Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Peter,

I will check this out further

Hi, Thanks to both Peter & Jarno for their replies.

I must apologise in that I meant that the Domain Authority, as measured in the Competitive Domain Analysis, which has suffered principally in each case the actual Domain Mozrank has only changed a little.

Yes I am sure we are using the rel canonical tag correctly. We got this information from SEOMOZ forum and checked it out independently.  Removing the duplication resulted in the correct number of files being seen.

Howard

Hi,

Since we sorted all duplication issues using the rel canonical tag in the home page, and redirects in the htaccess file, our Moz Ranking has dropped markedly (possibly because there are now less apparent links on our site. At the same time our rankings and traffic from Google have dropped markedly.

I notice that none of our top ranking competitors are using the rel canonical tag in the source on their home pages.

We have just performed the same seo strategy on another unrelated site with the same immediate drop in MOZ ranking.

Thanks Keri,

That's useful

Howard

Mark, Thank you.

In our sitemap.xml we use priorities 1 to 0.1 averaging out at about 0.5  is there much mileage in this?

Howard

Our ecommerce software produces a sitemap.html which is very large.  We also use a sitemap.xml file for Google and other main search engines.  Is there any point in maintaining the sitemap.html or should we hide it?

Thanks Brad,

I've had two good replies, and your link is additionally really helpful.

Howard

We are planning to set up a blog using wordpress to help improve domain authority and rankings.  Is there a preferred site to put this?  ie  is it best to create a subdomain, or put it in the root directory or put it in a completely different domain?  Or will there be no resulting difference ?

Thanks Charles.

The link was useful.

We have had a page which until recently was ranked first or second by Google UK and also worldwide for the term "Snowbee".  It is now no longer in the top 50.

I ran a page optimization report on the url and had a very good score.  The only criticism was that I had used an atypical character in the url.  The only unusual character was an underscore "_"    We use the underscore in most file names without apparent problems with search engines. In fact they are automatically created in html files by our ecommerce software, and other pages do not seem to have been so adversely affected.

Should we discontinue this practice?  It will be difficult but I'm sure we can overcome this if this is the reason why Google has marked us down.

I attach images of the SEO Report pages

8fDPi.jpg AdLIn.jpg