Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Taysir,

Great question! Honestly, I'm not confident what would happen if you add the rel=canonical and rel=alternate tags to the desktop version (and whether that will disrupt the rel=canonical on mobile or not). My advice is to test it out on a few select pages (I would recommend not testing your most important/highest revenue driving pages first, but on less critical pages) and see how the search engines deal with these pages. If the duplicates are removed and traffic to the mobile site isn't affected, then I would start scaling the rel=canonical out on other pages. However if you do see an issue with the combination of rel=canonical and rel=alternate on the desktop version, then it may be worth fixing the CMS, so that it no longer creates these duplicate pages.

Best,

Stephanie

Hi Martin,

I have less of an SEO concern over this than a user experience one. It doesn't sound like a good idea to have different prices for users who come from Google product search. What happens if they return over 24 hours later to purchase the product? Unless there is some type of clear message on the page to indicate that the price is only valid for 24 hours, it will cause a lot of confusion, and even then, it's not the right approach from a business perspective.  I've talked a few individuals who had prior experience with mismatched prices in Google and overall, customers are never happy when that happens.

Also, it's okay for a few products to have different prices. However, for the most part, when prices are not matched between product pages and feed data, you're risking Google suspending your feed.

Although, I can understand the reasoning behind this, in general, I think it is far too risky to implement.

Best,

Stephanie

Hi JU1985 - Yes, page C would get the link juice if you canonicalize pages A and B to page C. You should also make it very clear to your users that they should be using widget C.

The other option is to 301 redirect pages A and B to page C and implement a dynamically-generated message via cookie to let users know why they are being redirected. This would also enhance user experience.

It's okay to put similar available products on the product page that is no longer available. Before de-indexing them, make sure that the category pages have not garnered any backlinks. If they have, it might be worth 301 redirecting. If not, let them become deindexed.

Like mentioned above, internal 301 redirects are completely appropriate, especially for product pages that no longer exist. However, instead of redirecting a non-existent product page to a new similar product page, you might want to consider redirecting it to a category page, especially if that non-existent product page has already garnered external links.

This will help demonstrate to search engines that this page is more important than other pages and increase the link equity to that page, which would ultimately help increase its page authority.

Hi Robert,

Google has traditionally not passed value on links from affiliate programs - the reason being that the site is receiving financial incentives for including those links on the page.

However, Paddy Moogan wrote an SEO blog post on SEOmoz on how to optimize your affiliate program to get some links that will create some SEO value.  The link to the blog post is: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/getting-seo-value-from-your-affiliate-links

His suggestions include:

1. Use of a Dedicated Landing Page for Big Affiliates

2. Affiliates Linking to the Right Page

3. Help Affiliates Make Their Content More Valuable

4. Add More Value to Widgets and IFrames That Affiliates Use

Hopefully this was helpful- If you have any specific questions, please ask away!

Best,

Stephanie

Hi AK,

I've done some work/research for a client who had mobile sites. The responses below are based on these past experiences.

1. It should include the same/similar page titles. However, you should append the word mobile at the end, so that users immediately recognize that this is a mobile site. Ex: "Company XYZ Clothes- Mobile Site"

2. I'm a little unclear about your question, but there is a Googlebot that crawls regular pages and another bot that crawls mobile pages.  The user-agent settings on the server should provide search engines with enough information to specifically use their mobile bots to crawl the sites.  However, to build the authority of the regular sites via the mobile site, add canonical tags on the mobile site that lead to the regular site. This helps tell search engines the preferred location of the URL and pass authority to that site.

3. In theory, yes. However, this is based on the user's mobile device. The issue with mobile rankings is that it is entirely dependent on the user's phone model and this ranking differs phone-by-phone. To help with this, I would suggest creating a mobile sitemap for Google.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34648

4. The regular version will work, but it will be helpful to append the word "mobile" in the description and ideally, near the beginning of the meta description.

Smartphones work by using the regular sites, so this only pertains to individuals who use mobile devices that can access the internet, but are not considered smartphones.

