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If the URL can be accessed via one page, there is no way Google will be considered as duplicate content. 301 redirects should certainly help avoid duplicate content profiles. But, when it comes to Google search console, it usually takes time to update things under it.

I personally like the idea by CelevePhD, adding rel canonical to your finally page will also help you confirming Google that what is the preferred version and after the crawl Google will deindex the alternate URL from the index.

Hope this helps!

My 3rd point about discussing the project in detail is for the same reason! because this didn't seems to be a do able target!

The other thing that is wrong in my opinion is that traffic is not a good KPI, but KPI should include the %age of goals increased (that may be leads or sales) may be Rankings, and other similar KPIs!

Last time I used URL removal in GWT was a long time ago and at that time the URL will not get out of the index for ever but for 90 days only and after that it will come again.

The better idea in any case is to use no index, no follow tag on the pages that you want out from the Google’s index!

Hope this helps!

I am little confused here. Are you talking about ranking the app in app store or you has a website for an app that you are trying to ranking in search engines? OR you are trying to rank your app in search engines?

I would love if you can describe a little more and maybe I can be of your help.

Pretty much agreed with your point! In my opinion, website owner should discuss the goals and expectations with the contractor and clear the stuff before getting started or else the investment will be a big risk!

Casey is right Panda and Penguin are different penalties and they should be resolved differently! Penguin has to do with links so if there is a penguin penalty then you must have some toxic link within your link profile.

My idea here is to collect all the links (GWT, Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic SEO) and then either manually check each link or use Link Detox or Link Risk to kill all the links that are unhealthy. If the penalty is penguin you will receive a Google message to either remove more links (with some examples of the link) or it will give you a positive message that will say “The penalty has now been revoked”

Note: It is better to remove as many bad links as you can before disavow them.

In case of Panda, the problem is within your site and content so may be the content you think is high quality isn’t really high quality in the eye of Google and in this case you should considerer redoing your content.

All in all I believe the decision of going for a new domain is too early at this stage, my advice is to look in to the penalty details and deal with it.

Hope this helps!

I personally think this is not really a big problem. The problem arrives what your page is accessible via both http and https.

Plus, the ranking plus for https is so minor that you might not even notice every time.

Just a thought!

I agree with Kane, Also, SEOmoz have the good guide regarding this http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success check this out and you will have a clear idea of what to do when you stuck with this situation.

When I search your site in Google it shows me 82 results against my query “site:domain.com” so it seems like Google is slowly crawling your site but you are right the rate of crawling pages is quite slow and to increase this here are few things that you should follow

• Strong Internal Linking

It is important to have a strong internal linking between the pages if you want Google and other search engine to crawl your page. Please check if you have a strong and powerful internal linking between the pages

• Xml Sitemap

The other thing that is missing on your site is xml sitemap. The idea is to add an xml sitemap and add it in Google webmaster tool and this will indicate Google to crawl different areas of your website with no hassle

Hope this will help!

You explained pretty much everything on what happened and your reaction to that update since last year. You have done quite an extensive work on design and content but penguin update usually refers to the links that are pointing back to your website.

I quickly get in to your link profile and found tons of links that are coming from blog comments or article websites. Here are few of the examples…

-          http://www.science20.com/news_articles/3500yearold_mummies_prove_ancient_origin_heart_disease (Keyword used: the therapist)

-          http://www.searchenginejournal.com/microsoft-to-revamp-msn-portal-to-fully-integrate-bing/11263/ (Keyword used: the therapist)

-          http://www.fatmanunleashed.com/weekly-check-in-31-body-fat/ (Keyword used: the therapist)

What you should be doing?

-          Remove as many links to irrelevant sites as possible

-          Try not to get link with exact match anchor text

-          Say a big no to links that are coming from Blog Comments, Forum Signatures, Article websites and more.

My advice here is to audit your link profile in detail and see how many bad links you can remove and at the same time build as many quality links as possible. Submit the Reconsideration request to Google and you probably will be get your rankings and traffic back.

Hope this helps!

Kavin not to panic and planning a solid strategy is the real key to success…

If you are sure its Penguin… then get in to your link profile (best is to extract the link profile from Google Webmaster tool). Now when you have your link profile (may be in a csv) get in to it and figure out how many links are coming from your own network or network of websites… even more how many link pointing to your website that are already hit by penguin…

Clean your link profile and submit the reconsideration request to Google.

IT is good to build some good high authority links from different resources while removing links.

Removing links from 3^rd party website is sometime difficult so in order to be successful one have to use every possible way to request the website to remove a link i.e phone, email and others.

