Thanks for all of your help!

Thank you Roman. Yes, we definitely don't want the new subdomain to be crawled/indexed. In addition to using the canonical link as you mentioned, couldn't we block it with robots.txt?

We have a client who would like to move their Wordpress blog into a different server from their main site's server for security reasons. However, the blog is almost 10 years old with good traffic and rankings and we'd rather not have them change the domain.

The developer has come back with a URL "masking" rule in .htaccess that will display the contents of the blog placed in the new server under a subdomain but still show the blog's original URL.

If we block the new subdomain from indexing to avoid duplicate content - are there any SEO implications for doing this? Will Google see it as a deceptive practice and tank the blog's rankings?

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Hi,

We are still waiting for the developer to make the change. I will certainly post the answer when we know for sure!

Thanks

Thank you!! Just sent it

Hi Will,

That is correct - the developer told me that's exactly what he did. Could I send you a screenshot of the actual .htaccess file in a private message?

Thank you!

Thank you Will! Just one question, so if it's a simple redirect from one page to another, it would look like this? Or is adding [R=301,L] only for those that start with RewriteRule?

Redirect 301 /Bamboo https://www.fauxpanels.com/style-wood.php [R=301,L]

So the developer got back to me and said he had tried that but the redirect chain still occurred. Any other ideas?

So the developer got back to me and said he had tried that but the redirect chain still occurred. Any other ideas?

Thank you! Will try and let you know

Hi,

We have a client who recently switched their site to https://

The rule to force redirect non-secure URLs to https is in their .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on

if non-SSL and one of these, redirect to SSL

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.clientdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

However, they also have simple redirects below this rule that redirect one page to another, such as:

Redirect 301 /old.php https://www.clientdomain.com/new.php

This is causing redirect chains like this:

(A) http://www.clientdomain.com/old.php > (B) https://www.clientdomain.com/old.php > (C) https://www.clientdomain.com/new.php

Is there any way to rewrite the rules in .htaccess to get rid of these redirect chains? So that URL A goes directly to URL C?

Thank you!

We have a client who had been ranking in Google’s top ten organic results for 2 of his major keywords last year. Currently Bing and Yahoo ranks his site #1 for both of these terms; the ranking pages that are appearing were specifically targeted with these words.

As of now, the client appears to have a 50 plus penalty for these two keywords. Appearing #76 for one term and # 60 for the other.

We were thinking of submitting a reconsideration request through Google Webmaster tools, but discovered that you aren’t allowed to do that unless a Manual Action has appeared, which in this case has not.

The only problem we’ve had with the site from an SEO standpoint is that we recently discovered a website that had copied some of the product descriptions verbatim. The client contacted the site owner who took it down immediately (about a month ago), but we still have not seen any improvement in rankings for these keywords.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to communicate this Google and get the suspected penalty lifted if a reconsideration request is apparently not available?

That is true, Keri -- Thank you for clarifying.

The client had a site with ecommerce store from SBI!.  They wanted to change to a different platform and in the process created the site with a new URL.  The first site, however, had many links and was ranking for most of their keywords.  That site is still now appearing above the new site in searches.

Then we entered, and would like (obviously) to 301 redirect all the pages from the initial site to the new one, so that they don't lose what they had built up.  But SBI! says FTP access is not available and 301 redirects are impossible.

We're looking for a creative solution around that.  Thanks for any help someone can give us.

Not sure if anyone has an answer, but we have a client who has an ecommerce store with SBI!

The client has a new site with a new store builder/host and wants to 301 redirect all of the old site's indexed pages to the new site. However, we were just informed by SBI! that 301 redirects are not allowed - even more, they don't even grant FTP access.

Any brilliant ideas from anyone how we can get around this??

Thank you!