Best,

Stephanie

Hi Conrad,

Thank you for contacting Distilled. We really appreciate you reaching out to us. I just confirmed that we did receive your inquiry and one of our sales executives will be contacting you shortly. Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Hi Conrad,

Interesting results- however, I think there may be more to that than the currency change. You mentioned previously that the company worked with other external SEO agencies that had garnered only low-quality links to the site with exact match anchor text or little anchor text variation. You also mentioned that you were successfully able to remove around 70% of those links from the link profile.

This could have played a crucial role in your recovery from Panda.

Hi JU1985 - Yes, page C would get the link juice if you canonicalize pages A and B to page C. You should also make it very clear to your users that they should be using widget C.

The other option is to 301 redirect pages A and B to page C and implement a dynamically-generated message via cookie to let users know why they are being redirected. This would also enhance user experience.

Hi AK,

I've done some work/research for a client who had mobile sites. The responses below are based on these past experiences.

1. It should include the same/similar page titles. However, you should append the word mobile at the end, so that users immediately recognize that this is a mobile site. Ex: "Company XYZ Clothes- Mobile Site"

2. I'm a little unclear about your question, but there is a Googlebot that crawls regular pages and another bot that crawls mobile pages.  The user-agent settings on the server should provide search engines with enough information to specifically use their mobile bots to crawl the sites.  However, to build the authority of the regular sites via the mobile site, add canonical tags on the mobile site that lead to the regular site. This helps tell search engines the preferred location of the URL and pass authority to that site.

3. In theory, yes. However, this is based on the user's mobile device. The issue with mobile rankings is that it is entirely dependent on the user's phone model and this ranking differs phone-by-phone. To help with this, I would suggest creating a mobile sitemap for Google.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34648

4. The regular version will work, but it will be helpful to append the word "mobile" in the description and ideally, near the beginning of the meta description.

Smartphones work by using the regular sites, so this only pertains to individuals who use mobile devices that can access the internet, but are not considered smartphones.

Best,

Stephanie

Like mentioned above, internal 301 redirects are completely appropriate, especially for product pages that no longer exist. However, instead of redirecting a non-existent product page to a new similar product page, you might want to consider redirecting it to a category page, especially if that non-existent product page has already garnered external links.

This will help demonstrate to search engines that this page is more important than other pages and increase the link equity to that page, which would ultimately help increase its page authority.

Hi Robert,

Google has traditionally not passed value on links from affiliate programs - the reason being that the site is receiving financial incentives for including those links on the page.

However, Paddy Moogan wrote an SEO blog post on SEOmoz on how to optimize your affiliate program to get some links that will create some SEO value.  The link to the blog post is: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/getting-seo-value-from-your-affiliate-links

His suggestions include:

1. Use of a Dedicated Landing Page for Big Affiliates

2. Affiliates Linking to the Right Page

3. Help Affiliates Make Their Content More Valuable

4. Add More Value to Widgets and IFrames That Affiliates Use

Hopefully this was helpful- If you have any specific questions, please ask away!

Best,

Stephanie

Hi Martin,

I have less of an SEO concern over this than a user experience one. It doesn't sound like a good idea to have different prices for users who come from Google product search. What happens if they return over 24 hours later to purchase the product? Unless there is some type of clear message on the page to indicate that the price is only valid for 24 hours, it will cause a lot of confusion, and even then, it's not the right approach from a business perspective.  I've talked a few individuals who had prior experience with mismatched prices in Google and overall, customers are never happy when that happens.

Also, it's okay for a few products to have different prices. However, for the most part, when prices are not matched between product pages and feed data, you're risking Google suspending your feed.

Although, I can understand the reasoning behind this, in general, I think it is far too risky to implement.

Best,

Stephanie

Hi Taysir,

Great question! Honestly, I'm not confident what would happen if you add the rel=canonical and rel=alternate tags to the desktop version (and whether that will disrupt the rel=canonical on mobile or not). My advice is to test it out on a few select pages (I would recommend not testing your most important/highest revenue driving pages first, but on less critical pages) and see how the search engines deal with these pages. If the duplicates are removed and traffic to the mobile site isn't affected, then I would start scaling the rel=canonical out on other pages. However if you do see an issue with the combination of rel=canonical and rel=alternate on the desktop version, then it may be worth fixing the CMS, so that it no longer creates these duplicate pages.

Best,

Stephanie