Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Joseph

I'd make each page totally unique to the city. Don't worry about/focus on getting a penalty or not. Make the pages so useful for the user that if you have a sentence or two that's similar you won't get a penalty. Useful to me would be information that's entirely specific to what the page is "about". A page with some testimonials and an in-depth case study, photos and useful info in regard to that location should really deliver and give people what they need to know about the services in that location!

-Dan

Hi Vladmir

Perhaps I can help a little...

1. It depends on the type of duplicate content. Three scenarios;

-- two pages that are exactly, or almost exactly, alike. this means titles, on-page content etc. with those, you really should 301 redirect one to the other OR noindex one of them. then submit a URL removal request in WMT

-- pages that only have duplicate title tags and/or meta descriptions. assuming the on-page content is different and its just the title tags that are duplicate, change the title tags so they are unique. or, if the pages don't belong in the index (like paginated pages) noindex them.

-- lastly, you can have the same page_but it appears duplicate because of parameters like /search.php?search=apples - the page is 'search.php' but the parameters make it look different each time. This is the most appropriate time to just add a canonical._

2. In WMT, first submit a URL to 'crawl as Googlebot' - then after that crawl you will have an option to submit the URL to Google. This should get them to see the change sooner. Even if you didn't do this, any normal page should get re-cached in less than a month

3. Assuming we're just talking about on-page changes, this is also when they re-cache the page. That's when you should see the biggest change.

Hope that helps out!

-Dan

Right on the money Matt, thank you!

So now the challenge is somehow creating separate pages about each location that are not duplicates and are actually useful.

Not sure what the niche is, but let's say you're targeting a city the business is not actually located in. How could you make a page about that? You could make a page all about that town with case studies of clients from that town. With testimonials of customers from that town. The company could hold or sponsor an event in that town. Or a piece like "The State Of [company type] in [town]". Perhaps that may get some ideas going.

-Dan

Carlo

That is actually very standard WordPress behavior and should happen. Its redirecting the non-slash to the slash version. Either way, Matt Cutts has said inconsistent slashes will not really harm you, but its still good practice to have it redirect. From what I can tell, you don't need to change anything!

Hope that helps

-Dan

Hi Andrea

Are you all set with this? The transfer may have had to do with it, but the main importance now is to follow Adam's good advice - find the source of the 404 links and change them on your site. If they're indexed or backlinked to from elsewhere on the web, you need to 301 them to an existing page.

Let us know if you still need help!

-Dan

Ian

I'd completely agree. As I said to Patrick above, I've been deindexing tag archives like mad on my clients sites, with NO negative consequences, if anything the results are very positive. They're thin pages, with not much going on and often the titles get duped.

Check out this post I did which shows how to safely determine if tag archives can be de-indexed and how to do so.

Noindexing tags of course doesn't prevent Google from crawling them. If they're linked to it can still be good for Google discovering your content.

-Dan

Hi Patrick

Welcome! Thanks for the question. Everyone else pretty much got you in the right track here. The structure is good. Avoid too much redundancies and avoid too many folders (depth).

I'd like to add that I too feel very strongly about NOT indexing tag archives. If a blog is set up how it WordPress intended, you'd have about 5-8 categories, and an infinite amount of tags. You index the categories, as they act as the main buckets of content, but you don't index tags - because you could end up with 500 tags, and have half of them with only one post in them. Then they look an awful lot like a duplicate of the post. Not to mention tag archives are pretty thin, and Google is returning them much less in the SERPs now.

I had a client with 9,000 (yes... NINE THOUSAND) tags indexed. I zapped em all out of the index and his traffic actually went UP. Not entirely sure if it was due to the tags being removed, but it sure as heck didn't hurt traffic.

Feel free to check out my SEO for WordPress post on Moz as I think it covers a lot of the things you may have questions about.

-Dan

Edit: Ohhh I meant to add... noindex your subpages too.

David

Looks like you may have an issue there. The "address" and "canonical 1" should match about 99% of the time. Right now you're telling Google to index all those different address pages as a single URL (About/right-to-manage)... something to look at - and the suggestions below are both good as well.

-Dan

Thank you Streamline and Roque for answering!

In most standard cases, noindexing tags is what I advise. You can refer to two documents;

My SEO for WordPress post on Moz

My post about safely de-indexing tags in WordPress

-Dan

You likely have two because of the theme you're using. Noindex both tag sections.

Hi Shulman

Definitely get familiar with the WordPress SEO guide I put together for Moz. It will cover all the basics including good settings for a starting point on any WordPress blogs.

To answer your question specifically;

First make sure you're using Yoast SEO

Then, it sounds like you need to "noindex subpages" - these are pages where the URL is /page/2/ /page/3/ etc. You make this setting in Yoast.

