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I can't seem to make any progress with my car dealership client in rankings or traffic. I feel like I've narrowed out most of the common problems, the only other thing I can see is that all their inventory is on a subdomain using a dedicated auto dealership software. Any suggestion of a better way to handle this situation? Am I missing something obvious? The url is rcautomotive.com

Thanks for your help!

Magento pages have been giving me a lot of trouble with the canonical tags.

In some cases duplicate pages are showing up, so I need to add the canonical tag.

In other cases I'm getting an error that there are multiple canonical tags per page.

How can I get my pages canonized without duplicate tags? It seems like it's either too much or not enough, no matter what I do.

Note: this only applies to category and product pages.

We are using Raven Tools for our ranking results.

We have a client who has occupied the top spot on Google for the past several months. According to the Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool, this keyword should generate around 5,000 Global and Local Monthly average visits. Trends show this keyword has consistent month over month traffic. The keyword search type is broad match.

When we look at analytics, they're only getting 5 visits per month. Shouldn't the top spot get the lion's share of traffic? We've noticed this trend on several of our clients whose traffic doesn't really increase proportionate to the estimated search volume that Google returns in the Adwords tool.

Ideas? We see the estimated traffic and tell clients, "Once we get you in that top organic slot, you'll get most of that traffic," but it's not correlating.

Thanks so much.

Thanks for your answer, John. So, we should have the client 301 the url A to the desired url B. Confirmed!

Our client built a wordpress site on url A, then opted for a better url B. Rather than moving all the wordpress files/website over to the new url B, they just contacted GoDaddy, who hosted BOTH urls under the same IP address.

When I do a term target on url B, I'm flagged for rel canonical use. I can only get a B grade for each keyword. (I've also tried using url A, but I get the same flag and B grade results).

I'm not sure if this set-up will thwart our seo efforts for the site, because only the homepage comes up when you type in url B anyway. Every subsequent page displays the original url A. Somewhere, wordpress is also adding a rel canonical link on the homepage source to url A, too, which we can't seem to edit.

So, question is: is it ok to leave this set up as is with both urls hosted on the same IP address, or should we move the whole site over to the desired url B?

Thanks much!

Daniel and Tom- Thanks a million! I'll take your advice and use the cross url rel canonical element. I wasn't sure if it would work- but based on your input I did some searches and found Google's response to Matt Cutts original statement about not working across urls- and it looks like Google decided to support it, just as you said. Here is the link I tracked down:

Google Webmaster Blog- Rel Canonical across domains

Thanks again guys!

Hello,

We have a new client that has several sites with the exact same content. They do this for tracking purposes. We are facing political objections to combine and track differently. Basically, we have no choice but to deal with the situation given. We want to avoid duplicate content issues, and want to SEO only one of the sites. The other sites don't really matter for SEO (they have off-line campaigns pointing to them) we just want one of the sites to get all the credit for the content.

My questions:

1. Can we use the rel canonical element on the irrelevent pages/URL's to point to the site we care about? I think I remember Matt Cutts saying this can't be done across URL's. Am I right or wrong?

2. If we can't, what options do I have (without making the client change their entire tracking strategy) to make the site we are SEO'ing the relevant content?

Thanks a million!

Todd