effort, money, link equity, etc... but it would seem very unnatural. If I were writing an algorithm I'd probably figure out a way to push such pages lower in the results unless other signals point to really high quality at the page and/or domain level.

ALL of this "common sense" stuff flies out the window though when any ambiguity of intent or results is involved. For example, with "cars" you could be talking about the animated movie, which is why you see IMDB, Disney and Wikipedia  in the results. This disambiguation factor is why Google is pushing for semantic markup of the web, and is probably why topic modeling has become increasingly important (e.g. want to rank better for "cars" when the user intent is to find the animation, use words like "Pixar" and "Lightening Steve McQueen" in the copy).

As a rule of thumb, I tend to go with whatever sounds better and makes more sense to the user. For example, on a category page I might write "blue widgets" in the title, but I'd use "blue widget" on a single product page. From there I go with what the data says. Looking at Analytics a few months later I pay attention to traffic and keywords as a follow-up. If the "blue widgets" category page gets 80% of it's  traffic from a #3 ranking for "blue widget" when it ranks #1 for "blue widgets" that tells me I should probably change the title to the singular version.

In the end I usually find I get the best results when I don't think too hard about it and just go with my gut when writing. I know that's not scientific or anything, but if it works it works.

Hello Robert,

So doing the right thing for the client aside (which would be to advise them to nofollow those links for their own long-term benefit), if they are still ranking very well it is doubtful that they have a site-wide "penalty" or "filter" like Penguin, Panda or any others. Most likely if traffic has dropped significantly, but not dramatically, you could be looking at a loss of pagerank (not the green bar PR, but the real stuff) due to Google blocking the flow of PR from those, or other, links.

If that is the case then nofollowing them would neither help nor hurt because they aren't being counted anyway, and the site isn't currently being filtered or penalized. However, it could help in the future if you nofollowed them because you never know when "not counting" a link could turn into "penalizing you for it". It could only be an update away...

Hello Axello,

Thank you for your patience as we narrow down the possibilities.

Have you sent any kind of email or help request to the GWT team?

Did you do this on http://yourdomain.com or from the http://www.yourdomain.com GWT account? If you want it to cover all subdomains you may have to do it from http://yourdomain.com.

You may have to get some of those overoptimized external links removed. If you can't get them removed you may have to disavow them in Google Webmaster Tools. Here are some resources for you:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/how-to-disavow-links-0c56a26f

http://cyrusshepard.com/boom-1-email-60-bad-links-gone-4-tools-for-easy-link-cleanup/

http://www.rmoov.com/index.php

http://moz.com/blog/google-disavow-tool

It sounds like your site is being filtered just at the keyword level, which is a good thing. If you had a site-wide penalty for spammy links it would be much more difficult to get your rankings back. Just work on making the old links more natural-looking and removing or disavowing any that you can't make more natural-looking that seem spammy or possibly paid-for. Be ruthless in your culling of these links and you should bounce back within a couple of months.

Hello Axello,

How long has it been? Sometimes it takes several days, even up to a week, for the DNS changes to take effect.

Hello Samuel,

I assume you mean http://blog.mysite.com instead of www.blog.mysite.com. You will need to verify that subdomain in Google webmaster tools and upload a separate sitemap just as if it were a different site.

Yes you can have more than one sitemap on the same domain. However, a subdomain is considered a separate domain.

Hello ShearingsGroup,

You'll find tools that do that, and many other things, in this 100 Free SEO Tools post here on Moz.com. To answer your question though, I like SEM Rush for this purpose. You can also try SpyFu and several other tools. And here's a recent post on Net Magazine that should be helpful as well.

You're welcome Shannon. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to help out, even if the news isn't so good to hear.

1. If the tag page has one or more external links then you should redirect it to send that pagerank to the collections page. Otherwise it's probably not worth the effort.

2. You shouldn't add a "no follow" tag to the product tag pages, but you should add a "no index" tag. Preferably it would be "noindex, follow".

3. Yes you should include the collections links on your product pages. If you have too many links on a page there are other less important links to get rid of.

Also, since you're going to be sending pagerank into category pages (i.e. collection pages) you should look into putting a short, unique, helpful category description on those pages. You'd be amazed at how much this helps category pages rank for short and mid-tail keywords if you get just a couple of decent external links to them too.

The first thing I would do in this particular situation is to contact Kaboodle and see if you can get the Buy link to go to your store instead. They may have to remove that entry and you can post a new one.

