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Hi Richard Honestly, I really don't know.  A lot of me wants to say that: "Surely Google will know this isn't deliberate and manipulative duplicate content".  You could take a couple of those URLs and do a Google search with them.  Do: site:www.example.com/page?query1 info:www.example.com/page?query1 With the first result, if your URL hasn't been indexed, that's a good thing.  For the second result, if the info search returns the original URL (without the parameters), that's also good, as it means Google will be counting the one with parameters as just a variation and to be ignored.  However, if it's returning the result with the parameters, that would indicate that the web crawler is indexing the version with parameters and treating it as a separate URL - raising the duplicate content risk.  Silly Google! Regardless of those results, I would look to implement the canonical tag anyway as it takes any guesswork out of the equation.  And ultimately, a lot of this work with Google is guesswork as we can't see the algorithm - although it's an informed guess due to experience etc.

Thanks Umar I agree that responsive is the way to go. Plans are in place to go responsive this year but it might take a while to get there as we have a huge website. Thanks for the links as well. I will have a read a will get back to you if you I need any further clarification. Cheers

Since HTTPS is now a ranking signal, it is better to use the HTTPS version as the canonical. I would personally make every page of the site HTTPS via 301 redirections (or rel=canonical but those can be trickier to implement). http://site.com --301--> https://site.com http://site.com/page1/ --301--> https://site.com/page1/ etc. This may require a few changes to the site (internal links shouldn't have unnecessary redirections, adding the HTTPS site to Search Consol (webmaster tools), etc.) so make sure you look around for resources on migration. If you decide to keep HTTP only, do not noindex or disallow HTTPS because you may have valuable links pointing to HTTPS which help your ranking.

Hi there Honestly, I wouldn't do this. Meta descriptions should be used as a way to entice your users to click through to the site - it's essentially your sales pitch. It's not a ranking factor though, so these numbers won't affect your ranking. However, the way you're trying to set up your meta descriptions right now, they aren't really telling the user anything except a bunch of digits and stats that don't necessarily make them click through. You could try... "With over 2 million hosted websites and a 99% uptime, ______ is the most efficient & easy to use hosting provider on the market." Something along those lines. Remember - while your numbers could be changing daily, that doesn't necessarily mean search engines are crawling your site to update the description in the SERPs. This is just my opinion. Hope it helps! Good luck!

Actually, if you already have 302 redirects in place, you're going to have to find the source of those 302s and change those to 301s, Joel. Simply adding an extra 301 redirect via a plugin is not going to fix your issue. If you don't already have a plugin in place that is creating the 302 redirects, they are almost certainly being set in the htaccess file and must be corrected there. Paul

The reference uses the words "Consider" and "when possible", which is not as clear as other suggestions Google make. Instructions are crystal clear for other on-page techniques, such as hreflang. As a power user who works with clients in multiple languages, I frequently switch between languages using the URL, like going from https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/76329?hl=**en** to https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/76329?hl=**fr**. This wouldn't be possible if the URL was https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/keep-a-simple-url-structure. For this particular use, I would argue the former are more "user-friendly" than the latter! More and more the URL is becoming a relic of the past. Sitename and Breadcrumbs are replacing it in SERPs. Browsers on mobile hide it by default. There is no URL bar in recent in-app browsers (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn). On the hand, it has been said in the past that keywords in URLs help search engines understand the context of a link when there is no anchor text. A few things to consider: The need to create 301 redirects and the risk of losing trafic The impact on on-site SEO (hreflang, canonicals, sitemaps, internal links, etc.) The qualitative impact (do your users expect this feature? do visitors expect this feature?) Most importantly, the fact that it's probably a low priority optimization! If at all possible, consider running an experiment. Hope this helps! I left out a clear answer on purpose - because I don't have one.

Looks like Rich Snippets / structured data are whats doing it on this particular URL. If you right click on the site and click inspect elements you will see bits of code like this Sports The itemscope & item type tags all have to do with rich snippets / structured data, im no expert as i've not implemented them yet myself, but you can find out more at the following links https://moz.com/learn/seo/schema-structured-data https://moz.com/blog/a-visual-guide-to-rich-snippets https://developers.google.com/structured-data/breadcrumbs In short, they tell the search engines what the data is so it can be displayed in a more appealing way in the search engine.

