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.

Hi Nick,

I believe there is no longer a "character count", but more a space or pixel limit - http://www.seomofo.com/experiments/serp/snippet-ascii-art.html

This has been played out by a few people's experiments, so looks fairly solid - the limit relates to space, not character count. You could certainly try to create something that looked good both as a regular result and a sitelink.

Hi,

You don't need to redirect at all (with a 301 or otherwise) if the canonical tag is in place. So don't worry about that at all - both URLs can load together if the canonical tag points Google from the "duplicate" to the "correct / canonical" one. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

I am not sure the frequency of Moz's crawling or if you can force a refresh, I'm sorry.

Hi,

Hard to say, but it definitely won't have helped. As Bryan says, you've split authority between over twice the number of pages the site should have, and Google can take action against sites that produce a large amount of duplicate content. I'd get the canonical tags in place (and thoroughly check they're set up right, as it can be a mess if they're implemented incorrectly) and check on progress over two or three weeks. If you see nothing happen, I'd say your reason for dropping could be something else.

Hi again,

The canonical tag sounds like the right way to go for you.

Regarding the meta refresh method of redirection - this works perfectly for users... it was always the case that search engines did not honour this as a redirect though. This may have changed in the recent past (and realistically, it should have - a lot of people used this tactic for redirection and Google should understand that it shows a moved page). However, it is generally thought that the meta refresh does not pass all authority (as noted here), and this thread shows a Googler advising against it (this is a post from 2010 though).

Honestly, with the canonical tag, you don't need to do the refresh / redirection - this will take care of the issue

Cheers,

Jane

Hi there,

I'll answer these one at a time as there are a few responses to go through.

default.htm is the home page as created by the CMS, but you want to either use that URL or www.cheaptubes.com as the home page, not both.

The solution is a 301 or the canonical tag so that home page content does not appear on both URLs.

Hi again,

Yep - your non-www and www pages are both resolving... e.g. http://cheaptubes.com/ and http://www.cheaptubes.com/ bring up the same content. Also, http://cheaptubes.com/default.htm and http://www.cheaptubes.com/default.htm is also a duplicate of the home page.

Internally, I am seeing the same thing, e.g. http://www.cheaptubes.com/carbon-nanotubes-prices.htm and http://cheaptubes.com/carbon-nanotubes-prices.htm - same page, one on the www subdomain ("www." is a subdomain like any other, just with an extremely common name) and one just sitting on the root.

The solution here is either to 301 redirect the non-www version of the site to the www version for every page, or to use the canonical tag to point from the non-preferred versions to the "canonical" versions. More information on this is available here.

You also have a situation where upper-case URLs will resolve as well as lower case ones, e.g. http://www.cheaptubes.com/SWNTs.htm and http://www.cheaptubes.com/swnts.htm (as well as http://cheaptubes.com/swnts.htm!).

URLs should only be allowed to resolve with one case, preferably lower. The upper / mixed case should 301 redirect to the proper version.

Essentially, the "two versions of the site" issue is the biggest problem, with all pages being available on at least two URLs - one with www and one without. There are other tidiness issues like /default.htm bringing up the home page as well.

Does this make sense? Let me know if this is not clear.

Best,

Jane

Hi there,

This could definitely be a case of both non-www and www URLs resolving, but I'd like to echo the guys above me and ask for more information - if you could share the actual examples, either on here or in a private message, it would be easier to find why Moz has found twice the number of URLs your site should have.

Thanks,

Jane

Quite a few answers here that can be endorsed

Basically, footer links have been abused shamelessly in the past, when they were a good way of including juice-passing links to whomever you liked without many people seeing the links. Big sites still do it and still get away with it, but we've long known that all is not fair in SEO and Amazon can sometimes get away with things that small companies cannot.

Nofollowing footer links is the safe way out, especially if you want to keep the links for branding purposes.

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 there,

If you have the potential to acquire movieguide.com, that's a great domain name. That said, you're right that this is a crazy competitive space and some of the competitors are giants like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes!

One option is to buy the .com and redirect it to the .org. If you engage in offline advertising (magazines, on the subway, etc.), you could use the .com because it does look more professional. You could have the .org continue to be the resolving website, after the .com is 301 redirected.

We are always hesitant to recommend redirection (especially of an entire domain) if you don't have to due to the risk of lost rankings. The rankings are usually not too hard to get back, but it's never a sure thing.