That sparqstore domain expired on 01/26/2011 and is pending renewal or deletion from Network Solutions. It may be worth looking into how much it would cost to buy the domain and redirect relevant URLs like that to your product page.

That Kaboodle page is indeed a form of spam. It is what I would call a "stub page". Whether you report that page or not is up to you. Eugino provided the link above to where you would do the reporting. I would just say first that you should contact someone - by phone if possible - at Kaboodle to give them the chance to remove the page, as often this is just a matter of pour housekeeping and not outright spam.

Good luck.

If the page you linked to is indicative of the other pages as well, I'd just delete them, let the page 404 so it gets removed from the index, disavow the links, and start over with better content. You say the content is useful, but I read the entire thing and it sounds very much like it was written for the sole purpose of stuffing a bunch of keywords about selling eBooks. It was not very useful at all.

My advice would be to get rid of pages like that completely and if you're going to write about selling eBooks do so without thinking so much about keywords or SEO, and just focus on providing the absolute BEST guide to selling eBooks that you can. This will require a writer who is actually an expert at selling eBooks, which means it will cost more money to produce the content. Think quality over quantity. Scale down your landing page strategy drastically and just be as informative as you can.

Good luck. It is a bitter pill to swallow, but you're not the only one having to deal with it.

My first choice would be to stop using the tags altogether. If you need a few for legitimate sub-categories then you can just limit it to those few, but otherwise it's just a mess. You can read about how to remove tags on this Shopify help page. Any tag page that had external links (probably very few, if any) should get 301 redirected if you do this.

You could also choose to noindex,follow or robots.txt block the /all/ folder to keep those pages from being indexed if you want to leave them up for visitors (do they 'really' use them?).

Google is probably assigning value to those pages because of your internal links, which appear on every product page. It would be better to link to categories and other products instead, thus sending pagerank where you want it to go.

You could leave the links up and redirect the tag pages, as per your original question, but I feel that would be addressing the symptom (PR going into tag pages) rather than the cause (links to tag pages on the site).

Good luck!

Tommy,

If you completely dropped to nowhere for a phrase you ranked well for it may be more than just a little bit of pagerank lost through the redirect. What Holger says is true, but the amount lost is pretty insignificant.

If you share the exact URLs (before and after) we may be able to look into it for you. The way your domain is set up with multiple nested subdomains could be causing an issue too. The more specific you can be (keywords, etc...) the easier it will be for people to give you relevant advise.

It isn't always that simple. Maybe commas don't present a problem on their own. Maybe double file extensions don't present a problem on their own. Maybe a CDN doesn't present a problem on its own. Maybe very long, complicated URLs don't present a problem on their own.

You have all of these. Together, in any combination, they could make indexation of your images a problem for Google.

Just test it out on a few. Get rid of the file extension. If that doesn't work, get rid of the comma. That is all you can do. Start with whatever is easiest for the developer to implement, and test it out on a few before rolling it out across all of your images.

Hello Edlondon,

I think you're probably answering your own question here. Google typically doesn't have any problem indexing images served from a CDN. However, I've seen Google have problems with commas in the URL at times. Typically it happens when other elements in the URL are also troublesome, such as your double file extension.

Are you able to rename the files to get rid of the superfluous .jpg extension? If so, I'd recommend trying it out on a few dozen images. We could come up with a lot of hypothesis, but that would be the one I'd test first.

I would not advise buying EMDs for the purpose of linking into your main site, or for redirecting to your site after those EMDs get exact-match external links. Theoretically, if you had good content on the EMDs that you wouldn't mind putting on your main site some day (because catch-all redirects, like an entire site redirecting to the home page, are treated as 404s, according to John Muller of Google) you could gain something by redirecting the EMDs to that content on your main site once the EMDs had some decent links. However, the amount of effort it would take to do this would be significantly more than what it would take to put good content on your main site to begin with.

Google has been lowering the importance of exact-match domains and exact-match anchor text for some time now. Shortcuts don't work forever. I don't mean to sound like some preachy white-hat guy, but even if you could get it to work for awhile you would be risking the reputation of your primary domain. When a site gets banned people often lose their jobs. They go on unemployment. They can't pay their mortgages. They can't afford health insurance. So yea, maybe a little bit preachy. Don't do it. Just my two cents.

PS: I did try this a few times about five years ago on a few of my own personal sites. It didn't take long for Google to figure out how people were manipulating the algorithm by purchasing EMDs and redirecting them for this purpose.

