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the reality is slightly different to what i've said, basically the system causes the creation of cat-a/abc not being in cat-b in most cases but rather /featured/abc and /detail/abc or something like that ... we cant restructure the system as it runs on magento and basically that is how it does it. I have deindexed a few bits but i dont think the way it is set up is of great concern to be honest. the concerning bit is more that if moz cant detect that this isnt technically a dupe is it the same for other systems and therefore are others and myself hitting false negative responses for some reason?

if so how do we enable this - we've an average size site with a few hundred products but they appear in multiple categories, canonical url points to it's primary category (but a new page exists for each section... so for /cat-a/abc there will be another page cat-b/abc and again but the canonical points to cat-a always for that product) basically I see this kind of duplication error / notice as a false positive... help me

cache is in the little drop down to the right of the url in searches (usually).

Theres no way to force google to go and reindex the page in full, if its been 6 months and they are still definitely the cause of problems disavow them - whilst not the ideal solution at this point in time it can work. but i advise only doing it if it definitely that site or set of sites causing you issues. you may find google is ignoring those links now but the index just hasnt been updated. Also there is no telling how out of date sections of GWT are.

not that i know of, would be a cool feature though. So pop over to feature request section and let Moz know

https://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293194-Moz-Feature-Requests

There are two solutions, one which is canoncialisation pointing to the correct location, the other (which i prefer for this kind of thing) is to implement 301 redirects from the shorter url.

I think that is ideal because you are saying it's easier to tell people to go to that location, thats fine and great, but we want search to hit the real page - so therefore the second / landing page doesn't need to exist ... just redirect it and avoid confusion.

hope that makes sense

do the links still show in OSE and majestic?

GWT can take 6 months to show a drop of links in my experience, and sometimes longer - it basically will only show it once its revisited the site to makesure the page or link doesn't exist. This means if you are one of say a million links on the page it will take a long time to get reindexed because its huge and likely to be low value - but that link wont disappear until its been reindexed or disavow has been accepted for that page.

Have you spotted any dropping links at all?

As tom suggests, it won't be easy. I've a number of clients with this kind of multi-category set up (one is 5 layers deep!) and its really hard to get juice down to those levels consistently.

For example if you've a product 2 layers deep it seems to be twice as easy for it to gain traction as if it were 4 layers down. This isn't to say it can't be done, it can, but put simply it means you have to really push links at it externally and in social.

Also it sounds like you would benefit from splitting your sitemap by category to that you can focus some attention within sitemaps to these pages rather than have it be one of ten thousand entries.

Basically a 301 redirect is the best option, if you are literally moving a whole domain and the urls will stay the same (save for the domain name) you can use the below

 <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com$ [OR]
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com$
  RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule> 

Thats assuming you are running apache.

most obvious thing is that they tend to link to one another heavily. use open site explorer to check the major links going through and see if one domain points to the others you are thinking about and then check the others.

also check their code and see if they are doing anything funny, like cloaking information - another common blog entwork trick

if they are the same content, targetting the same area/country simple 301 one of the domains to the other. don't try to have two sites with the same content in that case.

if they have different content or targets (aka you are tweaking content for other target areas) then seperate is fine, but i suspect its my former suggestion

fyi http://www.seroundtable.com/google-webmaster-tools-reports-stalled-16756.html

unless you get a warning from google don't be too hasty about trying to remove them. they may hold little value but they probably aren't doing any harm.

nope that won't harm you, try to ensure it links back to you but no it wont do you any harm - it may even help in some cases

I sniffy some billy bull in this article, not least because of the website itself clearly being anti-google... maybe they should have read the latest ruling from the EU regarding favourance of it's own services anot happening before it posts this stuff...

pinch of salt - and all that

interesting to note on it's about page it uses microsofts logo but the blog doesn't mention bing ....

something to check would be in WMT if you go to the advanced section of the index status chart you should see currently in the index and ever indexed, it sounds like you are just seeing the ever indexed number which could be huge for almost any website.

how are you getting on, did this get resolved?

just because it may or maynot help with search rankigns doesn't mean those links and comments won't drive traffic. if you add a valuable comment to the blog then people are likely to click through from that site to your own, its not just about rankings

nope though you may get a drop in traffic if there isnt as much search volume in the new local area

use some nice AJAX script to list them by alphabetical order or some other order?

I assumed from the title you were wondering if you needed to crop the number of links, the answer is not if it's just a few pages and it's clearly just a directory in that part of the site. Those links won't pass huge value due to sheer volume so webmaster tools may scream but I wouldn't be horrendously bothered by them.

directories have paid links, its fine in general. don't worry about it too much.

i doubt that is the reason for your drop in all honesty, i'd suggest if you can redirecting to a category to avoid any issues though.

Id suggest adding more value content to the front page, at the moment its just a link-out affiliate site, these don't usually do amazingly well in search - you are adding a blog and forum that is great but maybe look at surfacing them on the front page if you can to add some depth to the site other than via the top nav.

other than that without delving into your stats and GWT i can't say too much.

it's not free but yoast SEO have this awesome WP plugin, adds microformats etc - see benefits  @ http://yoast.com/wordpress/video-seo/

used it for a client, well worth it- adds something competition don't have for the most part

i believe they hold little real SEO value, but are memorable and can be used to help navigate around the website. This said breadcrumbs would work just as well and good categorisation

cost to benefit ratio is hard to really give you a good answer, benefits are given above the cost depends on the platform you use and also where the site is hosted. For instance changing urls on wordpress or drupal is fairly easy and relatively cheap, compared to say a bespoke system which may have various issues around url changing (i've seen many sites break due to url updates not being done correctly).

for a better explanation than we can all give in this small space check this page from SEOMoz (the best practices bit has benefits in it) http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/url

that could help but would just shift the issue elsewhere - but it's worth a try.

if you'd like a chat in a bit more of a private setting head to my profile and send me a message in private, or go through to the company site and get in touch that way.

mmm sounds like you've had a penalty then if its just a specific term. when did you notice this drop and when was the last time you checked before that?

looks like you need to do some link building maybe...

search this on google

link:www.home-theater-design-concepts.com

only a few links seen

open site explorer should work for you.

or use the link operator in google

eg. link:www.redstarcreative.co.uk

or robots.txt file

also nofollow isn't a rule it's also a guide - most SE's see and listen to it but  some ignore it, even Google has been known to ignore it on some sites.