If you are interested in knowing the value of your visitors and why they are not converting then probably you should consider moving towards KISSmetrics as this is one of the best tool that can tell you about the value of visitors and how fixing things can help you increase your conversion rate!

Hello Marshill,

If you ask me I would say Yes, this could be one of the reason why your rankings are dropped and not coming back even after the extensive efforts you have put on the content. My advice here is to remove as many of these kinds of links as possible, submit the rest to disavow file and send it to Google for reconsideration request (now as you have mentioned that you have a manual penalty, you have to do this!)

Once Google will look in to your effort they most probably will lift your penalty and then good links will slowly take your rankings back. Incase Google reject your reconsideration request you have to go through the removal and disavow process again.

Hope this helps!

Nima what platform are you using?

Is it PHP or ASP? And any specific CMS?

With wordpress all you have to do is to install a redirection plugin and you are good to go... but if you have a normal php based website you have to write the following code in your .htaccess file.

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.yoursite.com/newpage.html

_ Redirect 301 /oldpage2.html http://www.yoursite.com/newpage.html_

If you are on a ASP platform you have to look in to your IIS and then work accordingly.

Category, you can block it, if you see they are creating duplicate content to the website.

Read More: Why block this? I mean it is link to your post and this is very much ok so I personally will not recommend you this!

Author Link: Hello No, Infect making it more interactive can allow you inspire new readership!

Joomla SEO is indeed a tough game mostly because most of changes that you need to make on the website require development skill to an extent.

If you are in to Joomal SEO here are the following things that you should consider as important.

-          Choosing the right Server

This is not really important for Joomla but any kind of website if you are not on the right kind of server you might see some big fluctuations in rankings as soon as your server goes down and all. The best idea in this regard is to choosing the right kind of SEO and go from there accordingly.

-          WWW to non-WWW redirect

Especially with Joomla but true for other CMS as well you need to choose one preferred version and redirect all the URLs so that there will be no duplicate content issue on the website. Make sure your website is displaying one kind of URL that is either with WWW or without WWW version.

-          URL Rewriting

When using Joomla set YES to “USE URL rewriting” in order to create Search Engine friendly URLs as by default the URLs are messy and might not understand by Google which have a direct impact on rankings.

-          Include /images/ in Google index

When using Joomla as your CMS, usually the robots.txt excludes images from the search engine index. Make sure you are removing /images/ from the robots/txt file so that your images can include in the Google image index and rank accordingly.

There are many other factors. Mark writes a detailed post about that on Moz.com that you can find here. http://moz.com/blog/seo-your-joomla-website-in-11-super-easy-steps

I would recommend you to use Marks post as a checklist and make sure that you are on the right track when it comes to search engine optimization.

Hope this helps!

That right check when the traffic has dropped and then the current changes in the website (if done any) if there is nothing major has been changed on your website and dates where the traffic has been dropped is close to the Panda or Penguin update then you are one of the millions of culprit.

Check your Google webmaster tools and see if you see any link request and if not then you have to get in to doggy links and remove then and tell Google about it...  If you will be way to lucky your website will come up in rankings or otherwise you have to delete as many doggy links as possible and build as many high quality links as possible.

To see your complete link profile try and get the links from Majestic SEO, Google Webmaster Tool or more and if you are good with budget then try and use the Link Removal software to spot and remove as many bad links as possible.

Hope this helps!

I believe there could be two or three reasons why this is happening... and maybe not all are in your control!

This kind of actions usually happens when your hosting company is having a problem like they are not been able to provide you a 100% of uptime. Please check and if this is the problem the only recommendation is to change your hosting server!

May be your link profile or on-page areas are weak, if this is the case try to get some solid links... this has happened to me in the past, I had a client with risky link profile (but not too risky to get penalized by Google) and he was keep bouncing up and down in rankings. If this is the case then you probably know your plan!

May be Google is testing things with your niche related quires (this is happening with your website only or with other results as well?) If Google is up to test... then there is nothing you can do about it! J

Hope this helps!

Ok as far as I understand your question, you are saying your website is ranking but for some keywords not the preferred page on the website is ranking.

I will answer as per the best of my understanding…

Ok this usually happens when you didn’t setup your website navigation and structure correctly. I would prefer to give another look to your internal linking strategy.

Another thing you can do is to get some quality links with anchor text around your keyword to your targeted pages.

Get an internal link from the ranked page to the page you want to rank in search engines against your key term.

I am not saying this will work 100% but most of the times it works for me…

Google test things from time to time and this something causes a fluctuation on few of the key terms and websites that are ranking for those key terms...I think you should be too much possessive about rankings and should not really check tit on regular basis...