You may want to consider rewriting those URLs. The character escape codes shared by Thomas above may meet your needs, but I'd rewrite URLs like that. Assuming you are on a Linux server (as opposed to Windows, which would require  ISAPI ) you'll do this by editing the htaccess file. I'd advise getting a developer to consult with you on this, as rewriting URls often involves writing regular expressions that can be easy to goof up.

Here's a good Moz article on the topic: http://moz.com/blog/down-and-dirty-write-your-own-url-rewrite

And here's another great introductory resource: http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/02/introduction-to-url-rewriting/

If you want to try doing it yourself feel free to post your website, with the example URLs, so other members can help you with the rewrite code. I strongly suggest working with a developer on this though.

Jonnygeekuk,

If GWT is telling you they are "aware" (whether indexed or not) of URLs that you do not want indexed, and you have either blocked them in the robot.txt file or the robots header tag, or the page serves a 404 or 410 response in the http header, it wouldn't hurt to use the URL removal tool to remove those pages from the index just to be sure.

Rasmus, what makes you think the bots are clicking on these links? Is there something in your log files that suggests spiders are following those links, or are you just getting really low conversion rates from clicks to affiliate programs?

Affiliate links should also be nofollowed, which would make it even less likely that they would be registering as a click from search engine spiders.

Hello Tguide,

To get around the long load time you could use a view all page as the canonical page and rely on a script to load more content as the user scrolls down. Sites like Twitter and Pinterest do this almost infinitely. Look up infinite scrolling and lazy loading as good places to start. However, this may be difficult to implement for some sites.

If you are worried about load time for a view all page you can use rel next and rel prev tags on your paginated pages. This should work just fine in most cases.

Moz will continue to tell you about the duplicate titles and descriptions, but you can ignore that warning if you have set up rel next prev or view all canonical correctly.

Thanks Josheph, I'm glad you liked it.

Have you looked into Google Site Search?

http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/products/gss.html

You can test out the search on your site from that URL. If your blog is on a subdomain you have to test http://yourdomain.com instead of http://www.yourdomain.com.

I think Endeca allows you to do this, but you should make sure they show you some live examples first. I looked for one but didn't find it.

Whatever Crutchfield is doing seems to work, though it's not exactly what you're asking for. If you use the search field from the Research tab you get content. If you use the search field from the Shop tab you get products:

http://www.crutchfield.com/learnsearch/installing_car_speakers.html

Good luck!

Hello Joseph,

You are very welcome. It sounds like you are well educated on your options and have put a lot of thought into this. Perhaps you are correct that we won't be able to understand the particular nuances of the situation without viewing the site ourselves. I think the plan you have outlined sounds like a good one and you are doing all of the right things as far as I can tell without seeing the site.

Good luck!

The thing the sites beating you in the SERPs for competitive phrases are doing differently than you is that they aren't obsessing over the wrong metrics. Things like KDS, DA and PA are useful in giving us a ballpark overview of the competitive landscape, including who might be worth trying to earn a link from. They do not always have perfect, or even strong, correlations with what you see in Google. For example, the MozScape crawler isn't set up to detect paid links or spam links. Where Google might ignore, or even punish you, for certain links, MozScape still gives a site credit for them. This "qualitative" value on links is one of the reasons Google has won the search game so far. It is very difficult to replicate at the scale of the entire internet.

The reason nobody can answer your question is because it is pretty much unanswerable. There are too many variables. Maybe if we had a look at your site, and your competitors sites, we could come up with an educated guess.

For the keyword that you drop straight back to approximately #200 for you may want to look into an anchor-text level link penalty, possibly due to too many links, or even just a few "untrusted" links with that exact anchor text going into that page.

Hello PremioOscar,

That may be the best option, and probably the one I'd choose, but I think he is hoping to rank for searches specific to each letter (e.g. Letter A Bracelet, Letter H Bracelet...) which may not be possible with a single page. By breaking them up into groups (e.g. A-G, H-M...) he can target at least one letter per group. Each group would have its own unique description, which is scaleable while each letter having its own is not.

I would argue that each letter having its own unique description is indeed scaleable if you're talking about one product. I could have written three of them in the time it took to write this reply. However, if this letter situation is repeated across dozens or hundreds of products I would consider the idea presented by  Michael.

Does that make sense?

Alice,

Most bloggers are not going to put a cross domain rel canonical tag on their page for you. I feel that would severely limit the effectiveness of the campaign by excluding those bloggers.

