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JoshPugh

Hi prospects,

It's a common problem, so no need to apologise!

You'll find a lot of good information about this in two places: SEOMoz for one has some great information about canonicalisation. This is basically the act of telling your website that while this page exists, it's basically a duplicate of another page. This way Google will only look at the "original".

Secondly in terms of Wordpress, I'm a huge fan of Yoast and their articles about optimising Wordpress. In addition to that, they have a fantastic plugin for Wordpress which gives you all the power you'll need to do the required things in Wordpress, so I seriously recommend that you check that out too!

I hope that helps you out!

JoshPugh

Ok first and formest: The Meta Description ≠ Meta Keywords.

You've pasted:

<meta name="keywords" content="protein powder, whey protein, protein supplement, whey protein isolate, hydrolyzed whey" />

Which is different from:

<meta name="description" content="Focusing on whey protein powder supplement that's the best in the business." />

Notice the bold bit in the above examples. The keywords element is good for validity but essentially unimportant. The description tag however is crucial to clickthroughs as it will entice the reader on a SERP to click on your link over the ones around it.

Secondly, when you're designing your Drupal template, you should certainly be able to re-arrange these elements. Have a play with page.tpl.php and drupal_set_head() - (I think) and see what you can do. That's not crucially important though. Also ensure that you don't have duplicate <title>tags, as this may be causing your issue with it reading a blank one and getting confused. Also ensure that they are inside the <head> tags. The <a title="SEOMoz Crawl Test" href="http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test">SEOMoz Crawl Test</a> can probably also help you out because it gives reports on what it finds on each page! Have a play and let us know how you go!</title>

JoshPugh

NoFollow links are highly beneficial, if you take Rand Fishkin's point of view (which I'd strongly recommend).

Basically a NoFollow link comes from forums, comments and other online activity which shows that not only are you purely trying to build backlinks, you're actively participating in the community.

Obviously Follow are essential for your SEO "juice", but a combination of NoFollows shows that you're not only fetching for rankings, your website actually has relevance to the wider community. You may not get a direct 1:1 benefit like a Follow link, but Google can still see the DA and PA that a NoFollow is coming from, and can index that just as readily (even if it is in a completely different way).

P.S. This is a somewhat contested opinion, so I'd add the disclaimer that this is what I think.

JoshPugh

Hi uwaim2012,

You can certainly re-use the old domain, just by removing the 301.

When you add a 301, you pass the link juice over to the new domain and this will continue as long as the 301 is there.

Technically therefore Google will pass over that old domain and slowly forget about it completely. When you remove the 301, you will have to reindex that domain. Any links that are still pointing the old domain will begin to give the juice back to it, and it will basically be building from scratch again.

It's still worth it though if this won't be happening for a year or two because the passing of juice is always worth it.

JoshPugh

Yes you can track PDFs.

Google has a page of information about how it works here, for starters.

Secondly, if you are using Wordpress, then I'd recommend the use of Yoast's Wordpress SEO or Google Analyticator. This functionality is built in with some configuration (outbound link tracking etc.)

JoshPugh

You need to add a canonical reference to stop that:

See SEOMoz's instruction here.

JoshPugh

I think the crucial factor here is long-term goals over short term benefits. While using some directories such as the ones you listed are showing boosts in SEO for your competition, there is always the chance (and a likely one at that) that they are found for what they are by Google and other search engines.

Because of this, while there is a boost at the moment, it's quite possible that when they are found out to be using "black hat" techniques and subsequently punished for it, the sites they link to will also be punished. This has happened before with link farms and such.

My recommendation therefore would be not to use these, and instead stick to properly monitored and customised link building techniques. Directories are a fantastic resource for incoming links, and there are lots out there that are properly maintained; use them instead and you'll reap long term rewards.

This is a longer road, I understand, however you will be sitting pretty in the long term.

JoshPugh

NoIndex I think is slightly superfluous as the 301 will take care of it and also point people to a proper result and give Google a redirected result.

