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Hi David,

I was wondering if you have come across a tool for this? Or what the tool is that Broadbeach recommended? (I can't see his post??)

Thanks

Hi Frederico,

Thanks very much for your response. And yes, sorry, my initial question wasn't written so great, sorry!

ourdomain.com and www.ourdomain.com both 301 to https://www.ourdomain.com (which is also the canonical definitive version for the .com)

ourdomain.co.uk and www.ourdomain.co.uk both 301 to https://www.ourdomain.co.uk (which is also the canonical definitive version for the .co.uk)

and the same as above for .com.au domains, and .co.nz domains.

The content is the same across all domains.

The thing is that a lot of info appears in Webmaster tools under the non canonical versions of the sites, and is not showing under the canonical profile in WMT. Which makes us feel like maybe we shouldn't delete those profiles?

Regarding the HTTP vs HTTPS issues... sounds like what you are saying is that we should consider only using HTTPS on pages that really need it - at the moment it is site wide. That makes sense.

Thanks again and look forward to your thoughts as to whether there is any benefit or harm if we keep/remove the non canonical site profiles from WMT.

Hi Dimitri,

Would you mind please posting a link to the other relevant answers?

Branden's answer was very interesting. I'm still a little skeptical as I client i recently picked up actually had a manual penalty for submitting articles to the likes of ezinearticles.com ... these were the examples of 'suspect links' that google gave us during the several rounds of reconsideration requests...

So, I'm pretty reluctant to recommend article marketing at the moment.

In Google Webmaster Tools we have set up:

ourdomain.co.nz
ourdomain.co.uk
ourdomain.com
ourdomain.com.au
www.ourdomain.co.nz
www.ourdomain.co.uk
www.ourdomain.com
www.ourdomain.com.au
https://www.ourdomain.co.nz
https://www.ourdomain.co.uk
https://www.ourdomain.com
https://www.ourdomain.com.au

As you can imagine, this gets confusing and hard to manage. We are wondering whether having all these domains set up in WMT could be doing any damage? Here http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=44231 it says:

"If you see a message that your site is not indexed, it may be because it is indexed under a different domain. For example, if you receive a message that http://example.com is not indexed, make sure that you've also added http://www.example.com to your account (or vice versa), and check the data for that site."

The above quote suggests that there is no harm in having several versions of a site set up in WMT, however the article then goes on to say:

"Once you tell us your preferred domain name, we use that information for all future crawls of your site and indexing refreshes. For instance, if you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to your site that is formatted as http://example.com, we follow that link as http://www.example.com instead."

This suggests that having multiple versions of the site loaded in WMT may cause Google to continue crawling multiple versions instead of only crawling the desired versions (https://www.ourdomain.com + .co.nz, .co.uk, .com.au).

However, even if Google does crawl any URLs on the non https versions of the site (ie ourdomain.com or www.ourdomain.com), these 301 to https://www.ourdomain.com anyway... so shouldn't that mean that google effectively can not crawl any non https://www versions (if it tries to they redirect)? If that was the case, you'd expect that the ourdomain.com and www.ourdomain.com versions would show no pages indexed in WMT, however the oposite is true. The ourdomain.com and www.ourdomain.com versions have plenty of pages indexed but the https versions have no data under Index Status section of WMT, but rather have this message instead:

Data for https://www.ourdomain.com/ is not available. Please try a site with http:// protocol: http://www.ourdomain.com/.

This is a problem as it means that we can't delete these profiles from our WMT account.

Any thoughts on the above would be welcome.

As an aside, it seems like WMT is picking up on the 301 redirects from all ourdomain.com or www.ourdomain.com domains at least with links - No ourdomain.com or www.ourdomain.com URLs are registering any links in WMT, suggesting that Google is seeing all links pointing to URLs on these domains as 301ing to https://www.ourdomain.com ... which is good, but again  means we now can't delete https://www.ourdomain.com either, so we are stuck with 12 profiles in WMT... what a pain....

Thanks for taking the time to read the above, quite complicated, sorry!! Would love any thoughts...

Thanks very much! Greatly appreciated

Hi Cyrus, thanks heaps for your answer, this was very helpful! Just wondering whether you might be able to point me in the direction of Googles resources on the 'not counting links to a 410 page' issue... So I could read up on that a little more?? Thanks again!

I just picked up a client who had built a large set of landing pages (1000+) and built a huge amount of spammy links to them (too many to even consider manually requesting deletion for from the respective webmasters).

We now think that google may also be seeing the 'landing pages' as 'doorway pages' as there are so many of them 1000+ and they are all optimized for specific keywords and generally pretty low quality.

Also, the client received an unnatural links found email from google. I'm going to download the links discovered by google around the date of that email and check out if there are any that look specifily bad but I'm sure it will be just one of the several thosand bad links they built. Anyway, they are now wanting to clean up their act and are considering deleting the landing/doorway pages in a hope to

a. rank better for the other non landing/doorway pages (Ie category and sub cats) but more to the crux of my question..

b. essentially get rid of all the 1000s of bad links that were built to those landing/doorway pages. - will this work? if we just remove those pages and use 404 or 410 codes will google see any inbound (external) links to those pages as basicly no longer being links to the site? or is the TLD still likely to be penilized for all the bad links coming into no longer existing URLs on it?

Also, any thoughts on whether a 404 or 410 would be better is appreciated. Some info on that here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=64033

I guess another option is the disavow feature with google, but Matt Cutts video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=393nmCYFRtA&feature=em- kind of makes it sound like this should just be used for a few links, not 1000s...

Thanks so much!!!!