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ah, I see... I'd forgotten about the canonical, I've never used before.

That could be difficult to arrange, as all categories are dynamic to what the store owner decides they're selling, and also it's one html/php template used across every category page.

Would it involve lots of hard coded ifs to accomodate the different categories, and then revise later down the road if/when the products have changed?

There is a module that can be bought for Xcart called CDSEO that goes some way to sorting this I believe. Maybe I need to cough up for that...

On an x-cart ecommerce website we have, seomoz has picked up a lot of duplicate content, based on URLs that are different, but are essentially the same page.

These come from Fitlers, that allow a page to show only certain colours and styles, reordering page by price etc, and also the page 2, page 3 etc of a category:

All the below are '4ft-bedding.html'

http://www.textilesdirect.co.uk/store/4ft-Bedding.html?filter=1&value=Pink

http://www.textilesdirect.co.uk/store/4ft-Bedding.html?page=2

http://www.textilesdirect.co.uk/store/4ft-Bedding.html?sort=price&view_all=Y

I've now changed all these internal links to rel="nofollow" on the a tag.

Is that the correct and best way to sort?

I might be mistaken on when I did this update and when the last report was ran, but on the SEOmoz crawling report, it still has the above as problem pages.

thanks!

Hi Baptiste... yes, we failed to get him to even have one /category/ in there... I do not know why he couldn't do this.....!

Hi Baptiste, thanks for putting the time in to look for me, much appreciated.

The ESP site is built in a way which we don't like, but we've tried to get those URLs sorted with their developer. Previously they weren't even showing as static style URLs. with every category page showing as category.php?=......

I read up on root URLs vs. folders within folders URLs, and the suggestion was that it didn't make a difference?

Thanks for the tip on the top nav... although not sure hot I'm going to fix that - I guess some clever CSS perhaps!

HI Alan, the content is very similar, they should both have their own unique content, but the navigation is structured very similarly.

They are different sites, so there are differences, but it's certainly not like comparing chalk and cheese.

It's an age old question, "why is my site lower in the ranking than theirs"

But in this case, I'm really not sure!... and we perform the SEO on both sites in question.

The problem site is www.esp-machinery.co.uk

We are looking for ranking for phrases such as Used Machine Tools, Grinding Machines, Drilling Machines, Used Lathes etc.

We aren't getting it as high as we have already with another customer of ours:

www.bwmachinetools.co.uk

We perform the SEO on both these sites, yet we've put far more work into the ESP one, and still not getting very far.

There are more linking domains to ESP than BW, in truth the BW site has a higher mozrank, but by only a single point.

We did not build the ESP site, whereas we built the BW one.

There have been some URL problems with the ESP site, but we have hopefully improved things enough working with their original developer to be on the right track now.

Any advice most welcome.