Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Do you mean soft 404 errors? If there are no links going to those pages, then you don't have to worry about. If there are links from your site, fix them. If there are links coming from external sites, 301 redirect them to a relevant page.

Thanks for stepping in everyone, though it looks like we were trying to answer the wrong question. This one is with Roger's crawl of the OP's own site, rather than links indexed in OSE. Guy, do you have a feel for how many pages SHOULD be in the index? If you only have a couple of thousand pages, then it could be that Google is crawling and indexing some parameters. If you've got 20k+ pages in the index, then Roger isn't finding some things. Also..are you looking at perhaps just the www.domain subdomain in SEOmoz and is GWT looking at the entire site? If you had a compact www.domain site, but then had forum.domain and wiki.domain, and GWT was reporting pages for all of the subdomains on domain.com, that would explain things too.

Yep, all of my future URLs will be nice and tidy and have SEO value. Just not changing them.  Good thing I am the boss here. 

Seems these listing are being syndicated to multiple outlets like examiner and others .... and all of these listings are duplicates of each other. What can you do for your client is to minimize the mix of duplication by adding a unique  content and useful for the user. (check zillow property pages they are doing an extremely good job with the data they are collecting)

Dealing with p1, p2, p3 within a blog. Would the following deal with the duplication? name="robots" content="noindex,follow"> Or would using the rel="next" and rel="prev" work better?

Good stuff ! thanks for all your help Aleyda

I've seen the same thing on some of my sites... This guy provides a pretty good analysis http://socialmediatoday.com/georgestevens48/1317336/google-rewriting-page-titles-time-brand It sounds like it's not so much about colons, but more about moving brands to the front of the title.  Only time will tell whether it's a test or a permanent change. I also want to add that I've seen this for general searches that do not include my company name / brand.

That sounds good, let me know if you have further questions, I'm always glad to be of help!

Hi Paul Many thanks for the swift reply, much appreciated. I will check why the nofollow was originally added, but as you say by removing it from the pages will allow it to pass the juice onto other internal pages. Point taken re your last comment. All the best. Richard

thanks for that keri, will have a look now

A sub-folder would be best. So if you can install PHP, that would be great. If not, or if there are security concerns, I would suggest looking into Reverse Proxy.

Thanks, this is what I thought but it is always good to get an outside opinion encase there is something I am missing!

Hi Rahul, It isn't really the link you need to be noindexing, but the URL the link is pointing to. To do this, just use the good old Yoast SEO plugin: http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/ Peter

Will do, thanks Matt. We have quite a bit in this new design, so we are staying with the platform. BC is great as far as uptime, etc. We actually left Volusion after 6 years to move here.

Hi Simon, Thanks for your tip. That could very well be the case here, although I need to know for sure before I settle with this interpretation. Take this search for example: https://www.google.nl/search?q=opleiding+veiligheidskunde&aq=f&oq=opleiding+veiligheidskunde&aqs=chrome.0.57j60l3j62l2.5126j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 I searched for "opleiding veiligheidskunde" and it should be an exact match with the actual page title. Though Google shows only "Veiligheidskunde" in the SERP, which can't be argued to be a better match than "opleiding veiligheidskunde". On top of that we've gone down from pos. 4 to 6 in the past couple of weeks for this keyword. That's why I'm concerned that Google not only displays another title, but our rankings are also influenced because it's not an exact match anymore.

This really depends... If there is a traffic coming on the 404 pages and have a good link value in that case I would highly recommend redirecting 404 page to similar pages or home page but if the link value is not up to the mark then in that case I would recommend to create a sexy 404 page and let ht people land their and then manually move to any other part of the website... A sexy 404 page will allow you to cater some natural links which might help you in the longer run!

Update:  It seems to be working!   I just searched instral and found you #1 for instral.com

as Bryan said, use canonical only if there are two identical pages with the same content live at the same time. If not (and this is the case) you should return a 404 to have it noindexed in a while or 301 it to the new one if you're still receiving traffic/links there, so the users/bot would understand the page has moved.

Hi there! You shared that you're using responsive along with dynamic serving (can you please specify more?), since for any of those two approaches you will be providing the same URLs for both mobile and desktop users and crawlers, you won't need to redirect: With responsive: You use CSS Media Queries and the same HTMLs for both mobile and desktop purposes. Your design will be fluid and always "fit" the visitors device, you won't need to serve different HTMLs nor redirect. With dynamic serving: You serve different HTMLs based on the user agent (mobile or desktop) through the same URLs. Since the different HTMLs will be shown through the same URLs no redirect is needed neither. What you need to make sure to effectively implement user agent detection (avoiding the errors specified by Google here), using the vary HTTP header, as explained here. On the other hand, the mobile Web approach that does need redirects is when you set a parallel mobile Website, for which you will enable a mobile targeted Web version through their specific URLs (it's recommended to show them in an "m" subdomain, following a clean and optimized URL naming system that can easily refer to the desktop one), for example: Category A for Desktop version: www.yourbrand.com/category-a/ Category A for Mobile version: m.yourbrand.com/category-a/ For this last setting you do need redirects, along with the usage of rel="alternate" tag pointing to the corresponding mobile URL from their desktop URL version and a rel="canonical" tag pointing to the corresponding desktop URL from their mobile URL version, in a page to page basis, as described here. If at some point you have a desktop URL that doesn't have a mobile version (or viceversa, a mobile URL that doesn't have a desktop version) then you shouldn't really do anything "extra" really, since: If for some reason a user can end-up visiting for a URL targeting another device and you don't have it, then it's better to leave the users browsing through the other Web version, since you don't really have that content still optimized for them and although not optimized from a user experience perspective, this is better than implement "non-relevant redirects" that would "force" these users to go to other URLs that although will be optimized for Mobile, won't provide the content that they're looking to consume. If you correctly configure your mobile and desktop versions tagging they shouldn't rank in the search results that they're not targeting to so the previous situation really would happen mostly if someone directly shares a specific Mobile URL to Desktop users and you don't have that Desktop version for that URL, for example, or viceversa. So to avoid this type of situation directly the best is to have always a mobile version of your desktop URLs and viceversa, although as you can see, if this is not possible, the alternative scenario (to leave it as it is) is not really negative and shouldn't affect a high amount of your users. If you have any question or additional doubt, please let me know! Thanks, Aleyda

Oh... argh. Yeah, that makes step one easy. In some cases meta refresh acts like a 301 (if it's set to 0 seconds), and in others it doesn't, and there isn't a lot of rhyme or reason. Get the page-by-page redirects running, and you may see a pretty quick positive impact.