I think you should stop thinking about this for few days and then you will notice the rankings stabled at one point... normally fluctuations are the market of the process so don’t take this too seriously.

Very Detailed answer y Thomas!!

If I have the similar kind of situation the first thing I would do is to audit the current website and will make sure the area that I am going to redirect have what kind of links and what impact they are producing to the website whole website.

If the section, I want to redirect have a major impact on rankings, now I have to make a decision. Can I afford a dip in ranking? And how users will react and respond to the new separate website.

I will recommend you to do your analysis and as there not much in your hand make sure what you want to achieve and what you can put at risk, make a back -up plan and start doing it.

Hope this helps!!

A little confused question so let me explain what I understand from this and then answer to you accordingly.

I think you mean to say that you have one website that is example.com.au and that is available on zen cart... and you are asking what if you load the same website on a .com domain so will your website get penalized in Google?

If this is exactly what you are asking then let me logically go for it.... duplicate content has no penalty but Google didn’t like it and that is why does not promote the duplicated content against the unique one...

So as far as the penalization is concern, I don’t think so but you might see a fluctuation in rankings and most probably you might not see good rankings for .com version as it will be the copied content!

I don’t think it is important to change the content if you only have Google in mind but if you really think that the content is stale and it hurts your audience there here are few ideas that will help you generate new content with less effort.

-          HQ Images

You can take high quality images and replace it with the current one with better and SEO friendly names. This will help you get better rankings in Google image search and if they will be more attractive you will see audience, links and conversions from it.

-          Reviews

I do understand that there are less people who actually respond to reviews but if you play some campaign that evoke users to review to your products, chances are you will get good reviews that will again help potential buyer with their buying decision.

A competition or contest around the reviews will be worth investing.

-          Videos

The thing that I see most ecommerce website is not investing on is the videos. If it is possible for you to make videos and put it on your product section, chances are your conversation rate will increase tremendously.

There are tons of more ideas that you can play around with and having a new text is one of them.

Hope this helps!

The website looks decent and on-page in my opinion is way above than average websites in this industry... (Although your Google Maps and Yelp logo down the page contain the same URL #justnoticed but it has nothing to do with SEO and rankings...)

I can see a major mistake at the link building side and that is the improper use of anchor text that are pointing back t your site... Actually many links pointing back to your site contains the keyword but very few links contain the brand name which is absolutely unnatural.

My advice to you is to build some high quality links with the variation of brand name in the anchor text and you will see a change soon...

As this is not a manual SPAM action so no matter what you have to wait Google to refresh the changes and then only you will be able to rank again (IMHO) and this filing a reconsideration request in this scenario won’t work!

If you are not sure that this action is actually a penguin attack or not then you probably should get in to your analytics and see on what dates your website receives a major dip in rankings and compare it with the algo updates… if you see the similarities in dates you probably are a victim of it.

You can also check your Google webmaster tool to see if you receive any manual action penalty in GWT.

If you are sure this is a penguin attack and not panda or any other update then it is most probably because of the links that point back to your site. Here are some of the ideas that you should consider as important.

-          Audit your website links and see which of them harmful links are. You can use software like Link Risk and Link Detox to see how many harmful links you have in your link profile.

-          Remove as many bad links as possible

-          Re develop your content (if possible)

-          Create new good and high quality links that points back to the site.

-          Submit a disavow file

Crate new content and link on continuous basis. This will take a bit of time for your website to start receiving that organic traffic back but continuous effort will take you to that point again.

Hope this helps!

If i strictly stay up to the question then i would go this way...

1. If the content is really awesome for for duplicate but always ad the canonical tag so that you do not die in the SE world.

2. If the content is just tons of words on the page to fill the container... its better to let the container go empty!

Ok here is my understanding regarding this and I could be wrong on this so I would love if anyone in the community correct me if I am wrong.

Google usually consider http URLs and https URLs as different URLs so if your website will be working on both http and https the moz tool will give you duplicate content indications.

The reason I believe your rankings are going down is because you have rewrite the URLs but the link value is still on http versions I believe you need to use 301 redirects so that your link values can also shift to https versions.

Again I am not sure about this but this is something that I feel, it should work like this!

Hope this helps!

Usually there is a path redirect module in Durpal.. all you have to do is to add that module and set redirect from old URL to the new one.