Jamie I had a look at the source - ie the description. "Car Warranty designed to be the UK's best by Quentin Willson. 95% satisfaction rating for Warrantywise award winning used car warranty. Get a quote today"  I just did a character/ pixel check and it is perfect.  153 ch / 1329 px I am only thinking out loud, but google might not like the first sentence -  it probably does not really respond to any searchers query match any intent. Hence google substitute the answer snippet taken from the page.  Maybe google is more advanced than we think they are with the ever changing SERP. On a positive CTR is positively enhance by the size of the Organic search result - so you are on a winner their. I would just monitor it at present on GA and webmaster and see whether action needed.

Gianluca already provided me with a lot of good info in another question which covered the same topic. Thanks for the info

Hi Dirk, Good explanation, that makes sense. Thanks!

Matt's answer below is spot on. I add that if the site is ranking well for the key pages then I would try and mimic the Title tags and H1's in transition. Why change a good thing. However if the site is not ranking well or can be improved then the transition is the perfect opportunity to review the Title tag and H1. Undertake some keyword analysis and optimize the Title tags and H1's for search today. Always good to review and maybe eliminate some duplication etc. that always creeps in with mine. The meta descriptions in my experience is irrelevant to SEO - only the title tag and H1, out of the 3.  However the meta description does have an impact on CTR which in my view is just as important. So ensure carefully crafted and sending the customer a reason to click through to your website. MattAntonino

Sorry for the slow response Christy. We never could pinpoint the problem. Since everything looked good, I asked her to give it time. Took about 6 months after the website launch, but she's back on the first page in position 2 and 3 for "LDS poems." She just kept doing everything right - writing poems and posting  in her channels. She also continues to post on Blogspot on the same day she posts on her main site. I advised her not too but it apparently doesn't matter. Google is not showing her blogpspot site in the SERPs. I added the publisher and author tags on this site and connected that to her G+ account, so maybe that helped at the time.

Ok - wasn't willing to let this go until I could definitively track down the issue. I've never come across this before. Rob, you've somehow managed to get a Unicode Escape character entered at the beginning of one of your paragraphs in your "Photography Series Part 1 Picking your Camera" post. This character is invisible to the reader, but because it's considered an invalid XML character, your RSS feed (which is just a specifically formatted XML file) is erroring out, as you noted. To fix this, you're going to have to go back into your WordPress dashboard to edit that post. Scroll to the second paragraph in the Smart Phone section that begins "You can buy a waterproof housing..." Place your cursor at the beginning of the word "buy" and then use your backspace key to delete all the way back to the word "plenty" in the paragraph before. Then hit the Enter key to create the new paragraph, and retype the words you've deleted in that "You can buy..." sentence. Then retype the words into the end of the previous sentence. Then, click Update to save the new version of the post. Believe it or not, that should fix the RSS feed validation problem. Now, the next issue will be that many places where the RSS is used will cache the feed (i.e. store a copy of it) The only way to bust/refresh that cache will be to publish another post, so the cached version gets updated to show the new post and the fix to the old post. If you are adding the RSS feed somewhere it hasn't been used before (e.g. to a newly created sidebar widget) it should be pulling the corrected version of the feed and work as expected. Hope all that makes sense - if not, just holler. Sorry for all the previous confusion as I tried to work out what was actually happening. Paul [Ignore the original suggestion below - the fix required more research] Rob, on your blog post titled Photography Series Part 1, Picking the Right Camera, the first subhead is  "Which Camera is Right for you?  Sea Dwellers Dive Center of Key Largo..." Try removing the extra space after the question mark and before the words Sea Dwellers. [EDITED TO ADD: Also remove the exclamation mark from the alt tag (alt="Dive and shoot!") for the associated photo.] Then you'll have to clear the site's cache if it has one to clear any RSS cache. Lemme know how you get on. Paul

Hello S_Curtis, Has this issue been resolved or is it still an open question?

Has this issue been resolved Prime85?

Thanks for your response!! - Craig

Did you ever end up figuring this out? I'm stuck on the same thing...

Yes this should be doable, just follow the instructions here: https://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory and note that there is some specific info for IIS in there.

Hi there You'll want to look into the Thin content with little or no added value resource provided by Google - there you will find next steps, as well as resources on Reconsideration Requests. Once you pinpoint and alleviate the content issues you on your site, you should take a look at the Ultimate Guide to Google Penalty Removal - it will help you with your reconsideration request. I also suggest going through the a proper content audit for your website, and continue to do so every so often going forward. Coupling this with your on-site SEO check ins will be a huge benefit to your organic site visibility and performance. Hope this all helps! Good luck!