Questions created by MikeCoughlin
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Index.php canonical/dup issues
Hello my fellow SEOs! I would LOVE some additional insight/opinions on the following... I have a client who is an industry leader, big site, ranks for many competitive phrases, blah blah..you get the picture. However, they have a big dup content/canonical issue. Most pages resolve with and without the /index.php at the end of the URL. Obviously this is a dup content issue but more importantly they SEs sometimes serve an "index.php" version of the page, sometimes they don't, and it is constantly changing which version it serves and the rank goes up and down. Now, I've instructed them that we are going to need to write a sitewide redirect to attempt a uniform structure. Most people would say, redirect to the non index.php version buttttt 1. The index.php pages consistently outperforms the non index.php versions, except the homepage. 2. The client really would prefer to have the "index.php" at the end of the URL The homepage performs extremely well for a lot of competitive phrases. I'd like to redirect all pages to the "index.php" version except the homepage and I'm thinking that if I redirect all pages EXCEPT the homepage to the index.php version, it could cause some unforeseen issues. I can not use rel=canonical because they have many different versions of the their pages with different country codes in the URL..example, if I make the US version canonical, it will hurt the pages trying to rank with a fr URL, de URL, (where fr/de are country codes in the URL depending where the user is, it serves the correct version). Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated. Thanks in advance! Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeCoughlin0 -
Title tag solution for a med sized site
Its the same old story, we all know it well. I have a client that has a site with 20k+ pages (not too big) and traffic levels around 450k/month. Now we have identified 15 pages with various conversion points/great backlink metrics etc. that we are going to explicitly target in the first round of recs. However, we are looking at about 18,000 dup title tags that I'd like to clean up. The site is not on a CMS and in the past I've had the dev team write a script to adopt the h1 tag or the name of the page etc as the title tag. This can cause a problem when some of these pages that are being found in long tail search lose their positions etc. I'm more hesitant than ever to make this move with this current client because they get a ton of long tail traffic spread over a ton of original content they wrote. How does everyone else usually handle this? Thoughts? Thanks in advance Mozzers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeCoughlin0