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I am auditing a Joomla website that uses the MightySites component to create multiple versions of the same site for different state/province areas. For example, the site structure looks something like:

example.com/fl/
example.com/mn/
example.com/ny/
example.com/wa/

etc.

Each of the state home pages are largely identical and much of the content within each state sub-folder is a copy of the original content on the main example.com site, with minor changes here and there. The client is a national organization and needs to keep this structure to allow each state to be able to edit and change their own content, though as far as I can see content doesn't actually vary much.

What's best practice here in reducing duplicate content issues? We can't use hreflang as it is all within one country (although it does also provide two different language versions of content, for which I will use hreflang.) Should we just canonical everything back to the corresponding pages on the example.com site?

Any thoughts or recommendations much appreciated.

Totally agree with this move. Thumbs down is too easy, not specific, and too anonymous. If a reader really has constructive feedback then they should be prepared to post a comment.

Hi,

First off it would be useful to know which version of Drupal you are using, which modules you have installed to control Meta Tags and the version of that module you have installed. It sounds like you might be running Drupal 7 and are perhaps using the Meta Tags Module (the version - can be found under /admin/build/modules)?

The page at /admin/config/search/metatags allows you to set up meta tag defaults for different content types using tokens, such as the node's title, site name etc. However, you should be able override this on a per node (page) basis.

Take a look at this video and it will guide you through it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SviVqtAinSk#t=5m56s.

If that doesn't help let me know what happened and all the version details and we can explore further

watch?v=SviVqtAinSk#t=5m56s

From the little I know of Nginx, I know it is meant to be faster, less intensive on server memory and able to handle more concurrent connections, but Apache is more widely supported across different servers and is more flexible out of the box.

The one thing I have had to get my head around in working on clients sites that run on Nginx is the different URL rewrite rules i.e. http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/converting_rewrite_rules.html

If you created a campaign in Moz Analytics but then switched back to the old Moz Pro interface you won't see the campaign there. Navigate to http://analytics.moz.com/manage-campaigns and check if your campaign is listed there.

No one query or site that I know of that will show all of a G+ authors articles but here's a few things to try.

1. Check the authors Google+ profile about section and look at the sites they list under contributor to and links. Do a site: search + the authors name and see what articles you can find.

2. Grab the authors author snippet profile picture and run it through Google image search and see what that brings up.

3. If the author generally includes a bio at the end of their posts search for unique text from their bio.

4. If the author has an author profile on their own website, these will sometimes include an archive of the authors posts on that website.  Run a backlink check on that author profile page with Open Site Explorer. This will potentially show you where they have written content internally and externally.

Probably best to submit a support ticket to the Moz support team through http://moz.com/help/pro.

I had a similar situation but in my case the Moz Analytics wizard process didn't complete properly. Despite adding the relevant details to the campaign afterward the campaign didn't gather any data. I just had to delete the campaign and add it again. That did the trick.

Nice! (for speed at least)

I would show your team some examples of external URLs pointing at the non trailing slash versions of your pages and explain the downside of the 302 redirect. Also consider that people and bots visiting those URLs will be adding overhead to your server, and on Amazon that will equal increased cost (small as it may be, the pennies add up!)

Reading the link you provided it looks like the default behaviour of the page metadata redirect under the s3 console is to create a 301 redirect. That makes me think the 302 is coming from somewhere else. Look at the following URL:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/HowDoIWebsiteConfiguration.html

It looks like you can add advanced redirects under "Enable website hosting -> edit redirection rules". I'd explore if there are redirects listed there and maybe chat to your developers further.

While you are it I spotted two other issues for you to consider. Currently the index.html files in your directories resolve to the same page as your main directory. I would 301 those pages back to the parent directory (slash version). Or you could add canonical URLs pointing back to the parent directory (with trailing slash). I'd make a case for adding canonical URLs to all pages.

Also, you currently have a number of redirect chains e.g.

http://www.strutta.com/resources/posts/share-your-contests-and-sweepstakes-all-over-social-media 301 redirects to http://www.strutta.com/resources which 302 redirects to http://www.strutta.com/resources/.

You need to find the original redirect and change it to 301 redirect to the trailing slash version of the directory. Screaming Frog can help you find these redirect chains.

Hey Danny,

As Maximilian suggested above the best solution is going to be to change those 302s to 301s. I generally like to redirect to trailing slash URLs for directories and non trailing slash URLs for files/pages (that's that standard convention). I find in practice hardly anyone who links organically ever includes a trailing slash when linking to a page, but when it's the homepage I don't worry about it too much, browsers and Google can figure that out.

Basically you need to figure out where the 302 is coming from and hopefully it is in your .htaccess file. If you can edit your .htaccess file you need to change that to a 301 redirect, or you could remove the redirect and just use a canonical URL pointing at the / version of the page. I would prefer to go with the 301 though. Just be sure to look at how these redirects are being implemented and in what order, you don't want to end up with redirect chains either.

Can you get access to your .htaccess file or is the server running something funky?

Hi,

If you are going to generate a lot of guides like that I'd definitely link them from the home page. Firstly from a menu item and then perhaps individual links to articles that are relevant to the user on the page they are viewing.

After that make sure you are generating links to those pages as well as the home page.

You could also put an alt tag on your logo header image.

Good luck

More discussion of this on Google+ too: https://plus.google.com/114779041142136013466/posts/U5PTFcRtbdT

What keywords were you ranking for that are now dropping?

The home page is a little light on content. You may want to create some content on the home page to explain to the user what you offer, how you are different and how to use the site. You could perhaps also provide links from the home page directly to each of your airport guide content pages.

Consider whether you should make your shuttle guides 'pages' instead of 'posts' and keep them closer to root of the domain rather than in the shuttles category folder: e.g.

http://www.transfersandshuttles.co.za/shuttles/airport-shuttles-cape-town/

-> http://www.transfersandshuttles.co.za/airport-shuttles-cape-town/ (redirect if you create new URL)

Perhaps the airport shuttle guides could contain some information about the airports in question too? Where to catch shuttles, airlines that fly from there etc. Make a resource for your users.

I have a client with a website that is hosted on a shared webserver running on an Nginx server. When I started working on the website a few months ago I found the server was throwing 100s of 403s and 503s and at one point googlebot couldn't access robots.txt. Needless to say this didn't help rankings!

Now the web hosting company has partially resolved the errors by switching to a new server and I'm now just seeing intermittent spikes in Webmaster Tools of 30 to 70 403 ad 503 errors.

My questions:

1. Am I right in saying there should (pretty much) be no such errors (for pages that we make public and crawlable).
2. Having already asked the web hosting company to look in to this. Any advice on specifically what I should be asking them to look at on the server?
3. If this doesn't work out, does anyone having a recommendation for a reliable web hosting company in the U.S. for a lead generation website with over 20,000 pages and currently 500 to 1000 visits per day?

Thanks for the help Mozzers