Thanks Dirk for your great in-depth response!

I will now check with developers what the estimated effort would be. Making the canonical URL available will let me sleep better at night before releasing the new site version.
I think the risk shouldn't be huge if we cannot do this and will not waste too many ressources on this (unless, of course, we see a negative impact, which I will then report here;)

Best, 
Phil

Thank you Dirk!
I did look at the article you pointed out, but could not initially find that information:
"Double-check that your rel=canonical target exists (it’s not an error or “soft 404”)"

However, for me this is not 100% conclusive. The page does exist, in a way, but it's redirected. I know that to be on the safe side, we should better make it available. But as it would mean a lot of additional programming effort, I am trying to find out if it really is necessary. Thats' why I was hoping someone already has some experience with this...

Hi

We have a website selling cellphones. They are available in different colors and with various data capacity, which slightly changes the URL.

For instance:

• Black iphone, 16GB: www.site.com/iphone(black,16,000000000010204783).html
• White iphone, 16GB: www.site.com/iphone(white,16,000000000010204783).html
• White iphone, 24GB: www.site.com/iphone(white,24,000000000010204783).html

Now, the canonical URL indicates a standard URL:

But this URL is never physically available. Instead, a user gets 301 redirected to one of the above URLs. Is this a problem? Does a URL have to be "physically" available if it is indicated as canonical?

Errors indicated in Webmaster Tools are often inaccurate. Unfortunately, there is not much else to do than manually go through the errors and see for yourself whether there actually are problems. Maybe you want to compare indications in Webm.-Tools with other crawlers (such as Open Site Explorer).

Hi Alec

Depending on what your website is about, I usually find it best to get links from partners and cooperators. Is someone distributing or using your product? Try to get them to state this on their site! Anyone you regularly cooperate with? Make sure they will say so on their site.
Careful not to overdo it with the link. Take it easy, create links step by step and don't get too many at once...

Hi Peter

I think you should be fine. Redirecting old URLs that no longer exist is a best practice and helpful for users. Of course, those 301'd URLs should drop out of Google's index after a while. But this should be okay. You only want URLs to appear in SERPs that actually do have content.

It's still there, but hidden a bit. Enter the first domain in the field and on the left side a navigation will appear including "Compare Link Metrics", where you can compare multiple domains.

It's still available, but I wonder as well why MOZ hid it like that...

Good point with the backlinks! Currently, both robots.txt files are open and google does not seem to have canonicalization problems so far. So it makes sense to leave it this way anyways... Thanks Thomas!

We recently changed our domain from http to https. When a user enters any URL on http, there is an global 301 redirect to the same page on https.

I cannot find instructions about what to do with robots.txt. Now that https is the canonical version, should I block the http-Version with robots.txt?

Strangely, I cannot find a single ressource about this...

Yes, I think the crucial point is that addressing googlebot wouldn't resolve the specific problem I have here.

I would have tried adressing googlebot otherwise. But to be honest, I wouldn't have expected a much different result than specifying all user agents. Googlebot should be part of that exclusion in any case.

100 points for you Martijn, thanks! I'm pretty sure you've found the problem and I'll go about fixing it. Gotta get used to having https used more frequently now...

Hi

This subdomain has about 4'000 URLs indexed in Google, although it's blocked via robots.txt: https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=site%3Awww1.swisscom.ch&oq=site%3Awww1.swisscom.ch

This has been the case for almost a year now, and it does not look like Google tends to respect the blocking in http://www1.swisscom.ch/robots.txt

Any clues why this is or what I could do to resolve it?

Thanks!

Well, if Moz is able to find such URLs, these dynamic versions are linked-to from somewhere in your content. This is still not optimal, even if you use rel=canonical. If you can find the source and change these URLs to a non-dynamic version, this will still be better. Otherwise just ignore the warning in the report...

whoohoo, i like how easy it finally gets to use advanced segments in GA... just follow the link!

however, it's incredible how useless this sometimes gets if all Google provides is: (not provided)

thanks for sharing the segment though Dan!

Cool, I'd be interested in the outcome! Let us know how it went:)

Same here, the US often generates the largest traffic on english sites because there are many more users in the US... But the fact that those are all direct users is strange and might be a bug. Sometimes traffic is shown as direct, even though it's referred from other pages or even search engines.

Sure, if you have a developer that can set it up with a nice design, WP is also good from an seo standpoint!

There is no SEO advantage to this IMO. Just plain

Header

will do.

I suggest to add the m.abc.com Domain to a mobile Sitemap if you can do it. It's not an important requirement - particularly if you already have a normal XML sitemap and use rel=alternate. But if you can additionally create the mobile sitemap without much effort, why not.

Oh yes true, now I see it. You linked to it 21 times, so actually this now looks like you linked too much!

But like you've said, I think relevance is key. Try to add a little bit of content to the CPU page. A quick unique description of it or so. See if that helps. I guess you might have to test a few different approaches to see which ones work. This is actually a really interesting case.

What works pretty good for me usually is linking from the page that does (but should not) rank to the page that should (but does not) rank, using the anchor text you want to rank for.

In this case this means linking from the comparison page to the CPU page with the anchor text including "fx8350".

Actually, in my experience the quickest way is to 301 redirect it to another URL. This is even quicker than disabling the URL and let it return a 404 (which would be my second choice).
Also, keep in mind that only using GWT does not have any impact on Bing!

Yep, it looks that way to me... Unless you reduce the amount of links in your CMS, the links you manually put into the content will not have much value. While it is normal that some CMS' might have navigation links in the source code that a user doesn't see, the amount of 400-500 seems way over the top... Maybe you might have to reconsider site architecture in general?

True, I guess I'd also test this with some other domain before doing it on an important corporate site. Would be great to read about someone's experience with this!