However SEOMoz's Robots information page page suggests:

"In most cases, meta robots with parameters "noindex, follow" should be employed as a way to to restrict crawling or indexation."

So maybe consider that...

As for Robots, you can check out SEOMoz's Robots information page where it has information on wildcards, which you could use, which I THINK would work (i.e. http://domain.com/*/tags ?

Not quite sure on that last bit though...

JoshPugh

Which means you should have a read of this SEOMoz article about redirection.

In regards to your title... It all seems well and good, so it may be one of these other issues that are causing your problem

JoshPugh

You don't want to filter it! Instead you want to work out why it's doing that, and then fix it. This is going to be done by adding a rel="canonical" link for starters, and then also 301 redirecting the non-WWW to the WWW or vice versa.

You do NOT want Google to see duplicate content, you want all roads to lead to the one.

Therefore look into htaccess 301 redirection (for Apache) or similar.

SEOMoz has a bunch of info about duplication and redirection:

The latter is extremely extremely important for SEO. Duplicate content is bad, and at the moment all of your content has the potential for duplication so you want to ensure that there's only one version of everything.

JoshPugh

Hi msquare,

According to Identity on a blog post about multiple sitemaps:

It is still just one URL, but the engines prefer to not have URLs duplicated across sitemaps.

In this way, you are sending a lower quality signal about your sitemaps. Certainly this can happen, like any duplication, but if it is rampant, hundreds-thousands of URLs duplicated across multiple sitemaps might lead the engines to believe that your are trying to manipulate them in some way and I wouldn't be surprised if they trusted the sitemaps less, which may defeat the purpose of having them in the first place.

I would argue the same. If you have two sitemaps with lots of similar content then it can be seen as inaccurate which is contrary to the point of the sitemap in the first place.

Have a read of that article too that I linked above, because there's a good introduction to multiple sitemaps and indexes, so that you can avoid as many problems as you can!

JoshPugh

Hi William,

Shouldn't be too hard. In that 301 redirect, add a GET query.

i.e. A question mark after the URL in the redirect that says something like:

http://www.new-url.com?redirect=true

What this will mean is that on your NEW site, you can add a query like (if using PHP):

if(isset($_GET['redirect')){

if($_GET['redirect'] == 'true'){

?>

You were redirected!

}

}

Decoding this, it basically checks for a question mark in the url, and if it finds one, it adds the div with the class "redirected" and says something!

Let me know if that didn't make sense!

JoshPugh

Hi yacpro13,

There have been questions on a similar note in the Q&A before if you have a look here and here.

Basically the long and short of things is that yes, they are two completely different terms. There is evidence that adding a plural to something for example actually implies changes in what the searcher was looking for and therefore it's arguably appropriate that different content appear.

While this is a huge pain, you want to make sure that you are targeting a term that you think is appropriate. Out of the tea cup, teacups and teacup, which one of these has the current SERP that is around what you're looking for? Have a think about what people would search for and focus on the big SERPs, not the little ones on the side.

JoshPugh

Hi Matthew,

The key to good SEO is good and organised content.

If you've got three different fields, then ensure that you have on page for each of these sections. Under these pages should be more pages of information that link, relate and add more information on the topic.

On the home page you should have lots of links to all this content, and you should cover all three of the fields in a more general sense.

Keeping the site linked (internally, as well as externally) is crucially important.

If you pick one (or two if you're game) terms for each of these pages, you will be able to focus your SEO and target particular terms for each aspect of your site.

Start there and you should start to get some numbers

JoshPugh

Ah sorry about missing the bracket.

Yeah the ? query has to come at the very end, otherwise it interrupts the flow of the URL... So it should be C.com/blogpost-20?redirect=true

There is lots you can do, but I understand that it may be a bit more work than you planned

JoshPugh

Well.. SEOMoz Pro does it! Just check out the Crawl Diagnostics -> Duplicate Page Content then go to the top right and Export as CSV!

JoshPugh

Yes it does, in column AF there is a list of Duplicate Page Content URLs

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