Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi, It is always good to have nice clean URL's, but I wouldn't advise trying to change them all just for the sake of wanting to change them, especially if they are ranking so well. What could be way better than 1st place? Google has even said in the past, not to change URL's for SEO purposes. If you had a problem because of this, then it might be a different discussion, but for the most part, a URL plays just a tiny part of what Google looks at. I hope this helps. -Andy

Hi Catherine, I think you should analyze the User experience. Sometimes is better to mantain the same window, sometimes it isnt. I prefer always **not to open a new window. ** I do not know if there is a best practice. It will come down to user experience. Best Luck. GR.

That makes a lot of sense. Thank you!

Agreed with above. You are probably still flagged by Penguin and it will be very hard to get your backlink profile back in order. You can also try a double 301 redirect (301 redirect to a intermediary domain, then 301 redirect again to the new domain) in order to avoid passing the penalty while keeping your old domain.

I recommend you keep the title long as is and let google cut it based on the keywords searched. Editing those titles to a certain length and keep them making sense isn't scalable. long title tag = text gets cut off in serps, not worse for SEO but worse for CTR page heading and page title not matching won't hurt your SEO.

Thank you for the valuable suggestions

I have done everything you listed with the exception of a firewall. Will the firewall actually prevent this from happening or just make it a bit more difficult? Can something like this also be installed on the server end?

Honestly, maybe both? For me, it would depend on how useful those old posts are. Are they getting traffic? Are there valuable links pointing to them? If so, it may be worth it. If not, 301 redirect them to new, relevant, optimized posts. For what it's worth, I also wouldn't recommend "churning out" blog posts unless they add value for your visitors.

If you're not trying to rank, then you may not need to prioritize fixing this. Duplicate content isn't a penalty; it's a risk. The risk is that more than one page on your site will seem appropriate in response to a particular search query and Google might 1) rank the wrong one, or 2) "decide" it's not clear and rank neither. If these aren't pages you'd expect or want to show up in search results anyway, then you can feel free simply to put together a page that'll provide the best experience for the user.

The other question is how will the "link bait" page be found by potential linkers? It won't show up in search anymore, if you point a canonical to the other page. [Maybe it is just very easy to find from another popular page on your site, which is easily findable?]

I agree with what Angular Marketing said. Normally I would just NoIndex, Follow tag pages because they can be useful for people but troublesome for bots.

In addition to what Gaston says, check out this Whiteboard Friday by Rand - What to Do When the Wrong Page Ranks for Your Keyword(s).

Hi Kevin! I apologize for not noticing your thread earlier. Don't know how I missed it! You are describing so well what happens when a multi-site approach begins to get out of hand. While you could, of course, run 5 different websites, the long term health of the brand is likely going to be best served by consolidation, with proper redirects being set up from the old sites to the new umbrella site, and citations being corrected to reflect the change of URL. You'll likely want to dedicate good resources to earning some new links, while you're at it, to the main site, to strengthen your hand, and a dedicated review acquisition campaign would be smart to throw into this mix, too. Could you lose rankings? Yes, it's possible, but you can mitigate this as much as possible with proper redirects. The major benefit of consolidation will be that, going forward, every single action you take will go to strengthening the brand, rather than you having to slice that up 5 different ways. Your goal will be to become the dominant player in your city for everything you do with an incredibly powerful website backed up with a unified marketing plan. I do recommend going with folders rather than subdomains. It's simpler. Hoping you'll get some other opinions from our community, and that this one helps. Wishing you luck in the work ahead!

There are reasons for either. With relative paths (1) you can change your root domain without messing up your structure. (Like moving from a dev environment.) However, there are arguments to be made for the absolute path (2) including avoiding wholesale scraping and possible domain confusion (http://site.com vs https://site.com vs http://www.site.com vs https://www.site.com). Check with your developers and see what they say.

Hi Lesley, I think Google would be pretty good at handling things like this on e-commerce sites, so I wouldn't worry about it (as long as those page elements are plain text and not using heading tags, for some reason). Also, google:off/on tags are only used by Google Search Appliance, and are ignored by Google Bot. You will still have content within off/on tags indexed in normal Google search. Cheers, David

Hi there, There's no standard format for online phone numbers although I've seen people recommending to stick with either dashes or periods, and to not use parenthesis. The more important recommendation would be to make sure users can click to call directly on the phone number, as well as setting up tracking through analytics so you could see how many people called your business through your website. Hope that helps! Serge

Umar's comment is very helpful. What they say in the Disqus FAQ, is that page owners can synchronize comments with their website and store them locally on the page. Thus they are crawled by Google and benefit both page owner and the guest. It means there is a high chance that your comments are indexed and beneficial.

Like Dmitri mentioned, it shouldn't really matter it's redundancy. In the last case it could sometimes be useful for bigger sites to make statement or tags specific to certain engines to keep their behaviours from being different.

Hi Paul, Thank you so much for replying. I don't think they're as concerned about ranking for the recipes as they were about doing something that would be harmful to SEO (as far as adding so many extra pages/URLs to the site). It's a hunting gear website so the chances of ranking for recipes are probably extremely low I totally agree with you that from a social sharing standpoint it is necessary. Thank you so much for the taxonomy/search tip also. That's a great idea!

I think our news section is beginning to fall into the "is this too big to not run the risk of duplicate content with tags" category - so that makes sense to me. And that's great you saw the organic search traffic increase; my guess it that it lessens any "dilution" of targeting from having too many similar pages.