Hi there,

You may have a more complex pagination issue. My former colleague wrote a good guide to this sort of e-commerce pagination / canonicalisation problem a few months ago. It may qualify as one of the non-boring reads on the subject Do you see a solution here that looks good for you? - http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/conquering-pagination-guide.html

Hi Robert,

The canonical tag is in place on the dynamic URL, meaning that Google is assigning that "page"'s value to the correct, static URL. As such, this shouldn't be a problem for Google. Not sure why Moz is still flagging this, but my guess is that the Moz system is not set up to disregard overly dynamic URLs when they are properly canonicalised elsewhere. The Moz system likely understands that this isn't duplicate content, however, due to the canonical tag. The dynamic URL warning is just being triggered regardless.

If all your dynamic URLs are canonicalised like this to their proper canonical, static version, you should not have a problem with Google.

Cheers,

Jane

Given how strict Google is about footer links (with fairly good reason; they have been abused badly so often that footer links with good intentions get swept up in the mix), I would nofollow those links if you wish to keep them because they've brought you qualified traffic.

If the client site is otherwise quite strong, consider looking for another location to link from in a way that seems editorially-chosen and "natural". It's unfortunate that footer links have become so "poisonous", but they truly are best avoided or nofollowed.

Google handles special characters in URLs, titles, etc. just fine now - a page like http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Château_de_Versailles uses the proper accent on the a, and is displayed properly in modern browsers as well as in Google's results.

There should be no impact on rankings, although it's safe to say that best practice would include using the proper characters, as they certainly benefit usability.

Hi Jason,

If you use the unique ccTLDs and the href lang / rel="alternative" tag, this duplication will be fine. The tag was brought out in late 2011 and tells Google: "just because this content is the same on an Australian site, a British site and an American site, this is okay - it has been done on purpose." You can also use it to point to direct translations, e.g. "this Spanish content is the same as this English content over here, but one is meant for the UK and one for Argentina." Lastly, you can also use this tag as mark up to say "This is French content meant for Canada, and this English content over here is also meant for Canada".

More information about the tag is available here and here.

Cheers,

Jane

Hi Tihomir,

Are you planning to give the remaining category a facelift too?

It would be best to include all three categories under the same subdomain (e.g. the "www." subdomain) and place them in folders, e.g. www.domain.dk/category1, www.domain.dk/category2 and www.domain.dk/category3. www2 isn't technically damaging but it's bad from a usability point of view. It's incredibly unlikely to be remembered, for one, and even more likely to be mistyped as www.

Agree with everyone else here - this is a pretty horrible strategy when done solely for SEO purposes, and usually ends up being very spammy. Most businesses don't have a broad enough catalogue to warrant multiple sites, and the benefit of having keyword-rich domain names (even, or especially exact-match domains like carinsurance.com) is negligible nowadays. Google had to crack down on this, as domain names used to be a very easy to way to rank.

Google is good at figuring out who owns which websites, so unless you are incredibly dedicated with your efforts to hide details, a network of sites like this is likely to be grouped together - Google will probably know they're all yours. Whilst that alone isn't a terrible thing (lots of businesses own more than one domain), Google has seem networks created for SEO purposes like this so many times that the view they'll take of it is dim. Something as simple as the same Local / Places / telephone information would be more than enough to make that connection.