Secondly, set up title and description templates, also in Yoast. This is why some descriptions are empty. If you set up a template it will fill them automatically.

Hope this helps!

-Dan

Hey There

What you want is "contributor to" -> http://screencast.com/t/HhLjilNE

-Dan

Hi Emily

Just making sure you're all set. I can't seem to replicate the issue any more and I see you have the latest version of WordPress installed now.

If you need any further reference on securing WordPress this is a nice guide on their site - Hardening WordPress

The rest of the advise here looks great, thanks so much Majid and Nakul for helping out!

-Dan

Colin

Any luck with this yet? I'd follow Marie's good advise and first be sure everything is updated. Then try these things to find it;

• Disable each plugin one by one and see if it goes away.
• Can you see the code when you view source or use a tools like browseo.net or shut off CSS? If you can see the location of the injected code you may be able to tell where it was inserted.
• If you can't see it viewing source or with browseo etc - try doing a Google cache: search and view in text only.
• Check your widgets.
• Check your .htaccess file

Once you find it definitely check out this document on securing wordpress.

Let us know how it goes.

-Dan

Greg

Thanks so much for helping out! If you don't mind I'm just going to correct a few finer details so people don't confuse anything

"Essentially the tags display the exact content as the original URL so the pages are identical but the URL is different."

Its totally true that this happens, but this is not what causes the duplicate content error in the crawl report. The errors are usually from sub-pages of any given tag archive having the same title tag.

"Remove the tags"

By this I'm sure you just mean noindex tags. You don't need to remove them from the site altogether, just remove them from the index.

"If you want the Tags and Categories for user experience, Install Yoast SEO plugin which allows you to insert a canonical URL on the duplicate category pages."

You should leave categories indexed and noindex tags. Yoast does canonicals no matter what, you don't need to think about them and they are not what handles duplicate category pages.

Everything else stated is more or less ok but I just don't people to be confused.

Thanks again!

-Dan

Justin

Sorry to hear of your trouble with making the new settings. For one, my guide on SEOmoz about setting up WordPress for SEO should be helpful. I'd recommend familiarizing yourself with that.

In these cases - the "duplicate content" is usually not the page its self but rather usually just the title tags.

This is because, imagine you have tag archives like this;

• mydomain.com/tag/pink-elephants/
• mydomain.com/tag/pink-elephants/page/2/
• mydomain.com/tag/pink-elephants/page/3/

Usually the title tags respectably end up being the same;

• Pink Elephants | My Domain
• Pink Elephants | My Domain <-- title tag for page 2
• Pink Elephants | My Domain <-- title tag for page 3

For every single tag "subpage".

Normally, the protocol would be to;

• Noindex subpages
• Noindex tags
• Noindex dated archives
• Disable author archives (single author blog only)
• Index categories

You can still link to tag pages and use tags within the site all you want, but you just don't want to index them.

These are just default settings. Its impossible to know exactly what you should be doing without seeing your site, but I hope all of that gets you in the right direction!

-Dan

Anthony

There's a few ways to do this, and it does depend a little on the specifics of how the site is set up but the best (and easiest) may be to use the URL parameter settings in Webmaster Tools.

You're going to log into webmaster tools, go to configuration->URL Parameters - set it to NOT index things beyond the ? (this may be numbers 2 and beyond or it may be everything)

How is this set up though? Does the calendar "start" and "end" somewhere or is it going off infinitely in either direction?

The robots.txt file won't keep the page out of the index.

If you can let us know some more specifics that would be great!

-Dan

Hi

To track brand search you'd want to create an advanced segment - create one to show branded keywords and other that show non-branded keywords. The more unique your brand name, the easier these are to create. Like "zappos" (and you'd want to include mis-spellings, "zapos" "zappo" etc).

Direct traffic is someone typing your website directly into their browser - so no search is taking place. By "none" maybe you mean "not provided" (which is when Google doesn't share keyword data from logged in searches) in which case there is no way to get this branded/non-branded in analytics.

-Dan

Hi

There's two ways:

1. Do you care which exact  link they click on? (ie you could have a main menu and footer link) - if so you will add an actual parameter to the link to track it as an event. That's the more involved method, but it might be to see which specific button etc is being used.
2. Or do you not care what link they click on, just that they go from page 1->page 2? (This is the method Ben is referring to). Then, you can pretty much do what he says - set it up as a Goal for a URL destination.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

BTW - all the Google Docs are really good - here's the one on Goals

Kevin

I bet if you have Webmaster Tools setup and you run a "fetch as Googlebot" this will get you what you need. You'll have the header response info in there too, but you'll see how Google will view all the source HTML.

-Dan