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Articles look like they've been migrated and redirected to SunZu (although I only checked a couple).  E.g.:

www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=141908 now redirects to http://www.sunzu.com/articles/article-on-articles-how-to-write-a-compelling-article-and-get-it-published-141908/

But other pages not - e.g. company and user pages just redirect to home page.  Although if I do a search on a user in site:sunzu.com then it comes up with the page.

The SunZu site has nofollows on article links, but does follow from sidebar and user / business pages.

As for Ecademy... well, I'll keep my thoughts to myself on that.  Be interesting to see what SunZu does, but I haven't personally used Ecademy for years.

There's also various plugins for Chrome / Firefox which will highlight nofollowed links on a page - including SEOMoz's Mozbar (http://www.seomoz.org/seo-toolbar)

I think you might be doing Save As... rather than Export.

You should have the option "Export to Tab Separated File" under the File menu?  That will export to a TSV format which Excel can read quite happily.

I'm going to be biased on this as it's all we work in, but have a look at Drupal - open source, enterprise CMS.  Great support and modules for SEO (provided it's configured correctly).  If you're using internal search then it will combine with enterprise search applications like Apache Solr.

Donford's answer is good then - they're probably ignoring those meta description tags as not relevant to the search query.  So it's not that they won't display them (assuming they're correctly set up) it's more that they're ignoring them as they're not relevant.

From the horse's mouth: "Google will sometimes use the meta description of a page in search results snippets, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content."

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35624

Is there a meta description tag actually being generated?

Are they literally just flat HTML files - not served from a CMS or anything?

Do you know what kind of server you are on?  You can probably find out here http://news.netcraft.com/ (box top left)

If you're on Apache, then see if you can edit your .htaccess file - this should be in the root of your web space.  Note: editing .htaccess can seriously muck up your site if you get it wrong.  It depends what kind of redirect you want to do, but if you're just looking to redirect abc.html to xyz.html then you'd add in a line like this:

redirect 301 /abc.html /xyz.html

If you're on IIS I'd have to bow to someone with better knowledge of IIS...

No, Javascript is run at the client (browser) side and a 301 has to be done server side.

However, it's really quite simple to do using PHP or ASP - have a look at http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php which gives sample code for various languages.

Do those pages still exist?  If they do, and there's a reason for them existing but you don't want them to appear in the index then

1. Block spider access to the pages with robots.txt

e.g.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /es/node/100

etc.

2. Use the Drupal metatag module to set up robots "noindex" meta tag on those pages if D7

Google say they'll remove pages from index which have noindex meta tag on them (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710&from=61050&rd=1)

You could also look at using the meta robots = noindex tag on /search/ pages, rather than just blocking it in robots.txt, as this will remove existing URLs from the index.

Can't really do anything in depth here, but this is where the root of the issue is:

1. The GHD irons link (and I suspect this is the case for all the errors) is coming from this product page:

http://www.thehairroom.co.uk/hair-care-products/ghd-straightening-irons

Look at the links being generated in the left hand "Filter Results" menu - they all have the GHD link appended to a different category, and so...

2. ... because your CMS allows wildcard endings to URLs after the product category, this brings up the same page (although this doesn't always work, but the following examples do):

e.g. http://www.thehairroom.co.uk/Tigi-Rockaholic-797658/something-else/norec

http://www.thehairroom.co.uk/redken-styling-products-577765/hello-seomoz-readers

Given that these aren't valid URLs, they should be returning a 404 page, rather than a "200 - OK" result  which is why you're getting all these duplicate page errors.

Looks like a bit of a bug / bad design in whatever CMS is powering the site.

So if I was being charitable, I'd say that's a CMS issue - possibly there's a library of links somewhere internally which have been tagged up incorrectly, and this is a dynamic list which is just pulling back everything tagged up accordingly.

You can see it if you click the "+ Explore The Site" link, which expands to give several lists of links.  The last column "Business Services" looks ... interesting ...

+1 for Xenu - run Xenu over your site, when it finds a broken link you can get a list of which pages it appears on

We had a demonstration of a piece of software called AdInsight Clarity a while back which might be what you're looking for.  IIRC worked by replacing telephone numbers on your site dynamically with their own numbers so you could track which telephone enquiries came from PPC.

To answer your question directly - yes, there's a rule to put in .htaccess for this.  It would be something like:

RewriteRule (.*).asp$ http://www.link.to/ourbrandspage (someone who knows regex better may correct me on this)

However, redirecting everything to the same page is a bit of a waste - if the site has been around for a long time, then there may be inbound links to deep pages in the site which would be better off being redirected to the appropriate page on the new URL structure rather than dumping everyone on the same page.

If there's a pattern match which you can follow, then you can write regex to cope with this (e.g. if the old structure was http://www.whatever.com/blah.asp and the new one is http://www.whatever.com/blah.php then just do an .htaccess redirect from *.asp to .php - something like RewriteRule  (.).asp $1.php).  However, I'm going to bet it's not that simple.