Here is a guide that might help!

http://www.volacci.com/blog/ben-finklea/2010/november/05/drupal-seo-tutorial-how-set-301-redirects

I did some research but it seems like Squarespace didn’t actually have their plugin directory which is quite weird. As they don’t have a plugin directory, similar to wordpress or open card or Joomla, they probably didn’t have their SEO plugin as well.

My advice would be to move to a platform where there are plugins and extensions available for every little thing so that you can freely use them and move on accordingly.

I personally believe 301 will help as it will allow you to transfer the juice from main domain to the sub domain. Remember 301 redirection will lose some of the juice when transferring from main to the sub domain.

hope this helps!

In the light of this article (http://searchengineland.com/google-can-now-execute-ajax-javascript-for-indexing-99518), I can say that Google can crawl the content in Javascript (few of it, if not all).

Hope this helps!!

If you didn’t noticed any change in traffic, ranking or sales then there is no way a big problem I don’t think it’s some kind of penalty or you should consider changing your back link profile…. I guess it’s an update problem…

Check your DA and see if you loss DA from the past and if not then things are not dangerous for you…

I would personally suggest you not to go for 301 as it will increase the page load time of the website which direct affects the rankings in search engines. I would rather prefer to choose the preferred version and use canonicals on every page of the website. This way Google will have an idea about what URL is the preferred and crawl the stuff accordingly.

Hope this helps!

I personally don’t think that ranking better in places and drop off in normal SERPs have any interaction but this can be the result of latest Panda update (24^th) which might affect your niche... I don’t think this is the point of problem... all you have to do is to analyse your website again from SEO perspective and build some links if required.

This kind of thing happen from time to time and the idea is to check your SEO campaigns and fix the problems and you will see a re-gain in SERPs from the desired key phrases

Here is what I would do if I will have the similar situation. Instead of saying good bye to the old domain just because someone is negatively attacking the website, I would try and get all of their links using tools like Ahrefs and Majestic SEO and disavow in Google disavow file and at the same time try to get highest quality link back to the website so that Google can have a clear idea of what is going on with the website.

Even in that case if the website hit the penalty or the penalty did not wave I probably will go for a new domain. In case of a new domain my advice will be to again create a link disavow file and include all links in the file and let Google know that you are buying this expired domain which have the following history but you are disavowing all the links so the history does not bite.

Obviously there is always a risk but I probably will take that risk if the domain name is that good.

Hope this helps!

It’s possible that you website got a limited penalty in that case only few part of the website get out of the search engine but rest of the website will still be in the index.

I would advise you to check your Google webmaster tool and see if you received any notification plus analyze your back link profile and optimize to make it as less spammy as possible.

Hope this helps

There are two options in my opinion.

1. Use the same Meta description if they are helpful for your audience. I know this will create problem as far as the Google and SEO is concern but the importance of Meta description as a ranking factor is questionable so if it is helpful for user, you can take that risk.
2. Do not use Meta description at all. This way Google will pick any random Meta description from the content and I think as Google is someone who did that so there can be no legal restriction to it.

Hope this helps!

Interesting question!

Canonical tags are used to inform search engine about the preferred version of the website when there are two identical pages available on the website and removing anyone of them is not possible.

If the page is not identical to any other page on the website not having a canonical tag or canonical tag of the same URL make sense to me but if the page is identical to some other page that which is preferred then you should include the URL of that page.

For example:

http://www.example.com/543256 is a unique page on the website then not having a canonical tag or having one with the same URL in the code both make sense but if page is identical to another URL let’s say: http://www.example.com/abc and the 2nd version is the preferred version in that case the first page should contain the preferred URL in the code of the first page.

It is kind of confusing but let me know if you need more help in this regards.

--

If the first para of the blog post is available on one page and the whole blog post is available on the different page then in most cases this will not be considered as a duplicate content.

Hope this helps!

Hey Jason, I am glad that someone really asked this question!

Well everybody wants people to read whatever they are writing on their blog and for that one of the ways is to rank the blog well in search engines from the searchable keywords like you have mentioned in your question.

Actually the keywords that you are trying to focus is one of the money making keywords within your niche and that is why it’s more competitive than other keywords that you are not focusing. I think the better idea is create natural titles that may or may not focus keywords all the time but focus on the content on the page...and give indication to Google and users about what the page is all about...

As far as targeting keywords is concern try to focus on long tail keywords with less competition so that you blog will easily rank and get some attention and if it will really worth reading you will see people share far and wide naturally through social networks, emails and all other possible mediums.

Hope this helps!

I believe Google have started considering sub domain as part of the main domain so multiple links of the same domain in the search results is hardly a chance and if you are seeing it, it’s a matter of time when this will change.

