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Hi, I've a number of wordpress posts that were written by different authors, and I want to merge them into a single author. If Google sees that originally the post was rel authored to person A and later we change the author reference to person B, will Google see this as suspicious in any way? Or does it not matter, as long as it's only attributed to a single author at any one time? Thanks, Leigh

Hi, I have a client who's made some changes to their content strategy. They want to use a single author for all content produced and publish, to maintain a consistent identity across the web. This single author is a persona e.g. "Joe Bloggs" but this is not a real person. This works fine for creating and publish content (for their blog and outside blog posts). It allows many people to work on creating and publishing content under the same name, which for a number of reasons makes good logistical sense. The problem arises when it comes to social marketing. They have set up a Facebook and Google + profile and Facebook and Google business pages. The main issue is that they are finding it difficult to friend other people because nobody knows this "Joe Bloggs" persona. Can anybody offer advise on how to approach this kind of strategy. Thanks,

Hi, In the Crawl diagnostics reports, I'm getting lots of duplicate errors warnings e.g. duplicate page title. In most cases these are tracking urls and the page has a canonical tag pointing to the original page. It would be helpful if the crawl analysis reports could separate these out from ones that are of genuine concern. It can also happen when there's a noindex tag on a page. Thanks, Leigh

I have a client that's setting up a section of his site in a different language, and we're planning to geo-target those pages to that country. I have suggested a sub-folder solution as it's the most cost effective solution, and it will allow domain authority to flow into those pages. His developer is indicating that they can only set this up as a sub-domain, for technical reasons, but they're suggesting they can rewrite the url's to appear as sub folder pages. I'm wondering how this will work in terms of geo-targeting in Google Webmaster Tools. Do I geo-target the sub domain or the sub folder i.e. does Google only see urls or does it physically see those pages on the sub-domain? It seems like it might be a messy solution. Would it be a better idea just to forget about the rewrites and live with the site being a sub domain? Thanks,

I'm working with someone who's setting up an online jewelry store. The jewelry is available in many metal types, so we're creating filters to provide a good user experience in trying to narrow down their choice. Let's take an example of a wedding ring that's available these options: 10kt yellow gold
10kt white gold
18kt yellow gold
18kt white gold
Palladium
Platinum These are all entered as separate products, so that they can be used in the filtering system. However, apart from some minor changes to the title and description most of the content will be identical, across these 6 product pages. Also, many wedding ring styles are going to be very similar, so we're going to have very similar descriptions for a lot of the rings. We're concerned about problems this might cause with the search engines in terms of duplicate content. There's 2 issues that I an see (there may be more!): They will not index many of the pages and we'll leak link juice to those pages that will never get indexed They do index all the variations, but the content is so similar, that we have different pages competing for essentially the same keywords Also, these products are likely to come and go, so investing heavily on creating really unique content for them isn't really sustainable, affordable. Any advise? Thanks,

In my crawl diagnostics, I notice some 4xx client errors. They are appearing for pages that no longer exist, so I'm not sure what the problem is. Shouldn't they just be dealt as 404's? Anyway, on closer inspection I noticed that my 404 error page contains a canonical tag which points to the missing page. Could this be the issue? Is it a good idea to remove the canonical tag from this error page? Thanks.