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We look after a website which was originally just hosted on mysite.co.uk. We expanded to the European markets creating mysite.de and mysite.fr getting each product and page translated properly into German and French respectively. We have really good success on google.de and google.fr for these sites.

We want to do the same with google.ie and create mysite.ie for the Irish market but as they speak English there will be no translation required. The only thing we will change is the base currency from GBP to EUR.

From a duplication point of view will this be bad for both businesses mysite.co.uk and mysite.ie or will the .ie site be seen as the 'copier' and the .co.uk as the authority? Has anyone got any advice over best practice here and what would be the best thing for us to consider? We absolutely cannot risk the .co.uk site ranking wise.

It's unrealistic for us to rewrite each product description and page so it means the same thing but is worded differently to avoid the duplication issue.

Right... We think we've been able to get the code noindex code into the dodgy pages. The only way we could think of doing it without breaking the user interface was to put this rule into the PHP.

if(!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH']) && strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH']) == 'xmlhttprequest')
{

normal code

}

else
{

echo '';
echo '';
echo '';
echo '';
echo '';
echo '404';
echo '';
echo '';
}

Its rendering ok for us front end, if anyone would like to test... I'm just hopeful it would work for google?

http://www.outdoormegastore.co.uk/cycling/cycling-clothing/protective-clothing.html?ajax=1

One thing I am not sure about is how google is going to revisit the said pages. I have put in various rules to the robots.txt files as well as the url parameter handling in webmaster tools to prevent any future pages from being followed... Would these rules need to be removed?

Thanks for all of the replies... My best option seems to be the meta noindex rule but the nature of the pages that are getting indexed are just one long ajax string with no access to the header are. I hope I have already 'prevented' google from following the links in the future by adding the rules to robots.txt but  I'm now desperate to clean up (cure) the existing ones.

My next thought would be to put a rule in htaccess and redirect anything with ajax in the url to a 404 page?

I'm worried that this may have even worse side effects with rankings but its based on this article that google publish: https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=59819

"To remove a page or image, you must do one of the following:

• Make sure the content is no longer live on the web. Requests for the page must return an HTTP 404 (not found) or 410 status code

What would your thoughts be on this?

Thanks for the quick reply! I'm desperate to get these removed as soon as possible now. I've got webmaster tools access but requesting over 5,000 pages to be removed one by one will take too long. You can't do page removal in bulk can you?

I'm going to work on the noindex option

We've had a lot of pages indexed by google which we didn't want indexed. They relate to a ajax category filter module that works ok for front end customers but under the bonnet google has been following all of the links.

I've put a rule in the robots.txt file to stop google from following any dynamic pages (with a ?) and also any ajax pages but the pages are still indexed on google.

At the moment there is over 5000 pages which have been indexed which I don't want on there and I'm worried is causing issues with my rankings.

Would a redirect rule work or could someone offer any advice?

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:outdoormegastore.co.uk+inurl:default&num=100&hl=en&safe=off&prmd=imvnsl&filter=0&biw=1600&bih=809#hl=en&safe=off&sclient=psy-ab&q=site:outdoormegastore.co.uk+inurl%3Aajax&oq=site:outdoormegastore.co.uk+inurl%3Aajax&gs_l=serp.3...194108.194626.0.194891.4.4.0.0.0.0.100.305.3j1.4.0.les%3B..0.0...1c.1.SDhuslImrLY&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&fp=ff301ef4d48490c5&biw=1920&bih=860

We setup a pretty large htaccess file in February for a site that involved over 2,000 lines of 301 redirects from old product url's to new ones.

The 'old urls' still get a lot of traffic from product review sites and other pretty good sites which we can't change.

We are now trying to reduce the page load times and we're ticking all of the boxes apart from the size of the htaccess file which seems to be causing a considerable hang on load times. The file is currently 410kb big!

My question is, what should I do in terms of a long terms strategy and has anyone came across a similar problem?

At the moment I am inclined to now remove the 2,000 lines of individual redirects and put in a 'catch all' whereby anything from the old site will go to the new site homepage.

Example code:

RedirectMatch 301 /acatalog/Manbi_Womens_Ear_Muffs.html /manbi-ear-muffs.html
RedirectMatch 301 /acatalog/Manbi_Wrist_Guards.html /manbi-wrist-guards.html

There is no consistency between the old urls and the new ones apart from they all sit in the subfolder /acatalog/

We've got a dilemma at the moment with the content we supply to an affiliate. We currently supply the affiliate with our product database which includes everything about a product including the price, title, description and images. The affiliate then lists the products on their website and provides a Commission Junction link back to our ecommerce store which tracks any purchases with the affiliate getting a commission based on any sales via a cookie.

This has been very successful for us in terms of sales but we've noticed a significant dip over the past year in ranking whilst the affiliate has achieved a peak...all eyes are pointing towards the Panda update.

Whenever I type one of our 'uniquely written' product descriptions into Google, the affiliate website appears higher than ours suggesting Google has ranked them the authority.

My question is, without writing unique content for the affiliate and changing the commission junction link. What would be the best option to be recognised as the authority of the content which we wrote in the first place? It always appears on our website first but Google seems to position the affiliate higher than us in the SERPS after a few weeks. The commission junction link is written like this:

http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-1428744-10475505?sid=shopp&url=http://www.outdoormegastore.co.uk/vango-calisto-600xl-tent.html

Thanks for the reply..

Would the 300 unique words be spread across just body content or would it include meta words too?

It's going to be difficult describing tent pegs in 300 words or more!

I'm getting a lot of duplicate content errors on my ecommerce site www.outdoormegastore.co.uk mainly centered around product pages.

The products are completely different in terms of the title, meta data, product descriptions and images (with alt tags)but SEOmoz is still identifying them as duplicates and we've noticed a significant drop in google ranking lately.

Admittedly the product descriptions are a little bit thin but I don't understand why the pages would be viewed as duplicates and therefore can be ranked lower? The content is definitely unique too.

As an example these three pages have been identified as being duplicates of each other.

http://www.outdoormegastore.co.uk/regatta-landtrek-25l-rucksack.html

http://www.outdoormegastore.co.uk/canyon-bryce-adult-cycling-helmet-9045.html

http://www.outdoormegastore.co.uk/outwell-minnesota-6-carpet-for-green-07-08-tent.html

I'm trying to think of what links to sacrifice then without effecting the user experience too much. When you actually look at the links, there are two for each product on the page, the image links to the same page as the product title. Its the same with the navigation, the nav in the header is pretty much the same as the nav in the footer and then every other link is essential for conversions I feel.

I've just done a quick analysis of other sites and I know most of these don't need the SEO but it seems to be a trend with ecommerce to have more than 100, probably because its almost necessary?

Amazon.co.uk - 166 Links

Play.com - 278 Links

asos.com - 175 Links

johnlewis.com - 467 Links