If you 301 redirect two pages the preferred version will get the links and authority of almost two pages but I am not sure how Google will take it when it comes to rankings as there are 200+ other signals that Google uses when ranking a website in search engines.

Ideally what you should be doing is considering your audience in mind before taking any action. If consolidating two pages as one will make a positive difference to audience, I believe you should go for it as audience comes first and search engine comes 2^nd.

Hope this helps!

Ok this is tough!

1. You need to shift your eCommerce Platform!
2. You need to change your domain name (removing hyphen is same is changing to new domain)

If you are going to take all the two major changes on the blog so there is only one thing which is important and should be considered that is redirection. Domain level redirection from old domain to the new domain plus URL level redirection as this will help you save the rankings and traffic from inner pages (categories and products) that are ranking well in search engines like Google.

Do check that your next ecommerce platform should have all the SEO friendly plug-ins available or else you might see a dip in traffic, rankings and sales instead of improvements.

Also, you need to recheck your robots.txt to see if there is anything else which is going to affect your new domain and URL structure... at the same time update your sitemap xml accordingly.

There are many thing that can be witness after the deep analysis of the website but here are the basics that you should consider as most important.

Having an identical image and page name didn’t sounds spammy to me at all but if your page will contain the same keywords everywhere in title, description, h1 and more than obviously it will become spammy and it will hurt your rankings from the desired key phrases.

Hope this helps!

Create a page that says the machine is sold and here is the list of similar machines... when a machine is sold you can delete the page and redirect 301 to the new page that you have created!

The reason why you should do this is because this will help you make lesser pages and do more work and you will stay away from duplicate content as well.

Hi Mack,

For less developed markets, acquiring links would really cost you some money either in developing a content asset that is targeted to tangent industries (not just to the specific industry where the website belongs) or in setting up scholarship programs that aims to provide value to community user in that niche.

In fact, you don't need to tell the webmaster to link to you from their pages, if you know that student discounts is what the .edu/.gov site is interested about, then it won't be difficult for you to get links from them.

You may want to check out this post for more link building tips for boring/difficult industries: http://digitalphilippines.net/link-building

Cheers!

This really depends...

If there is a traffic coming on the 404 pages and have a good link value in that case I would highly recommend redirecting 404 page to similar pages or home page but if the link value is not up to the mark then in that case I would recommend to create a sexy 404 page and let ht people land their and then manually move to any other part of the website...

A sexy 404 page will allow you to cater some natural links which might help you in the longer run!

Ryan totally nailed it!

Here is right principles will remain the same. No matter how big or small the size of your website is, you have to avoid duplicate content, include unique title tag, Meta descriptions, robots.txt site maps and more.

When you talk about building a strategy to win the online industry, now this can always be different and also changing on continuous basis depending on the dynamics change within the industry. Try to build a strategy that suites your condition instead of going for industry trends and common factors.

Obviously, building links is a principle which will remain the same but where to build link is very much based on your strategy.

I will second Cyrus webinar as it contains pretty much everything you are asking for!
Hope this helps!

If you have a choice to stick up to the current version and carry on with the things then it is fine but if this is not a choice then move towards redirecting 301 to all the pages to new URL structure is something you should be doing.

Obviously this affect your traffic and SERP rankings for certain keywords but along with the migration if you also working on the quick marketing campaign (as you are taking over some other website) which may includes Press Release, Blog posts about it, mailer to all your subscribers and social media.... this will help people coming and visiting your website from multiple places and this will help you retain your SERP rankings and traffic quicker than normal.

As far as my experience goes you are looking for a person who can audit your website and pinpoint the areas that are week and more importantly answer the question that why your competitors that haven’t really done any on-page is ranking better than you.

Once done with that, you obviously want them to work on the project accordingly. My idea is to look for the list of service providers that are recommended by Moz: http://moz.com/article/recommended

Another option could be to meet service providers in your local area and have one-to-one conversation about your website. Ask them some tough questions and if they are answering satisfied question my idea is to go with them.

I did a post about how to hire a digital marketing consultant for your business. Check this out and see if tips here can help!

http://www.setalks.com/how-to-find-quality-seo-consultant-for-my-business/

Hope this helps!

I really don’t think that the problem is with indexation as when i search for post title i still can see the post appearing in the search results...The only different thing is when I use this simple search “site:www.incredibleinfant.com” I see categories are appearing in the search results instead of the post titles... which is kind of different then usual.

I can be wrong but is there any plug-in that you was using in the older theme and actually not using in the current theme? Just wondering!

P.S: Idea by Fede also makes lot of sense to me!