Hello Taraneh,

While I can understand your logic for putting the dates into the header tag to try and influence and reduce duplicate data issues the header title tag really tend to work best when it is a bit more focused. Hence why you probably tend to see a improvement when you just target specific keywords such as "home team vs away team" etc.

I don not feel that the word "preview" would become too repetitive as does actually describe the content well. As would "post match report" etc

To reduce the issues have you considered using the mark-up schema for articles with published dates or maybe even periodical articles. Periodical articles could possibly allow you to have multiple fixture all tagged with a period(volume), in your case each season. This could hopefully allow Google to identify each article as a stand alone item that could be different from season to season.

More information on article schema can be found here

Hope that helps a little.

I would suggest doing a bit of a crawl error report in GSC to establish how many error links are being pointed at your site. I would suggest it is not too late to get them in place.... remember you will possibly have lots of external links that are incorrect and need to resolve to a viable page.

Search Engine Roundtable just released a very timely article - Click to read in full

Google's John Mueller said in the Google+ Hangout from last Friday that he'd recommend you keep your 301 redirects live and in place for at least a year after you set them up. He said "I'd aim for at least a year," when it comes to keeping your 301 redirects in place.

He said it can take 6-months to a year for Google to fully recognize a site has moved. Plus you may have people finding old links and if those no longer have redirects, they may lead to a 404 page or a parked domain, which would result in a bad user experience.

Cheers all for the responses, this was pretty much what I was hoping to hear....

Thanks

Tim

I am looking into a .htacess file for a site I look after and have noticed that the urls are all 301 redirecting from a none slash directory to a trailing slashed directory/folders.

e.g. www.domain.com/folder gets 301 redirected to www.domain.com/folder/

Will this do much harm and reduce the effect on the page and any links pointing to the site be lessened?

Secondly I am not sure what part of my htaccess is causing the redirect.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.co.uk [NC]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.domain.co.uk/$1 [L,R,NE]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.php
RewriteRule ^(.)index.php$ /$1 [R=301,L]

or could a wordpress ifmodule be causing the problem?

Any info would be apreciated.

I just wanted to check that you had tried performing these search in each locality before getting a bit worried. If you are doing the search for the FB page here in the UK it is most likely that a local UK version is displayed, where as if you are doing a search from with Germany via google.de is there a chance the DE version is shown instead? Just wanted to rule it out first.

First of all having looked at your site, may I say "Amazing photos", I partake in a few shots myself but mainly motorsport.

Having looked over the site your menu from first glance appears great to me both from a well structured source code point of view, but also from a usability perspective. I found it nice to be able to drill down into any particular section that I happened to be interested in and I think that's the main point. Let the users get as far as they can without having barriers in the way, having to go via multiple pages rather than using your already good/quick menu would make it a more problematic when moving around your site which could in turn increase exits.

You could maybe implement a search facility to enable your users to filter the images based on a variety of categories, e.g. landscape/colour/topic etc

I believe there are a couple of possible solutions to this.

1. You could set up canonical tags on the pages that utilise query parameters so that they always point to the parent page.

Alternatively

2. You could set it up so that your robots.txt file disallows all query strings, thus preventing them from being indexed. (be careful with this version in case Google cant crawl the original source)

Disallow: /*?

it will take however a further crawl from Google before you could see any changes to the indexation of your pages.

Also in Webmaster tools you have a query parameters section within the Crawl menu. You can add in the variables in order to tell Google how to handle them. Learn more here. Hope this helps.

Tim

Have you given Moz's Open Site Explorer a trial yet.

Simply type in the URL you want to look into and it will give you valuable insight into the pages inbound links and other useful metrics such as page authority, domain authority, spam scores of inbound links, social shares etc.

Definately worth a try.