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Thank you very much everybody. It's very helpful! Regards, Jonathan

I considered that but didn't really see any reason this site would add links to our site and then quickly remove them.  I've seen crazier things though.... I actually just finally figured it out, though.  They are displaying our site through a damn iframe.  There's a link hidden in the jumbled mess on their site that says "View Website" -- I missed that before.  Since it doesn't actually link to us, crawlers weren't finding it and my source code search for our URL didn't find it either.  However, Google is reporting it as a link, which is strange.  The "View Website" link really just links to another page on their own site that shows our homepage in an iframe.

No. it will not affect your organic rankings on Google if you change from reviews to votes. Keep the tab, but add the aggregated ratings on the page. It will be a snapshot of the reviews. and link the snapshot with the tab as well. Reviews are always better than votes because reviews keep your visitors engage and build trust of your site. They spend time in analyzing/reading the reviews which help them make a decision. Reviews increases your time on site. For example I want to buy shoes and visited a shoe website. I see votes, some are positive or negative but I don't know what's positive / negative about them. But if I get reviews I can specifically see the pros/cons, I get a better insight before coming to a buying decision. Rich Snippets can have a huge impact on your website’s performance. However I don't see them helping rankings directly but indirectly they help a lot. It can help you see: 1. Better clickthrough rates from search results 2. More qualified traffic and better conversion rates They also help you communicate a clear, unique value proposition and establish a competitive advantage. Google’s ultimate objective is: to create the best search experience for users, so they can find the best, most relevant results. The better Google Search is able to help its users find the best search result before they click through (to ensure that each click is the correct one), the better the experience for their users. Hope this helps you

Can anyone suggest?

I'm not sure I will ultimately be able to help answer your question... but I wanted to let you know that your question isn't currently giving enough information for someone to be able to help. What duplicate page content are you referring to exactly?  Title tags?  Content on the pages?  Product descriptions?  Something else? What is the "Magento robots" file?  Probably a robots.txt, but what's it say in the file? You're getting 3616 errors where?  Webmaster Tools?

Hi there, When developing a new site, if there is no need for subdomains, we generally recommend staying away from them and using subfolders. However as Andy says, there's no reason why subdomains can't be used to create successful rankings and well-performing websites if they're used correctly. I would suggest changing this structure if it appears the site is performing poorly... but if you can see a lot of other things you could fix to improve performance that have nothing to do with the subdomain issue, I would look at doing those first. The exception to this is link building - if you think that link building is what is needed to improve performance, make the decision about whether to keep the subdomains or use pages / subfolders first. You don't really want to do a lot of link building to URLs that you will then 301 redirect - redirection transfers a good amount of authority from one URL to another, but probably not 100%. Focus link building efforts on URLs that probably won't change any time soon. My former agency took over SEO for an aged, successful business a few years ago that was using subdomains to target different regions. We didn't like the set up from a purely SEO point of view, but would never have changed it due to the rankings the site already had. We didn't want to put them in jeopardy (it was a very competitive industry). We worked well with what we had. The decision has to be based upon cost / benefit of changing and risking what rankings the site has currently, and how well you believe the site could do if it were structured differently. Cheers, Jane

Hi, This does seem to be a bit of a problem as I am not getting redirected to the non-HTTPS version of the site, and the HTTPS version is not loading CSS for me: http://i.imgur.com/WoA66F4.png http://i.imgur.com/T7pf7zU.png You need to put or fix a 301 redirect on the HTTPS URLs (I take it it was working properly before?). Also place the canonical tag on each page, referencing itself with an HTTP URL. Cheers, Jane

Hi there, That's odd! I've found you on there so I'll PM you instead. Cheers!

Thanks for your help in this Yiannis. We are now sifting through a lot of the duplicate alias's, creating redirects, and then going into delete them.  Also altered the option going forward.  I have decided to go with 'Do nothing' as i don't want it to make any URL alterations - That should be OK shouldnt it? I guess this is case closed - Really appreciate your time and help in this mate! Sunny

This would only work if the old site is still live, you need to place the canonical tag in the old page pointing to the new page to transfere link juice. You can only transfer link juice thought a request (eg: a link)if no links point to old pages, there is no need for the link juice

Yes, when clicking the link in google you get redirected. I will wait some time. Thank you.

Scott, I am wondering how your ABC + WP results came in. Would you have an update on you're experience?

Hi there, For the question of how long rankings will take to come back, unfortunately that's impossible to answer for sure. I had a client once mistakenly point all of their canonical tags at their home page, effectively de-indexing the whole site. The fixed the error within a day, but it took five weeks to get their rankings back. This was a very new website that had very little authority to begin with, but it was still a huge hit to take. If your site is a little older and more established, your recover should be a lot quicker. Unfortunately it's still very hard to put a time frame on this.

Thanks Keri, thats exactly what i wanted!

Hi Dennies and thanks, I'd done a lot of on-page SEO to try and ensure that was as good as I could get at the time but you may well be right as it has certainly been a big drop. The puzzling things about the drop is that the site has been in existence for a long time, it's a "genuine' site about Nile cruises with tons of relevant and useful content that ranked really well for so long...and then...bingo...massive drop. Yet competitors who I out-ranked and who's sites are still the same remain on page one. Very frustrating. Colin

Thanks a lot for your answer

Andy and Alan covered what you need to do. One more thing to keep in mind, check the traffic, you don't want to lose those spot in the SERPS. You might want to consider fixing up the subdomain if it gets you conversions and traffic.

Kind of going back to where I believe Craig was heading... Even though the content will be very different will the products be the same or similar?  Will 'Site B' be selling masks? I think where Craig was going was - will there be pages on 'Site B' that would be relevant enough that you actually redirect 'Site A' pages over to 'Site B' pages rather than to the 'Site A' home page? If I have misrepresented your line of thinking, Craig, I apologize.

Getting the publisher markup to work is much more important than HTML validation. One is going to have a bearing on many factors, whereas the other will make no difference at all. -Andy

That's good solid advice. Thank you. Other ecommerce sites in the niche are nothing to write home about. Where they win is where this site has some major issues (larger than the one I'm asking about) that need fixing too. I'm just trying to come up with a cohesive plan for a site that will blow the competition out of the water on Google (achievable) and increase sales / visitor. This is part of that. Much as I don't like your suggestion due to the amount of work it is going to take to implement, I do think you are right and it's a better solution than the canonical tags. That said, I suspect the canonical tags will be tried first, and then we will end up going with the content writing.