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Hi Rob, Gaston and Andrew have already answered this question with supporting resources. But there is I good guide I came across for website Indexing. If you are still looking for solution, you may find this useful. You can check it here -  The White Hat Guide for Website Indexing If you have already found the solution, do enlighten us with issue (and what was causing the issue). Good Luck,

Marcus, The duplicate content on each product page runs at about 35%. Would that be considered a reasonable proportion? Thanks.

Look at the keyword you are trying to rank for.  Perform several searches and see what currently ranks in the SERPs Two things to look at Are you going to look the same or different from everyone else? If everyone who is ranking right now uses the title "Top 10 Violin Teachers of Boston" then go with something like "Hire Violin Teachers, Tutors from Boston".   Likewise, if everyone else uses "Hire Violin Teachers, Tutors from Boston", then go with something like "Top 10 Violin Teachers of Boston" You get the idea.  If you want to get clicks, you need to stand out from the rest a bit. What is the user really looking for? What is the searcher intent? Google is big on searcher intent. Forget what you and the owners think. What is the problem that potential students are trying to solve? Have your client go ask a bunch of his students / parents of students. Are they looking for "the best"? Are they looking for "the cheapest"? Are they looking for "the most experienced"? Are they looking for "most experienced with teenagers" etc.  Use that with the KW volume to drive your decision. Here is an example. Let's say the keywords are "violin teachers Boston". It has good search volume and goal completion rates. You have the owner talk to clients and find they really looking for Violin instructors with the most experience. You then see that all the pages in the serp use the listicle approach - top 10 violin teachers in Boston, the best 5 instructors for violins in Boston" etc  The results seem to indicate that people are looking for the best/experienced violin teachers in Boston, but the pages that are ranking are trying to fulfill this intent by using a list approach. Brainstorm with ideas around the keywords "experienced violin teachers in Boston", that don't include lists and try that out. You should now have the basic keywords covered for volume/conversion/ranking purposes, you have searcher intent covered, and you have something that can help you stand out a bit on page 1 among all the other titles.  Make sense? Cheers!

Thank you both for the information. All the best.

Depends ... do you WANT the brands to compete with each other? That might sound strange but it really isn't. Mabye the three brands have some feature that separates them from each other and makes them uniquely suitable for a different target group. Then it might not be bad to have all three rank for slightly different (long tail) terms AND each for the generic overall term. The brands itself also may carry different values; answering in a vacuum on what I would do is hard to impossible. Nico

Bernadette, many thanks for the reply. This is a very tricky issue, and I'm still very confused. If I go to dresses and then 'red' i get a set of products, if i go dresses and then 'blue' i get a different set of products so I cannot see any potential for duplication there. All of these products may appear on other pages in small numbers - for example one of the red dresses would appear in the lace dress filter as it is a red lace dress, however, the other 15 dresses on that page would not match the red dress page. There are about 250,000 products in the store, so while products will appear under several attributes, the chance of the same 16 products appearing on the same page for multiple attributes is tiny.  I guess this is why I'm thinking there wouldn't be a need for a canonical tag as no page is really duplicating any more than a tiny % of another.  There is only one way to access the list of products on any one page. If i borrow Amazon as an example - would rather not share my url at the moment as it isn't 100% finished.  On amazon we have a page for Black Prom Dresses at https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=sr_nr_p_n_size_two_browse-_0?fst=as%3Aoff&rh=n%3A83450031%2Cn%3A!425571031%2Cn%3A!425573031%2Cn%3A9780907031%2Cp_6%3AA3P5ROKL5A1OLE%2Cp_n_size_two_browse-vebin%3A1946173031&bbn=9780907031&ie=UTF8&qid=1476896938&rnid=1836991031&lo=clothing  (whoa that's a big url!) with the canonical tag of https://www.amazon.co.uk/Prom-Dresses-Edit-Black-Clothing/s?ie=UTF8&bbn=9780907031&page=1&rh=n%3A83450031%2Cn%3A!425571031%2Cn%3A!425573031%2Cn%3A9780907031%2Cp_6%3AA3P5ROKL5A1OLE%2Cp_n_size_two_browse-vebin%3A1946173031" /> If we go to red dresses we have a url https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=sr_nr_p_n_size_two_browse-_0?fst=as%3Aoff&rh=n%3A83450031%2Cn%3A!425571031%2Cn%3A!425573031%2Cn%3A9780907031%2Cp_6%3AA3P5ROKL5A1OLE%2Cp_n_size_two_browse-vebin%3A1946185031&bbn=9780907031&ie=UTF8&qid=1476897017&lo=clothing https://www.amazon.co.uk/Prom-Dresses-Edit-Red-Clothing/s?ie=UTF8&bbn=9780907031&page=1&rh=n%3A83450031%2Cn%3A!425571031%2Cn%3A!425573031%2Cn%3A9780907031%2Cp_6%3AA3P5ROKL5A1OLE%2Cp_n_size_two_browse-vebin%3A1946185031" /> Both of these two sets of dresses were reached by going Dresses and then clicking on the colour filter. Both have unique urls. This is pretty much the same situation as my site - the products on each of those pages is different so is not a duplicate of any other page on the site, so would they really need that canonical tag? I'm not sure if I have managed to confuse myself. My understanding of the canonical tag is that it is to be used if you have the same, or very similar content on more than one page. You point all versions to just one page to avoid duplicate content penalties and to make one page have all the links which might point to alternative versions. Therefore, if the page isn't a duplicate of another, is the tag really necessary Thanks, Carl