However, putting the rel canonical tag on your page isn't going to hurt, and could be one more signal that you are the authoritative version of the content. Other signals would be that your page gets indexed first, and that the other pages are linking to you. There is a lot of duplicate content on the web, and Google isn't going to penalize every site with a little bit of content that can be found elsewhere. If they did that every news site from the New York Times to Boise Weekly would be penalized. Duplicate content is a real issue, especially when it comprises the bulk of your content strategy, but I don't think you have much to worry about in this particular case.

The PDF or image version of the flyer is a great idea. I'd go with that and instruct the participants to explain the contest in their own words.

You could even provide a share box below the flyer where they can copy the code to paste the flyer onto their site. You would want the href link to your page to be within that code so the flyer they paste links to your page. If you do this Google will have little doubt as to which page is the original source. Just don't get fancy with the anchor text.

Hello Joseph,

If you're going to throw your links away rather than fix them and plan to start fresh with new pages that don't have any links at all - it may be cheaper and faster to just start on a new domain. This all depends on how much branding you have into the old one, but if you want to distance yourself from bad links and build a better site it might be a good time to start over.

Assuming you don't want to start over, please don't expect that the 302 redirect of those pages to the search pages are going to get you out of a link-based penalty. The bad links are still going into your domain, and if you've been affected by Penguin there are only two things that I know of to help in the long-term: 1. Remove all of the bad links that you can, and disavow the rest. 2. Buy a new domain and start over, paying more attention to Google's guidelines this time.

I've heard of temporary escapes via redirects, but the site usually ends up in the same trouble again once the link graph has been updated.

You said Panda above, but Panda didn't have to do with bad links. If you were affected by Panda you probably have some thin/duplicate content and user experience issues to deal with. Perhaps building a better quality site will be all you need, assuming you don't have a link-based penalty, and weren't affected by Penguin.

I would block the internal search result pages from being indexed using the robots.txt file, as recommended by Google here under Technical Guidelines:

"Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines."

Also, regarding faceted navigation, it is often a great user experience, but can wreak havoc on your site's SEO strategy. Make sure to read up on how to properly implement it if you haven't already. Here are some links:

• Building Faceted Navigation That Doesn't Suck
• Faceted Navigation Whiteboard Friday
• Solving Duplicate Content Issues Arising from Faceted Navigation

You will quickly find that there are lots of different ways to deal with faceted navigation's affected on your SEO strategy, and will have to decide which method/s are right for you.

If the links between each site are relevant, and the content on each of those sites is 100% unique (it sounds like you may need to work on this aspect) a few links between them are probably not causing any harm, and may actually be helping. A lot of businesses have multiple websites that link between each other. The real test is to be honest with yourself when asking the question: Is this link here for the visitors, or for SEO? Without seeing the sites myself, I can't say whether it looks spammy or not.

I hope this calms your fears (the person asking the question only had one less site than your client): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufGw65-1je8

watch?v=ufGw65-1je8

Hello PedroandJobu,

I'm glad you found the answer useful. Here is a bit more explanation based on your questions...

1. I don't have a preference for follow-up email software other than to try and use the email marketing solution you already use (e.g. Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, Bronto...). Here is a comparison of a few of them, though it is a little dated: http://www.comparethebrands.com/compare/97. I think most email platforms can do this these days. There are even plugins for popular eCommerce platforms like Magento (example here see the first screenshot on that page).

2. You would join an ad network that offers re-targeting and put the tracking pixel on the page. Here are a few posts to help you get started:

• Retargeting: What is it and how to use it by Joanna Lord
• Comparing the Top 4 Regargeting Companies by Joanna Lord
• How Retargeting Works on AdRoll
• Ten Retargeting Tips by Ben Plomion

3. Sticker shock is when people add a bunch of products to their cart and don't see the total price, including shipping, until checkout. Because they typically don't think the order is going to cost that much the shock of the total cost causes them to rethink the purchase and abandon the cart. Avoid this by offering a running total (when possible include shipping) that they can see on every page.

Dinesh,

Go look at the code for any site using BazaarVoice and you'll see that they have found a way to do this. If Shopper Approved doesn't think this is important enough to fix then perhaps you should look into another review vendor.

Regards,

Everett

Hello Barnsco Inc.,

I would imagine that a library of high-quality how-to articles (with pictures) and especially videos would do well. For example, if you sold concrete supplies you may consider a video about how to properly tie together rebar before pouring concrete. The audience would be DIY homeowners for that type of piece. It is ok if the audience for something like this isn't exactly your prospective buyer (i.e. contractors, builders...) but it would be better if it was.