It's all been said but here are a few more tips to get your going with the perfect page titles

http://seoandy.com/optimisation/perfect-webpage-title/#sthash.lcH9PSFM.dpbs

completely agree. also a domain doesn't mean its your companies name, in many cases it can be but not always. good luck.

start another crawl. I've hit a few bugs like this, but when you submit a new one for the same url it works ... can't cancel or restart old ones (maybe something for Moz to work on)

very odd indeed.

Its a frame-forwarded url, it's something 123-reg.co.uk still offers

They sell it as "if you do this you can have two homepages/urls with different titles and descriptions but the same content" ... its nothing of the sort.

It would be near impossible to offer real SEO to the new url, it would do nothing for it.

It feels like a case of the company rebranding and this was the shortest way for them to "move" the site to a new place.

To do an audit just have one line - can't see website, it's in an iframe

good luck

long story short, rel canonical isn't the tool for the job - manual work (to an extent) is.

titles and content want to be unique even if you have canonicals. if you miss use canonicals you can have other issue within your site and serps  so be careful. my advice is point blank remove the dupe content whether by manually changing content and titles.

Hi Nico,

before i answer your question, its probably worth noting that if you manipulate your sitemap priorties too much they will be ignored - and should this "over optimisation" penalty occur you will be hit.

it also sounds like you are trying to manipulate "link juice" within the site, usually doing this is a bad idea - my advice is think of the user and not the search engine, even if it worked and you got visitors to your site if they can't find their way around you are in trouble.

your question

Rel canonical only effects duplicate content between your own pages and other sites - implement it if you want it wont have much effect. I think you've got rel=alternative mixed up, it is used to point to things like RSS feeds or copies for PDFs, not previous pages / content.

We have a number of sites that rank well on Big G but not on Bing - it seems to be an issue around search lag from our experience. We could be wrong but we've had sites who ranked in top 2 or 3 for a term on G and 6 months later it was top 5 for bing when previously it had been no where, its just possible bing is slow?

hang on Cody... things not to do "write something readable" .... i think you've mixed two lists into one!

Tom's point is spot on.

Syndication is a great traffic driver, no doubt - but it also means that the content usually worth a little less. Also implementing the canonical tag can be away around this but it will mean that the "copy" of the content will never get a chance to rank, though it will still drive some traffic.

The answer is always original content across the board - if you must repost on your own website use the canonical to point to the other site - show the love.

off topic: i was once asked "if i add a picture of a cute cat to any post would it become unique content?" ... answers on a post card to "sill questions here"

Google knows they are all separate niche's and so I can't see a problem in optimizing across them all. I would advise you mix things up so that your titles aren't all the same just with a word swapped out - same for the urls etc.

hope that helps

I'd probably look at sculpting using the sitemap - internally restricting flow can been seen as a little odd unless its for say documents, checkout or a login area type thing. what isn't clear is what it your objective in performing this task. Because even if you nofollow to that page others externally could and the equation alters a little - if you don't want a page found maybe look at robots.txt too

it depends what you are putting as a no follow, do you mean for just external links?

not passing link juice as a silo can cause issues as search engines tend to favour all round "good egg" websites who are part of their community ... aka both receive and give links

it was once worth more than it is today for SEO means - to be blunt.

It's worth listing on there but there are probably other sites more related to your niche which would be worth more time and effort. Yes get listed and update Technorati but unless you are at a loose end don't spend hours trying to please them.

either use rel=canonical, its use is just this purpose and saying this is the origin of content.

or if it's not an important page to you add it to robots.txt and remove it from search -

either way it will fix the issue... another could be to look at if you can fix those variables into friendly urls which you can then pull things from for your title for instance... but thats a bit more complex and usually not worth thinking about.

You may find useful this tool I use "fruition" it looks at whether you are likely to be hit or have been hit by an update - http://fruition.net/

Its useful because you don't want to be hit by future updates nor previous ones being refreshed.

In terms of de-indexing, unless you've thousands, it's probably a waste of time and effort. If they don't rank thats fine and unless you intend to delete them at some point it's not worth it really. you could look at maybe a system where say 3 months after the deal ends it redirects to a page for that shop which has the latest offers on - this way you deal with another issue of drop off because people see something has expired... if that makes sense?

The process we use with several clients follows this flow

is the product out of stock temporarily?
-Yes, leave page up but remove from category pages

is product out of stock permenantly?
-Yes, redirect to category page and remove category page links (if not done automatically).

Just a quick note - unless your website is tiny! you will never get 100% indexed according to webmaster tools, even if you've in real life got more pages indexed than are in your sitemap - GWT will never show 100% in my experience.

Google+ is a good idea, though  if you just post a link and nothing else - or abuse it - google is likely to ignore you, it's like you abuse the "submit to index" feature of webmaster tools, it will be ignored - so be careful, that kind of "cheating" is hard to come back from and could wipe out authority your user may have.

further to this you could look at having the image above some text and the text describes the image -- using z-index to layer them - hope that makes a little sense... if not google z-index