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Well i decided to give old product pages a 301 redirect, as long there is traffic on the url's, this wil be the best solution for this site. To leave the page up with a canonical, will create a messy site at the end. Thanx for all your replies! Grtz, Leonie

Hi Woj. I've yet to use that, but conceptually it sounds like it would work as part of platform that's already using a delivery solution: "Edge Redirector requires a delivery solution and works in concert with other Akamai Intelligent Platform capabilities."  If the server based .htaccess is becoming very large and a bottle neck to serving pages globally, I'd consider it.

I agree with Matt, in order to get the advice particular for your situation you need a real pro that look in to your website and backlink profile but here is a general advice. If there is no manual action on your website, it’s a good part in my opinion and you have time to fix things up before Google actually put the manual penalty on it. My advice is to look in to your link profile and see how many bad links you have and separate bad links from the good one and ideally you should disavow all bad links to tell Google that these links have nothing to do with you and you are not looking for a link juice from all the bad websites. The next step is to see what good links you have and get as many relevant and authority links as you can and you will see that the rankings will go up with increase in DA as well. Again, this is a general advice for anything in particular you need to share your URL here! Hope this helps!

Hi Dev, It's really going to depend on how much of the content is duplicated.  From what I've seen, Google isn't very good at chunking pages up YET.  They're good at spotting entire pages duplicated (e.g. press releases or articles syndicated across multiple sites), and pages on your site that have the majority of the content the same.  But I don't think you're going to run into trouble with a page that has a number of sections, each of which is an entire page on its own. Where you MIGHT run into trouble is with Panda and thin content.  If the content you have for each of the manufacturers is very light, i.e. just a few sentences and an image or two, then those pages might be seen as thin content.  While I don't think you have to hit the magic 2000 word mark on every page to avoid being seen as thin content, you certainly are going to want more than 100 words.  And, if those manufacturer pages are important search targets for competitive terms--well, then, you probably WILL want those pages to contain somewhere near 2000 words each. In THAT case, you'll probably want to change the content on the all-manufacturers page, and instead just put a short excerpt for each manufacturer there, along with some sort of "learn more" link to the single manufacturer page.

Awesome-thanks so much Ryan!

Excellent! It matches up nicely with the example you provided, and always good to have someone on hand to make sure everything works as intended. Glad you found a good one.

Addendum to this story: it turns out that this was likely a malicious activity with an extremely similar IP address to ours so we might not notice. We have disavowed.

Was the change to the 301 redirects made and copyscape still provided that error?

Exactly this. Thanks Richard for explaining it in this way as well.

You can make the links manual instead of 3xx and use a pop up like, "It looks like you're from [Country].. would you like to browse with those currency and shipping options enabled?"  That way they have to click to enable it and then go to the folder via a static link. For load times, there are several CDN options out there that could help speed that side of it up...  Cheers!

I like the direction we're heading to --> Search Experience Optimization!

I see. In that case, sure, any short folder would be fine.  Maybe even 'a' as it reads a little nice: website.com/a/us-en/store/product-name.html.  Reads like, "Website, a US, English language store with the product named X."  Someone seeing the link would have a pretty good idea of what it is going to be.

Hav you crawled your redesigned site with a tool like Xenu or ScreamingFrog?  That will help ferret out any bad links / 404 pages. Also, did you submit an updated sitemap with the redesign? Use 301s? Etc. Edit: Looks like Dirk above hit on the most likely issue regarding 301s. You should be set with that.

If you can actually load the regular URL then you should canonical to it (it is best practice to canonical all of your pages to themselves), but if going to that page just redirects to the escaped fragment then you should update how your site build is set up so that you don't have the escaped fragment any more.

How long has it been since you deleted the old sitemap and provide the new one ? I think your Google account may just need some extra time to update correctly. it seems to me that Google updates in my WMT account seems to have a little lag time. I think it will update correctly after a few weeks to a month. I don't think you have any actual problem as much as Google is not actually finding and updating new info correctly. I would wait and see what happens after a short while. Joe

Here is two more excellent piece that ties and a lot of the most essential things. http://www.sytian-productions.com/blog/web-design/the-ultimate-seo-guide-for-website-redesign/ Great tool for site inventory and redistribution. http://urlprofiler.com/ All the best, Tom

Our site hosts b2b content and while I agree with your scenario in general, we do have some niche content that some users would have no interest in. A better example instead of a toy industry site might be a construction industry site. Let's say our content is generally related to the construction industry and our readers work in or own construction businesses. We might have brands and individual publications that cover everything from concrete innovations to lumber pricing to interior design. While all of the content is generally is related to construction, most interior design professionals may have zero interest in lumber pricing. That's essentially where we're at. For branding purposes the interior design folks think it would be better to have their own uniquely branded website, but they'll obviously feel the pain of the break from the main construction site.

I just hope they give us some more time to get things resolved and roll this out slowly so that it is not like a major penalty.

Excellent, that reference is just what I needed, thank you!

I agree with Ryan. That's great advice. One more thing I would add is to go ahead and pro-actively add some extra high authority page backlinks to the "about me" page. You want to ensure the Page Authority is higher than any other pages on the site that may out rank your author archive page. Just to make sure the pages you want ranking first are where they should be in terms of your websites pages authority. Hope that helps a little further, Joe