Hi William

It looks like they have done this to deliberately target you. It doesn't make any sense as it wouldn't be great for them either. The fact is that you are the copyright owner and whatever people may say about copied content not affecting you, duplicate content does and you now both have a virtually identical page.

This is bound to affect you - duplicate content is a no no and whilst Google may elevate you above the other page- which sits in a directory it will still have an effect.

I would open a copyright dispute with Google - pretty simple to do: Here:

https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?hl=en

Hit 'web search' and I have a legal dispute that is not mentioned above.

Get it removed.

Regards

Nigel

Hi Paul

Google knows not to crawl tel: links and this is not a problem. It's more an issue with the tool than SEO and will do you no harm.

If you really want to remove the warning you could use a bit of Java

Or nofollow them in Robots.txt

I have a site which is crawled by MOZ weekly with tel: links and they don't report them as problematic and the site ranks really well!

More here: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/91883/how-can-i-stop-search-engines-from-crawling-tel-links

Regards Nigel

The URLs are identical it is just the content that is served that may be slightly different.

Since you can only specify one canonical for each URL it makes no difference. Just self-reference and that is it.

If you had to different URLs then it would be an issue where you woudl need a rel=alternative so there is nothing to worry about.

Regards

Nigel

Hi JH

I'm sure Thomas means well with his multiple complicated posts but all of this is totally unnecessary.

Both sites are serving the same URL

You can't put a rel=alternative because there is nothing to point to.

Just put a self-referencing canonical. I said that 2 hours ago!

That is all.

Regards Nigel

Hi Kingsplan

The problem here is that you would still have them pointing at your domain. Even if they 404'd, the links would still be hitting your site.

I would:

1. Ascertain if they are actually toxic - look at SEMrush or similar (anything over 65 toxicity is worth removing) - we have had a lot from 'the globe' recently. I have disavowed them for some sites but honestly, they don't appear to have done any harm to others.

2. Email the 4 or 5 domains and ask them to remove the links.

3. If you don't get a response after 2 weeks or so simply add those domains to the disavow file.

Regards Nigel

Hi mk

I am completely with Martin here. It never made sense creating a domain name with company and product in in the first place. You would be doubling the mistake by bringing it back to a sub domain.

In my opinion you either leave it like it is but more preferably, use a subfolder, then 301 all the old site back to the equivalent pages within that. i.e.

domain.com/catergory/separateproduct

It just doesn't make sense from a number of points running a site just for a subset of products. The site would continually fight with www.companyname.com for link juice. It's far better to keep the whole shebang under one umbrella.

Although part of the ranking factor in determining QS is associated with conversion history I would argue that it is heavily skewed towards how the ad text is written targeting appropriately written on page content/headings/meta.

Regards

NIgel

Hi Tej

Maybe spend some time looking at how many times people search the term brand/product/colour - From my experience, it is extremely low and the benefit of the higher ranking on the broader term massively outranks the slight drop you will experience not having colour in the title.

I have tested this with so many clients now - it really is the only way to go.If in doubt go look at Zappos!

Best of luck!

I'd love to hear how you get on.

Nigel

Hi Kingalan

Personally, I find that page all rather gloomy. If you are in the business of selling office space then I would make it as light and airy as possible. Giving the impression of a 70's Chelsea Hotel is not going to float my boat!

However I agree with William - A/B test a couple of designs to come up with your own answer - we are not experts in the NYC property market.

The important thing here is to get the page ranked and this will require extra written content which I have always found looks better on a white background. It's easier to read and assimilate.

Regards

NIgel

Hi Conversal

You have the root URL https://www.conversal.be/ set as your canonical so just ignore these spurious errors. Google knows that this is your page, it just pops up the odd anomaly now and again. It is not affecting your site's indexation or ranking.

There is a little more help here: https://www.terminusapp.com/blog/7-faqs-about-utm-parameters/

Just don't use them yourself anywhere!

I hope that helps

Regards Nigel

Hi eyeman - I think what Chrisy means that if that was the best answer please hit the 'Best Answer' button - all contributors like to see that, it's a confirmation of our valuable (and free) help  

I'm so glad you are going this way - you won't regret it!

Best Regards

Nigel

Hi Ryan

Disavowing a link doesn't take it away so they will still appear as backlinks to your site. The fact that Google disregards them in relation to your site does not take them off the sites they are on, so best practice is to approach the webmaster first and request the link be removed. If you get no response then disavow.

Remember also that the file you upload should be ALL the backlinks to want disavowing, don't remove any which have been previously uploaded as the links will then go back! rather, download what you have previously uploaded, and add newly found toxic links to the file, which must then be re-uploaded.

Google will date stamp each file. The file is not read be real people so don't bother making any notes on the file unless they are for you or your staff's benefit.

Regards

Nigel

Hi Taysir

I can understand why you would want to do this and this is a perfectly acceptable way of doing it. However, I'm not sure why you would want to redirect it to another page. Why not just put all the information required on that page www.example.com/marketingcampaign?

There may (depending on who you listen to - I'm with Rand) up to 15% loss of link juice passing through a 301 redirect.

Also by publicising the 'vanity URL' it may well be indexed by Google but then de-indexed in favour of www.example.com/resources/primary-keyword-2018. because of the 301 redirect. When people searched for that page it wouldn't exist!

Intentionally setting up a URL that 301s is just bad practice and you risk Google not respecting it and listing both URLs anyway - so any ranking could go out of the window.

So in conclusion - fine having the 'vanity URL' (as you call it - it's a bit of an old-fashioned expression - any URL these days could be considered a 'vanity URL' - it was in the days when URLs had long strings of numbers and non-relevenat characters) but don't bother 301 redirecting. Use that single URL to provide all the information you need. You will be able to see it in Google analytics along with all of the source data.

(If you do decide to redirect - I wouldn't - do it in the htaccess file as it will all be seamless. Don't do it by java on the 'vanity URL' page. )

You could just use a preferred landing page and use UTM parameters to track in Analytics if you knew which source it was coming from.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en

Regards Nigel