Couldn't an alternative be to disavow all links in Webmaster Tools pointing to the OLD domain and then still use 301 redirects? By using the disavow tool, the old domain should be in the clear, no?

Maybe linking each blog post might be overdoing it. But link to your sales pages where it makes sense, i.e. where you specifically talk about the products/services you sell. Don't overoptimize your anchor text though. But smart internal linking can indeed improve authority of your linked-to pages.

Yes, you're on the right track. Duplication bad. If you already spend resources for blogging, make sure the blog is part of the website you want users to purchase your products and services.

If management really cannot be conviced to stop this duplication craziness, at least get them to implement rel=canonical pointing to the company blog on your own domain to minimize duplication impact.

Hi
It's always difficult to give styleguides to developers if you're not one yourself... As ProfessorBlak mentioned, this stylguide is not always optimal. Personally, I think trying to achieve W3C Validity is a better standard. But even here, it's not always possible, so might have to cut your developers some slack...
As a guideline, I think this stylguide makes sense. Developers should at least be able to give a good explanation if they do not produce code that validates and/or does not follow the styleguide.

Hello

The first sentence looks alright to me.

'Bruadair is a large luxurious villa situated on the prestigious Platinum West Coast of Barbados, located in a beautiful tropical setting with gorgeous beaches just minutes walk away'

But I'd change the second addition a bit. Including "large luxurios villa" twice seems a bit over the top. Also, this is hardly a keyword that will generate much traffic and matching it twice exactly will look a bit spammy.

For more information about this luxury villa in Barbados do not hesitate to give us a call.

My pleasure! Have a nice day as well:)

Yes, probably a good idea to use specific portfolio tags (like "portfolio cats", "portfolio dogs", etc.). That way it doesn't get mixed up with other content (unless you want it to, of course).

Then you could create a portfolio overview page where you link to your sub-topics.

This change should pose no problems. But I understand if you're hesitant since you're already ranking. How about testing this on a few dozen pages or 20-30% of your pages? (I don't know how large your site is and which implementation is more realistic). See whether this change affects you positively or not and push it to the entire site after a couple of months.

But in general, such a slight change should not pose any problem. It might result in a temporary shift downwards but this has always recovered in my experience.

Split the portfolio up into various topics? This seems better for usability as well. Tag the various portfolios by category and make it nice and browseable. Does that make sense?

Well to be completely on the safe side sure. But having a portfolio site is so extremely legitimate, transparent and common that I see no reason for worries. However, I can only speak for myself who is wearing a completely white hat and therefore sleeping sound at night;)

rikano's got a point there. This is why I suggest creating a portfolio or "our customers" page to place this links. There you fully disclose why links are there and you don't need to nofollow them. Links like these in the footer are bad for SEO and useless for users visiting the site.

I think without nofollow is okay since linking to your clients and projects is legitimate and as long as you are transparent about why you link to them (because it's your portfolio).

I also suggest to take a look at http://piwik.org/, it's a great and promising open source analytics tool. But it requires more technical knowledge to implement it and have it running (you need to run it on your own server).

I would not put this in the footer, and definitely not with optimized anchor text. This will raise a red flag for google and does not add additional value to either you or your clients. If you do want to link to projects (which i think makes sense) it's better to have a portfolio page with these links. And as Jonathan suggested, use brand names or logo images to link to these projects.

I mean that www.site.com should be accessible as is (returning a 200 status) and not 301 redirect users to a page like www.site.com/en.

So the home page would be www.site.com and the rest will be www.site.com/en/page1, www.site.com/en/page2 etc. This might cause problems to implement with some CMS' but try if it can be done that way.

yes that would be a bit more up to date. i just ignore it. though psychologically it's not nice to see stuff appear in red on the crawl report;)

Hi David

If you only have this large amount of "filter"-links on this page, you don't have to care IMO. This is a central functionality you want to offer to your users, so there's no use removing it. If on the other hand you have +200 links on each page of your site, that might be something to reconsider.

Cool! Glad that this could be solved so easily:)

This is strange indeed. I suggest to follow James' advice above and check via Webmaster Tools if there are accessibility issues for Googlebot.

Another reason for this problem could be that this page is not linked to anywhere. Do you have a link pointing to this article on a page of your site that is being crawled by googlebot? Is it present in a sitemap?

In my experience, many so called SEO's don't have much experience and obviously rely on the wrong sources. They live in a lala-land, thinking they're the only ones who figured out how to trick the game and will "rank #1". Funny enough, they never even state what keyword they would like to rank #1 for... So that shows a clear misunderstanding of how people even search for and find stuff on the web.
I guess it has to do with a lack of training and maybe also the quick development of how things go on the web: Marketing standards from 1970 might still apply, while SEO from 2002 does not... And some people stand still and refuse to learn. Good for us! We can outrank them:-)

Hi Sam

IMO SEO is not the most crucial factor for this question. Yes, you have some slight benefits by using www.mydomain.com without /en for english. On the other hand, think usability and user interaction: Users who recognise the language patterns such as /ru and /es in the URL might want to reproduce the same thing for /en.

I think those are the two points of view that should be taken into account, but both are not that central and either way is okay. Some standard CMS's might not allow the special case for one language easily and you might have to use /en in order to be consistent. But personally, I would use www.mydomain.com without /en if the majority of your audience is english. That makes the site a little little bit "flatter" with one less subfolder in the URL.

That being said, one thing I absolutely recommend: Make sure the home page is actually www.mydomain.com (and not www.mydomain.com/en). Not using the root domain means throwing away backlinks and thereby site authority, so make sure it's available whether you use /en on the rest of the site or not.

Sometimes these might come from local google queries - so maybe you're in the wrong geolocation and google does not display the page in your area.

Also, have you checked image searches? Maybe you rank there!