Hey Jom

Problem is, from a search engine perspective, those are four duplicate pages & from a linking perspective, they are four different pages that you could see your link popularity shared between. Neither of which is ideal.

I would certainly deal with this but it needn't be an arduous task.

1. Set up a rewrite rule to change all URLs to lowercase and 301 any non lowercase ones, something like this in your htaccess should do the job assuming you are using a LAMP environment.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteMap  lc int:tolower
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [A-Z]
RewriteRule (.*) ${lc:$1} [R=301,L]

2. Add an automated lowercase canonical to all of these pages so they canonicalise to the lowercase version.

3. Try to replace the links so they all use lowercase. If this is a dynamic site it should be easy but if not, you could still do a string replacement across multiple files. You could write a little script to automate this if it is a huge job from the sitemap (of lowercase URLs of course.

Certainly worth doing and should not be too difficult with a bit of smarts applied.

Hope this helps!
Marcus

Hey Graeme

I am unsure of any specific guidelines with regards to HTML special characters but I would tend to keep my page titles to the agreed and safe characters. In this instance, the page title is totally fine but ascii has been abused in page titles in years gone by to create more catchy looking SERP listings.

(¯'·.¸(¯'·.¸Free X !!! Click Here !!!¸.·'´¯)¸.·'´¯)

You may find a variety of things happen and your titles get rewritten.

One other point or perspective - you mention that Googlebot sees the ascii code but a human sees the bullet character. Well, where? How does your SERP listing look? If the page title in the search engine results looks like this:

My Product • Category | Site Name

Then, I would say that is a pretty good reason to do away with the special characters.

If this was me, I would keep it simple, stick with the best practices and make do with standard characters to break up your title tags: - | etc.

Some links that may help:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35624

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey Michael

Chances are you will pick up some kind of filtering around these pages. The use of the word penalty may make it sound heavier than it should do and really we may just see these pages pulled down so they don't return for the targeted phrases. Inn terms of classification they are what is known as a doorway page and whilst there are multiple components of the algorithm that target this kind of content the famous one is Panda

Doorway pages - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2721311?hl=en

Some notes from that page:

• Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page
• Pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site(s)
• Substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy

I always find it useful to think about intent here and if you are based in Birmingham UK (so are we by the way so hello) and someone searches for 'web design birmingham' or 'web design hall green' then Google will tend to localise the results. This shows a pack of local results (3 pack now) and localised organic results where physical address weighs in. This makes it harder to rank these pages as you don't have the location signals but more importantly it illustrates the intent behind the search where folks are looking for a local business.

So, ranking these pages for locations like London without an address would be tough + they could send some low quality signals via Panda or other qualitative algorithm components. Then, even if they did rank, they may not convert the way you would like.

It is possible to work around this to some extent by creating truly authoritative pages that answer the need behind the query and why your company is a good fit. This involves getting inside your customers head and answering all the questions. I wrote about this in some detail here: http://searchengineland.com/local-seo-landing-pages-2-0-222583

Few options in my mind

1. Pick a few areas and create truly awesome pages and see how they do

2. Trial this with PPC and see how they do. If they pages don't convert at a rate that you can shovel traffic onto them then there may be better ways to spend your marketing time.

Hope that helps!

Marcus

Hey Michael

Yeah, it is possible to make landing pages work. These pages should really answer the questions the user provides and we have used this approach to supplement local visibility with many businesses - the real trick here is quality.

Ensure the page is high quality and avoid the temptation to just crank out hundreds of these with largely similar text.

Here is an example - you want business from London but are based in Birmingham. This page could outline how London is only an hour or so train journey from Birmingham and yet the price breaks you can offer over a London agency make using you a serious consideration. This speaks directly to that London customer and provides an angle for unique content. Then, bolster this with location specific reviews, testimonials, case studies etc etc to create a unique page and see how you get on.

For super competitive areas then you may need an additional push to get these pages to rank but you can always buy traffic and test and determine if the strategy is solid before doubling down on building some organic visibility.

At the end of the day it always comes down to quality - keep quality in mind at all times and all strategies have legs.

Hope that helps

Marcus

Okay, so the crawler is seeing it for the www. version but not for the non www version.

If we look in a browser at:

http://dunninggolf.com it redireects to www.dunninggolf.com

If I look in webbug at the headers it does not redirect and returns a 200 Okay status code for the non www version of the URL.

I think this could be the issue here and that for some reason, when bing visits the site is giving out some strange 301 response which then sends out a loop of 302 redirects.

Okay, there is a tool here that lets you visit the site as if you were bing bot and get the HTTP headers:

http://view-http-headers.gishan.net/fetch-as-bing-bot-tool.jsp

You have to select bingbot rather than IE6 from list of user agents.

If you visit the www.dunninggolf.com version then it returns a 200 OK

If you visit the http://dunninggolf.com version then it returns a 301 redirect (which in turn seemingly issues the loop of 302 temp redirects that never go anywhere).

Okay, there is your issue. The site has some issue with bingbot (and possibly others) when visited via the http://dunninggolf.com URL. This issue is not visible in webbug or a browser. That said, we do seem to get some redirection from http://dunninggolf.com to http://www.dunninggolf.com.

So, taking a stab in the dark, I would say there is some kind of meta refresh or something going on after the page has been returned as a HTTP 200 result. I am not on my windows PC so can't examine the headers more closely but this is certainly your issue here.

You need to find out the following.

1. How are they doing the redirect?

2. why are they redirecting this way?

3. why are they serving up these 301 /  302 loops via http://dunninggolf.com

Ultimately, this is an issue for the developers. You should advise them on correct protocol (a 301 via the HTTP headers from http://dunninggolf.com to http://www.dunninggolf.com and not via this whacky redirect they currently have in place).

Wowzers, that was a tricky one!

Hope this helps and sorts out your headache!

Marcus

Changing the CMS itself will not cause a drop, but any actual changes to the content or structure of the pages may cause changes (good or bad).

As with Craig, I am no big fan of CMS Made Simple, have you thought about maybe migrating to one of the other open CMS platforms? Hard to advise without knowing your site and goals but WordPress can take some beating for most small business websites and Joomla! & Drupal provide options if you need more flexibility.