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Hi Ikkie,

Thanks for taking the time to respond.  My canonical tags are semantically correct and the pages towards which they point are unique.  I should probably rephrase my question.  Does it matter that the pages towards which the villa listings are canonicalised are significantly different from the villa/product pages that point to them?

My understanding is that the purpose canonicalisation is to alert search engines to the fact that there are multiple versions of the same content and that a particular page of content should be regarded as the authoritative version.  In my case; the content pages that are canonicalised are quite different from the product pages that point towards it.  In this case; would Google pay attention to the canonical tag?

Hi,

My site appears to be under a Google penalty.  We've had an SEO guy assess the site for us and the working hypothesis is that we are under a Panda penalty for duplicate content.  The site is 4 years old and we have never had any success in ranking well for just any none branded keywords. The vacation rental market is highly competitive and we have found ranking for relevant keywords extremely difficult.  For just about every keyword that i am tracking we are below 50.

We sell vacation rentals.  We have ~1500 rental listing pages.  Much of the descriptive text content for those pages has been taken from other vacation rental sites.  I should add that this same content is used by many vacation rental websites also; we're all trying to sell the same listings.  We have started rewriting the the text content for the listings but as there are 1500 of them it is a slow process.

We have listings in 26 different countries.  Each country has it's own landing page.

As an experiment our SEO guy recommended that we canonicalise each listing that belongs to a specific region towards it's regional landing page to see if we receive more direct traffic and begin to rank more highly for keywords.  So www.mydomain.com/villa-in-barbados-1, www.mydomain.com/villa-in-barbados-2, etc all point to www.mydomain.com/barbados as the canonical version of the content.

We haven't really seen much improvement in organic traffic and, although we are ranking for more branded keywords we are not seeing much elevation ranking for other keywords.

Is this the right way to go about it?  The content in the landing pages is significantly different from those pages that have been canonicalised towards them.

Cheers

That makes sense.  Thanks

Hi,

This might seem silly.

What is the correct syntax for the meta tag used when noindexing webpages?

I have "".  I have seen it both with and without the forward slash before the greater than sign.  Does it make any difference if the forward slash is present or not?

Cheers

That is the answer I was looking for, I was thinking along those lines.  The problem was that Seo software was coming up with duplicate content because of different variations of the search parameters.  Thanks very much for a clear and precise answer and taking time to explain this.

My question is I have a search page on our website , you can search by date, number of people staying and so on, I am just wondering should block this in the robots.txt ? Because we have pretty URL'S already for searching by county and searching by towns.  I cannot see any benefit of having  e.g

"search/search.php?sp_dateFrom=16%2F12%2F2015&sp_dateTo=23%2F12%2F2015&sec_drop%5B%5D=727&spesh_town_id=764&q=&occupants=5&bedrooms=3&submit=SEARCH#search"   indexed.  Would I be correct in doing this ?

Robots.txt!  That makes sense.  I'll do that.

Thanks for your response.

Hi Jimmy,

Thanks for responding and for the advice.  When i hit the old sub-domain with Screaming Frog i get 301 moved permanently and nothing further is crawled.  I Frog-crawled a number of the old URLs and they are all redirecting correctly with 301s.  It looks like there is no duplicate content but i am still a bit uneasy that the old sub-domain shows up in Moz and the webmaster tools..

Hi,

I have consolidated my website's many sub-domains into sub-folders.  We had ~20 sub-domains.  The sub-domains and the root domain shared the same code-base and sub-domain specific features were controlled using Apache's SetEnv directive in the httpd.conf includes.

Now they are consolidated.  I have redirected all of the sub-domains to the relevant sub-folder; so http://sub1.mysite.com now 301 redirects to http://www.mysite.com/sub1.The redirects happen in the htaccess file and all sub-domains and the root are still pointing to the same code-base.

However, the Moz campaign tracker still occasionally tells me that i have optimisation opportunities at http://sub1.mysite.com and in both Bing and Google webmaster tools traffic to those sub-domains is mentioned.

Should i delete the subdomains?

Cheers

Hi,

I just checked my existing Disavow.txt file and the SEO company we hired to put us in this mess we're in had previously added secretsearchenginelabs.com to it.  I should have checked that file before i posted my question.  My apologies and please disregard.

Robots.txt!  That makes sense.  I'll do that.

Thanks for your response.

Hi,

Ach, having looked the headers for our listings on one of the affiliate sites I can see that they have a canonical tag that points to their own site.  Ok; now i know.

Thank you both for your help

Hi,

9 of my tracked keywords have dropped by over 20 ranks since last week.  The nastiest drops in ranking are by 36, 38, and 46 places.

For the last month I have been chipping away at the duplicate content with 301 redirects and was expecting my keyword rankings to improve slightly as a result of this; not the opposite.

I don't have any manual actions logged against my site and am at a bit of a loss to explain this sudden drop.

Any suggestions would be most welcome.