Hello Bernadette, Thank you for the information, I was aware of this and have excluded the pages created by the tags in the robots file. I do believe that makes the pages which the tags create null in the eyes of Google (correct?). Knowing this, what do you make of my original query?

Hi Avin www.abc.com/dance-coaching-classes is better because will cover both keyphrases (one partial but still better than nothing). Keep in mind to not add categories (or more keywords to url) because you'll spam your url: www.abc.com/dance-coaching/dance-coaching-classes/dance-coaching-classes-example-city Krzysztof

Feel free to mark it as 'good response' to help a brother out

Love the detailed response. Thank you so much.

Hi, I had a website with .com and target market was UK. Site performs well in .com but when I got .co.uk website conversion goes up. As you mentioned above that very little SEO work has done on current website I would suggest you to get .co.uk domain and no need to use 301 redirect in your case ("Its a young company with little or no SEO pedigree, and under 50 external links.). My suggestion is purely based on my experience. Thanks

Ben, it sounds like it should work--but there are preferred methods that I would try before you use nofollow. Ideally, you should use the canonical tag on those pages, and not the nofollow tag. If someone were to link to one of those pages (sorting options), then you wouldn't get any credit passed onto the main page of the category. Using a canonical tag accomplishes what you're trying to do, and has greater benefits in the long run. Another option would be to get rid of the sorting options entirely, and not allow anyone to sort them (and remove the links to those sorting options, as well. If the sorting options don't exist, then there won't be any duplicate content generated.

Yep. There's certainly nothing to stop them from ranking, and if you're already doing well with product pages, then it's an indication your category pages should also do reasonably well. Obviously you'll want to optimise for at the category level (e.g. Ladies Leather Jackets, rather than a specific jacket name or type), and there may be more competition. But obviously by going for broader terms, there's the opportunity to attract a lot more traffic. In general when I work with eCommerce sites, I always tend to work from individual products up where possible, so as far as I'm concerned you're doing it in the right order...

Thank you! Yes, that´s how I like to see it too.I was just a little worried that the high increase of "exact anchor links" could disturb google /Anders

Your welcome its all good no worries. I hope it works out let me know how it goes.

I don't think there is a definitive answer there, but my gut would be that those links out to relevant content are helping the credibility/quality consideration of your page and that they may be helping time on site and user engagement data as I mentioned before. What you might want to do is test adding that similar feature to a couple of other pages and monitor ranking impact! Best, Ricky

Thank you Martijn! /Anders

Yes, a canonical tag will fix that. You might also want to check with your developer to see if they can redirect the /default page to / without it creating a redirect loop.

They are likely trying to help you out by getting OFN and Venturize into the meta description, as your default does not contain any of those terms.   If you feel those terms are more heavily associated with your brand, you might consider updating your description to reference and see if that fixes the behavior. Typically Google does this to help you out, and pulls from the content of the pages, and your footer is the only element referencing the OFN keywords. Cheers, Jake Bohall