Best is to do a proper map of existing links so you can direct the actual old URL to the most relevant URL on the new site.

I've had to do this kind of "emergency redirect fix" before, for sites with a lot of pages and no neat "pattern match" fix.  The way I usually approach it is to try and get a list of the existing URL structure (either: from a back up version of the site, from Google analytics, from webmaster tools or at a pinch you can scrape the SERPs) to grab all the possible/indexed URLs and stick them in a spreadsheet.  I then prioritise the highest traffic pages - if you can see via Google Analytics (or server logs) which pages get the most inbound traffic, redirect those first to the most appropriate page on the new structure.  That way you can carry on adding new rules into the .htaccess as you go along - you'll probably find of the 1000s of old pages, there's a relatively small %age which get the vast majority of inbound traffic.

Hope this helps!

Assuming it's not actually an issue with the code in the .htaccess file, it's probably something like Alan says, an encoding issue.  It might also be the FTP upload method you're using to the server as well borking something in the file (i.e. FTP transfer type setting in your FTP client - try forcing the setting to "ASCII" rather than automatic or binary), or possibly a permissions issue on the file when it's uploaded, though that seems unlikely.

If you can edit in place on the server (using ssh and an editor like vim) then that would rule out those kind of problems.

There's a really useful bunch of examples (each showing schema.org mark up using RDFa, microdata and JSON) here: https://github.com/mhausenblas/schema-org-rdf/tree/master/examples

Just thinking - does the 404 page return a correct 404 response in the header? i.e. make sure it's not returning a 200 ("this is a legit page") response

The best way to think about this is - what happens if you don't do the 301 redirect from the old pages?

• Any links to those pages will be worthless (as the spiders will end up at a 404 error page, so the search engine will eventually drop the page from the search results)
• Any traffic which comes into those pages will get the same 404 page - so any referral traffic which follows those links in will be lost
• You're forcing the spiders to start from scratch again with your site - to spider and index all the content from the home page

What approach you take depends on your timescales, and how quickly you're going to create the new content.  I'm also assuming that maintaining the existing URLs either isn't feasible or there's more value in creating new URLs (e.g. old ones were www.domain.com/index.php?id=3483844 and ones are www.domain.com/category/title-title-title.)

I would be tempted to try and do both at once - just doing the redirect will get people going to the correct URL, but the content will still be regarded as "old" by the search engines.  Substantially changed content going onto new URLs will get the benefit of the 301 from the old URL (for referral links etc.), plus a "look again" from the spiders as it will be considered 'fresh'.

There is a very good recent discussion from a couple of weeks ago about new vs. old content http://www.seomoz.org/blog/new-links-old-pages-whiteboard-friday and one from November at http://justinbriggs.org/methods-for-evaluating-freshness

I've just done this for a site which was part http and part https.  The change was mainly for appearance - the client wanted the whole site to appear 'secure'.  This was in December, and we haven't noticed any massive changes in the rankings for terms.

The obvious thing to consider is making sure you set up 301 redirects for http:// to https:// which can be done with a simple rule in .htaccess, something like RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L] though there may be other things which affect this, so check this through first (there's a big discussion on this here with various other options).

You'll need the https version of GA, and to make sure that pages aren't referencing anything on a non-secure server (e.g. an image) else users may get warning messages.

Source code doesn't give any obvious clues.  There's an admin page at objectivetrading.com/admin but that doesn't give anything away either (what can you do when you log into admin?)

So my best guess would be it's a custom-made, basic "CMS" from your developers, which isn't going to be much help I'm afraid...

Wrote a reply to this which appears to have disappeared into the ether...

1. I think you're looking for some kind of content analysis module - have a look at the Alchemy module which might be useful.

Oh, also look at SEO Checklist and SEO Compliance Checker modules which might be useful.

2. Basic ones: page title, global redirect, path redirect, path auto, google analytics, xml sitemap, site verification

Other ones: a-links, taxonomy nco

3. Do you mean the Google Search Quality document? You can find them online pretty easily (including links from Dr Pete's SEOMoz blog: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/16-insights-into-googles-rating-guidelines)

4. Web Forensics in the UK does this kind of thing, there's other services out there which do similar kind of thing

Hope this helps

There's a bunch of Drupal modules which might do what you're looking for - can you be clearer on what you want analysed?

Thanks - good point on the #1 and #2 slots!

Say I have a site which sells widgets.

Site structure is as follows:

• Home
• Widgets
  • Blue Widgets
  • Green Widgets
  • Red Widgets
• About Us
• Contact Us

I know the money term is "blue widgets".  Not "widgets" (as this is too generic, and blue/red/green widgets are only a subset of the whole 'widget' universe).

How do I prevent the site from cannibalising this keyword?  Do I only try to make www.mywidgetsshop.com/blue-widgets the main page for blue widgets or do I try and make the home page rank for this phrase?