If your site is barnsco.com you have some other fish to fry. The press release talking about the new eCommerce store links with "new ecommerce store" but goes to the home page instead of the eCommerce portion of the site. Also when I clicked on a product detail page I was taken to a Runtime error page. This happened several times.

Here are a few more ideas in addition to placing helpful content on your site, as discussed above.

Join B2B industry forums and participate in a constructive way. Answer questions about your industry. Don't drop links everywhere or join a forum, post once in the welcome thread, and leave for good. Be part of the community.

Leverage the business partnerships you already have. These partnerships can come in many forms, from sister-companies and manufacturers to the local chamber of commerce, BBB, and similar but non-competing businesses.

Write high-quality articles and place them on other sites by guest posting. Visit MyBlogGuest and similar sites to find opportunities. Pay attention to their guidelines.

Although they don't have as much power as they used to, and you shouldn't overdo it, there are probably some niche B2B directories out there worth submitting to. The more exclusive and/or niche they are the better. You don't want to be on a directory that accepts everyone who coughs up the cash.

All great answers and input. There is no clear-cut answer to the "best eCommerce platform" question, unfortunately. They all have their problems and strengths. I think you will be relatively safe with either Magento or OpenCart, as they are both popular platforms with large communities.

You might also consider Volusion if you want to stay on the ASP Server.

A recent favorite of mine is BigCommerce.

Hello Gary,

You should know that using followable affiliate links is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines, as they are viewed as paid links due to the monetary relationship between merchant and affiliate.

With that said, lots of people take the chance anyway and so long as you're aware of the risk...

I do think the alt attribute text contained within an image link (as well as the title attribute in the link) is considered by Google's algorithms. It probably would make a very small difference. However, I would not overdo it by stuffing either the file name or the alt text with lots of keywords. Your brand name, or the name of a product or service would probably be OK, but highly-targeted, non-brand alt text in banner ads that link to your site, especially since a lot of banner ads are site-wide placements (i.e. potentially thousands of pages on a single domain) are not a good idea.

If it were me I would include a nofollow tag in order to avoid any potential link-based penalties in the future, in which case you needn't worry about alt attributes or filenames beyond making them useful to the visitor.

OK so Shopper Approved is one of the review sources used by Google Shopping. That's great! They sound like a really good service. All I would change would be to put the noscript tag in the code with all of the content that appears via the script. Let us know how it goes. If they can fix that issue for you I think I'll keep them in my back pocket in case someone asks for a good review service.

Also see my follow-up response above.

I'd like to add that you want to make sure you're going with a company that doesn't hire people to leave fake reviews on your site to populate that content. The Shopper Approved website says that all reviews are from "actual paying customers" so I'm guessing you're ok there.

I looked at the Shopper Approved site and saw this:

"Every rating you collect is added to a static, search engine optimized page, that can show up in Google, Yahoo, and Bing to boost your reputation."

You should find out where that page lives because I couldn't find any review content from several different products in the SERPs, and I didn't see any indexable version of the content in the code on your product pages.

The way the page is set up now that content is NOT indexable. The good news is that it isn't indexed on any other domains either. Sometimes these review companies will allow your reviews to be indexed on their domains, but not yours. They claim ignorance, but I think that type of arrangement is downright low. They'd be stealing your content and your traffic.

What I would advise for you to do if you're going to stay with the company is ask them to populate a

<noscript>field with the content contained in the script. This is what BazaarVoice / Power Reviews does, and I've seen it work first-hand. It is a 100% honest and correct use of the noscript tag. The thing with BV/PR is you have to disallow the reviews subdomain from being indexed or you'll have duplicate content on your own subdomain.</p></noscript>

I want to make sure everyone, including myself, understands you Alex. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're saying that the website is totally new (a start-up) and nothing (at least nothing owned by the company you're with) has ever been on that domain name. While building the site the previous guy accidentally allowed the development version of the site to be indexed, and/or allowed product pages that you don't want on the site at all to be indexed. Since it is a brand new site those "old" pages that were deleted didn't have any external links, and didn't have any traffic from Google or elsewhere outside of the company.

IF that is the case, then you can probably just let those pages stay as 404s. Eventually, since nobody is linking to them, they will drop out of the index on their own.

I wouldn't use the URL removal tool in this case. For one thing, it is a dangerous tool and if you don't have experience with this sort of thing it could do more harm than good. It should only take a few weeks for those URLs that were briefly live and indexed to go away if you are serving a 404 or 410 http header response code on those URLs.

