Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Anthony and Matt - we were definitely planning on the 301s, I just had concerns about the sheer volume of pages that would be going away. Sounds like we're on the right track! Appreciate your responses..

You're welcome Reed. I am into my 14th year now, although got my first taste of UX & Design back in 1997. So much has changed! -Andy

I've definitely found that Google seems to take more liberties giving you the title tag of your choosing when your title tag is too long. I also like the pixel width guidelines over the character recommendations. Your title tag is currently 589 pixels wide, vs the recommended 466 maximum. Fun tool to test it out with: http://www.webshoptimizer.com/page-title-pixel-meter/ Of course, you could change it and create a nice short title tag, and Google may still choose to show something else.

Yeah, I'd have to agree that this is not a sanctioned use of rel="canonical". Most likely, it will do nothing at all. I doubt it would harm your site, but it's not accomplishing anything. Google is even pretty picky about placement of the tag - for example, it doesn't seem to work in the body of a page. I ran some experiments with that a couple of years ago.

Hi there, Having a lot of internal links pointing out from one page has traditionally been thought of us sub-optimal - not because a page will "leak" PageRank if it links out a lot, but because it is thought to have a certain amount of authority to pass on, and linking to 30 pages ensures that the authority is spread between 30, as opposed to 200, other pages. Matt Cutts spoke about this in an interview once, but it was a very long time ago - http://moz.com/blog/questions-answers-with-googles-spam-guru Whether this is still the case is questionable, but it is generally not advised to link out at a high rate from a home page. I would say that your decision here should still be made on usability and that it is likely other factors contributing to the other sites' rankings - although if you have pages you're keen to push, a home page link can make a good difference.

Thank you Anthony

Hi Alexander, While there are some server-side technical things you can do to force a 404 error for a given URL, the best thing to do is remove the content in question from your server. At the very least this should achieve getting a 404 status code when you attempt to visit the URL that once housed the content. Ideally, if you can configure a custom 404 page that is more user-friendly, that's even better. Now, depending on how your server is configured, there may be instances when a URL should produce a 404 error, but doesn't. I only bring this scenario up as a possibility because it's something I am currently dealing with on one of the sites I manage. In any case, you may need to work closely with your server administrator or Web developer to achieve what you need. Most likely, it's just a matter of removing the old content from the server. Hope that helps! Dana

Most welcome Tom. Happy to assist. P.

Link Detox is good for finding toxic links, but you still need to manually review them all. It will give you false positives - no tool is 100% on that stuff. Rmoov and Pitchbox are good for outreach, though I favor Rmoov since it was specifically built for link removal. Pitchbox is more for prospecting, finding new opportunities, etc.

I would update the meta descriptions, page titles, meta keywords, and the body content to eliminate the stuffing. You shouldn't see a drop in ranking by removing extra keywords from the page titles.

Hi Robert, In general I would agree with Moosa, however, in this situation I think a drop-down menu is not the best choice. I think I understand why you want customers to be able to choose from the category page. It's most likely that there are a lot of colors to choose from, which means any drop down menu would be extremely long, and the presentation on the category page is quite attractive. Yes, the individual product pages are duplicate content, so you have a few options. Since your main content and color choices really live on the category page, you could do as Travis suggested and use the category page URL as your canonical URL for all the separate color product pages. In addition to that, if your preference is really that potential customers find the category page first and foremost, and you really aren't that concerned with them finding a page for an individual color, you could add a rel="follow, noindex" attribute to those pages as well, which would keep them out of the SERPs. However, if you are wanting to rank for longer tail search terms containing individual colors, this may not be the way to go. In that case, simply using the canonical should work. Still, those individual product pages may end up in Google's supplemental index with you category page being the favored result. All that being said, this scenario is extremely common on eCommerce sites. Keep in mind that there is no such thing as a duplicate content "penalty" per se. There may be negative fallout from situations like this, i.e. the wrong page ranking for a certain term, your crawl bandwidth being eaten up by many pages that are similar, etc. But I would make that secondary to the most important thing: What method will make it fastest and easiest for your customers to find exactly what they want? Do that, and then use some of the techniques mentioned to handle the SERPs. Hope that helps! Dana

Hi tahirekhanvc, I'm a big fan of Matt Cutts, and you should be, too. Check out what he has to say about duplicate content: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2319706/Googles-Matt-Cutts-A-Little-Duplicate-Content-Wont-Hurt-Your-Rankings I had a similar issue with a client a year or so ago. As I'm sure you know, secure pages are encrypted and need to be decrypted, which takes more time and requires more resources. And with that, speed may become an issue, and speed is a ranking factor. A good rule of thumb is to secure pages that communicate private data, i.e. contact pages, carts, etc. If you are offering some sort of security service, or if your business model requires earning a great deal of trust from your visitors, then go secure the site. Now I'm talking about sites like https://squareup.com/ (FYI, I actually do not recommend that service but you can see the home page is secure). And that company actually takes it one step further with an EV SSL, where you can show your company name in the green bar. Go for a purpose, but not SEO in particular. Matt went over this about the time Facebook switched to https. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4801641 Now it's up to you to make the call, but make it and stick with it. What you don't want to do is go back and forth a couple times trying to rank better thinking that this is a major problem.

Thanks for the suggestion. The issue appears to derive from the fact that our web pages are published with .tpl (template) extensions, which are rewritten via PHP to include pricing information, then presented to the browser with an .html extension.

Hi Viresh, The 301 redirect option is perfect, and so is using the canonical tag to point one "version" of the site to the other if you would rather do that - instructions for doing that are here. Just make sure, as you would with the redirect, the the canonical tag points on a page-by-page basis. That is, xyz.com/page31.html has a canonical tag on it pointing to www.xyz.com/page31.html, not to www.xyz.com/. Cheers, Jane

Hi Felicity, Unfortunately this won't be something Google would consider grounds for reducing Ebay's ranking for this keyword / these items (duplication of images, including both theft and legitimate re-purposing) is absolutely rampant online so duplicate images aren't easy to police and in most cases, it doesn't make sense to do so. Have you tried reporting the listings to Ebay Australia? Have a look here - http://ocsnext.ebay.com.au/ocs/sr?search=1&query=1732&popularTool=true&st=0&popularToolName=Report%20an%20item Especially if the items are knock-offs or not really what they purport to be, Ebay might take some action on the listings or sellers. I would think that is your best bet. Cheers, Jane

Hi Dana, First, thank you for your response!  I will change my image tags and add the canonical tag.  I seem to be getting 40 to 50 of these 404's a day and my traffic and rankings have fallen dramatically.   Scary stuff. Kind regards, Greg

I'm that guy, at least I am today. Never link simply for the 'SEO Juice'. If you follow that strategy, you will get your client/yourself in trouble in short order. Is this link legit? Will it drive traffic to the target site? Is it even remotely related? All of the numbers can be easily gamed. If you handle the situation intelligently, you'll have a happy client - without worry of penalties.

Andy - Thank you!  Very helpful.  I will use the folders option. Jane - Thank you!

Thanks everybody! It looks I need to "sort of" consider them in my analysis

Thank you for a reply, Andy! Now the other question: how much can we change the content not to lose the ranking? Does the change of titles and the content structure influence? What if I leave the keywords but change the content structure?