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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.

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?

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 ?

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

I can find no way of removing or editing existing brand rules

I tried to post a question which was at least 15 words long and received an error saying the question was less than 5 characters QrXcp

Three weeks ago we had a very large number of site errors revealed by crawl diagostics. These errors related purely to the presence of both http://domain name and http://www.domain name. We used the rel canonical tag in the head of our index page to direct all to the www. preference, and we have no improvement. Matters got worse two weeks ago and I checked with Google Webmaster and found that Google had somehow lost our preference choice. A week ago I asked how to overcome this problem and received good advice about how to re-enter our preference for the www.tag with Google. This we did and it was accepted. We aso submitted a new sitemap.xml which was also acceptable to Google. Today, a week later we find that we have even more duplicate content (over 10,000 duplicate errors) showing up in the latest diagnostic crawl. Does anyone have any ideas? (Getting a bit desperate.)

Using SEOmoz for the first time, the initial crawl said we have 9,00 errors which were basically 4,500 duplicate pages and 4,500 dupllicate page titles.  (ie http://domainname/etc .html, and http://www.domainmname/etc .html
We altered our website accordingly by changing all internal links to http://www.domainmname/etc .html as Google and all other rngines are listing us using the www. prefix. On the next crawl we now have even more of these duplicate errors.  How d we go about removing them as we only have one file for each on the server. Google has down graded our website in April by 35% and ass this is a retail site we are losing a lot of business. I would very much appreciate it if anyone has the time to amswer. Howard