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Did you make a change? I'm seeing the canonical tag in the header and not in the content/body (as Boomajoom mentioned). In my experiments, Google won't honor a canonical tag in the body. I do see that the tag is reversed a bit, with the "href" attribute first and "rel" second. Although Google will probably honor this, I think it might be confusing our system, which can be a bit more literal.

Hi, I admit, it does sounds spammy but the way it's been designed its not really as it's like a drop down list and not just a straight list of 200 blue ugly URLs lol. Thanks for your time

As long as you dont show different content to googlebot or google ip you are ok, sending google to the us page is fine, there is a matt cutts video where he states this. But i would have 2 pages, and would let users choose what page they want. this way you get more content indexed.

Internal links are helpful if you have additional or associated content you want to link to the core content. This adds relevance value. It makes sense. Internal links that dont provide that have no value and can create issues with Google. In your example above I would be more worried about duplicate content issues if you have the same stuff on several different pages and just sorted it in a different way and then all linked together. Google will see this as duplicate content....

Thank you for this information, Optimize.  Not having a very technical background in this area, it seems quite confusing to try to implement this correctly.

Great stuff..thanks again for your advice..much appreciated!

I think this is an interesting scenario where a 404 is actually better. 301 might not hurt but looking at the substance value which looks like nil in this case....there's actually no value in doing a 301. Granted that it can only help (and very very rarely hurt), but if it did not help the page itself,  there's no value there to redirect it to the other page and this is that rare case scenario where it "might" hurt to do a 301...so not worth the risk. Definitely delete and let it be a 404.

I'd look at the source code to see if a robots noindex got added, or if there's a weird canonical tag in the source. If you can't share your URL publicly, consider using a private question credit -- the private questions are not indexed, and only viewable by staff and associates (and we're all under NDAs).

As far as I know, OSE is simply a tool that crawls your site and as many as it can, so if the link is there, it will report it. OSE doesn't tell you what juice is coming to you, if any at all. So I would say it will probably report it as a followed internal link, if that's what the code says, (can't seem to get on OSE to explore further) but in terms of where the link juice goes, I'd say, as you said, it's "a link with no link juice"

I have been wrestling with this issue for some time. As far as we have been made aware, if a Page Title exceeds 70 charactes not only will this text not appear in the Search Results, but Google will also not index text after this limit.. But Andrew do you believe this too not be the case, and in fact having perhaps longer Page Titles with Long-Tail Keyword targeting is a good way to improve ranking? This article seems to agree with this as well: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2166510/4-SEO-Recommendations-to-Target-the-Long-Tail We had begun to reduce Page Title Character lengths across site but we are in 2 minds whether to do so now!

Upon further review, it looks like I'm getting about 150-200 search visits to the articles within that subd a week...I'm gonna keep it up. It's easy enough to figure out which posts are getting the most search traffic, but it is going to be crazy removing only the ones which do not get that traffic... If I see a huge panda like drop off in search traffic, then I'll pull the trigger.  Until then, we will stick with it. Thanks for the advice.

Hey There, Rogerbot will still follow Nofollows because it needs to get a holistic view of the site. Here are some things you can do about duplicate pages: Delete content that is similar on each page. Add some new and unique content to each page that is on the report. This can be done by adding more information, ideas, product descriptions, or anything that can make it differ from other pages on the domain. You can also add a rel=canonical to one of the duplicate pages. Here are a few ways to do this: Add a rel="canonical" link in between the  and elements. This should be done on the version of the page you want to be ranking or that non-canonical version of the two (or multiple) pages. To specify a canonical link to the page http://www.seomoz.org/blog.php?item=seomoz-iscool, create a  element that looks like this: <link rel="canonical"href="<a href="http://www.seomoz.com/blog.php?item=seomoz-iscool">http://www.seomoz.com/blog.php?item=seomoz-iscool"/></link rel="canonical"href="<a> Copy this link into the  section of all non-canonical versions of the page, such as http://www.seomoz.com/blog.php?item=seomoz-iscool&sort=fun. This should successfully eliminate the duplicate content issues.

This is such a nuanced question that depends on so many different factors, I fear I can't give you a complete answer. But I can tell you some of the questions I'm asking in my head. -What happened to the old para-sailing pages on Site B? Do they redirect to the salespage/homepage? Does the site still rank for and receive traffic for para-saling? What did those old pages rank for? -Are you trying to rank the new site for para-sailing queries? If so, it might seem appropriate to redirect the old para-sailing pages to the next most relevant landing page. This is what Google would prefer, anyway. -Do you take up 2 SERP positions now? That's off the top of my head. Would probably have some more questions if I saw the site and knew more about the particular queries.

Here are some things to help cut down on duplicate. Take a look at the website and answer the following: All have unique title tags Unique team specific h1 tags Have you put information such as what division the teams are in on the product page? What about any other popular information? Write some content about the popular players, team colors or info unique to the area. For example I am in Philly and of of course bleed green so why not say something in the product description like "Show off your Philly spirit next time you are hanging in South Philly eating cheesesteaks" or something that relates to the city. Of course be more creative than my two second content but you get the idea Do you have product reviews? If not, get them on and make sure they are indexable. This will help cut down the duplicate content.

On the homepage it does not matter, as no redirect is made to the slash, both return a 200 code but on deeper pages it is a problem as it leads to canonical issues. I prefer no slash because when people link to you by hand, they rarely add the slash on the end. Wordpress makes a mess of this, i have to say, i dont use wordpress so i dont know if its wordp[ress of a plugin, but almost all wordpress sites have un-neecessary redirects. That is internal links that go thought a 301 to get to the internal link, each 301 is a link juice leak, so why would you do this when the link is internal. Wordpress sites often use a 301 redirect to send you to a url with a slash, when the link should point to the slash or none slash, and there for not leak ling juice. The first think i do when i build a site, is setup my redirects, to ensure a canonical domain, none slash( or slash one of the other), and make sure all urls are lowercase. These things are a nightmare to fix later.

Maybe try displaying fewer results initially when the page loads and then let the viewer choose the amount of results to display.

Hi Eunan, I have done this very thing in the past - creating a forum for the ecommerce site that I was working on. I actually put the forum on its own domain and found that it did help increase relevant traffic to my main website. However I found that customers were reluctant to post on this community in comparison with a well known independent forum in the same niche. The one thing I didn't do at the time and think that I should have done learning from experience is inviting customers and others with interests relating to my site to be moderators. By doing this I think that you would help increase some exposure through these sources and also give the forum more of a feel of independent discussion even though it is attached to your business. One other thing I would say that I think you should consider is the fact that if your forum is on your main site and creates a sudden surge in traffic will your site be able to handle it without causing the whole site to slow down. As we all know there is nothing worse for user experience than a site that is slow and clunky. We also know that this also has an influence on rankings.