I hope this helps. Please let us know if we have misinterpreted your problem.

Hell Joni,

Although Thomas seems to be answering someone else's question here (replied in the wrong window?) Mihai has done a great job of providing you with actionable advice related to your question.

Yes, those kinds of links can be a problem IF you do not use a rel canonical tag. However, it is not uncommon for websites to use tracking parameters in the URL. This is fine as long as you use a rel canonical tag and/or tell Google and Bing to ignore those parameters. Most likely Google already knows to ignore them anyway. Please read these articles and let us know if you still need help with this...

Article by Dr. Pete on Rel Canonical Tags http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

Setting up campaign tracking URLs If you use Google Analytics: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en

About Rel Canonical Tag Support by Google:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

About URL Parameters: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1235687?hl=en

Thank you again Alan.

Typo fixed.

Alan,

Thank you for the great advice. If one has enough control over the eCommerce system, or the internal site search product, to change from GET to POST so these pages act more like real dynamically generated "search pages" than an infinite amount of "landing pages" I think that is a fantastic solution. It would keep merchandisers and others from linking to those pages - because we all know that they will continue to do it even if the SEO pleads on hands and knees for them to stop.

However, I have found it to be the case that most eCommerce businesses (from small mom-n-pop shops to fortune 500 companies) do not have the ability to do this because the internal site search functionality they use is out of their hands. Site search vendors like Endeca and Celebros serving enterprise eCommerce businesses don't typically hand over the keys to the client.

If you know any site search vendors or solutions that allow one to do this it would make a great contribution to this thread if you could share a few of them. I'd definitely look into recommending them in the future!

Thanks again!

I have tried different methods to fix this. First-hand experience tells me that oftentimes it is better to just block the paths (assuming there is better navigation on the site) from being crawled or indexed using robots.txt than to use a noindex,follow tag in order to save the pagerank you're sending via internal links. It is very easy for Google to get bogged down crawling around in the internal search results area.

Unless there are lots of links to search pages from top pages on the site, or a big list of search page links from every page (sitewide footer, for example) I really don't think the waste of internal pagerank is noticeable in the rankings, or worth salvaging if it risks sending spiders into a maze or a trap.

Yes, best practice is not to link to pages that you are blocking. In the real world though, search pages can be very useful to visitors, and to merchandisers who don't have the ability to create more targeted sub-sub-sub categories will often use them, and link to them on the site, as landing pages for promotional purposes (emails, PPC, sales...).

Everyone has their own strategies, and all we can do is make recommendations based on our own experience and knowledge. Thanks for helping out with this question Alan. Feel free to elaborate so Anastas has more input to help guide his decision.

Hello Gagan,

I think the best way to handle this would be using the rel canonical tag or rewriting the URLs to get rid of the parameters and replace them with something more user-friendly.

The rel canonical tag would be the easiest way out of those two. I notice the version without the encoding (e.g. http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10 ) have a rel canonical tag that correctly references itself as the canonical version. However, the encoded URLs (e.g. http://www.mycarhelpline.com/\"/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10) which is actually http://www.mycarhelpline.com/\"/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10 does NOT have a rel canonical tag.

If the version with the backslash had a rel canonical tag stating that the following URL is canonical it would solve your issue, I think.
Canonical URL:
http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10

And don't forget to look into the Change of Address feature in Google Webmasrter Tools:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83106

I am not entirely sure I understood your question as intended, but I will do my best to answer.

I would not put this in my robots.txt flie because it could possibly be misunderstood as a forward slash, in which case your entire domain would be blocked:

Disallow: \

We can possibly provide you with some alternative suggestions on how to keep Google from crawling those pages if you could share some real examples.

It may be best to rewrite/redirect those URls instead since they don't seem to be the canonical version you intend to be presented to the user.

This should work:

Disallow: /product/search*

Test it out in GWT just to be sure.

If you are asking them to write about you and give their honest impression of your product/service you are marketing.

If you are asking them to write about you AND asking for a followable links you are violating Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

What you are doing is clearly walking the line between these, but my opinion without having actually seen any of the posts/links is that you are leaning toward the marketing side.

Where you might run into trouble is if this tactic represents a huge proportion (say about half or more) of your total links. Relying to heavily on any one link building strategy, especially "iffy" ones like this, is never a good idea. Round out your link profile. If you need to pause this campaign while you do so then so-be-it.