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I believe the meta description is a hugely underrated and valuable tool you can use. Especially once you get your on page SEO and link building set on a good course. An example would be my company wanted to be on first page of SERP for benchmarking. and the change in Meta Description in title tag allowing me to mention member names has improved click through rates dramatically and gotten us to page #1. I always try to tie in my company's biggest selling point in the title tag. I talked to the sales staff and asked, "What's your closing move to sell so you don't finish second and win a set of steak knives?" It's been huge help.

Thanks Tom. SEOMOZ Community Rocks!

Thanks Andy! I know what to do now! Let's mark this question as 'answered!'

This is true, you can wait for google to deindex them, but that can take 6 months or more. You could also wait for the 404s to show up and check the referrer and then manually set up the redirect, but if you miss seeing them, you may also risk the linking site removing the link. Another thing you could do is pull reports from GWMT and Bing WMT and Majestic to discover who is linking to which pages, and then start with those redirects, then watch out for the 404s and pick them up as you discover them. If you do want to push google along with removing the old pages, you can do it by requesting them in WMT. 12,000 isn't really many, and last time I tried it, you can ask for 1,000 per day, but you have to do them one at a time. That means either a slow manual process or do it with a macro. I think I've had 20,000 or more deleted that way.

The second URL is coming from how some characters are being resolved by the Browser. I'm not sure what you are using in the database for the "Name", but some funky characters are causing your URLs to be interpreted multiple times with different characters. You can find the characters by using this tool: http://www.i18nqa.com/debug/utf8-debug.html Compare the characters to what you have in your database and think about whether those characters are necessary (I presume they are not). Strip those extraneous characters out if they are not needed and leave the Name as just "Holster-Atlas---Used-by-British..." instead. Hope this helps!

Every day I work to produce new content that will expand my keyword reach.  Every day.

Hi Aaron - You have a couple of solid answers here. Has your issue been resolved in GWT?

It's always a good idea to include the directive in the robots.txt anyway, Courtney, so I'd say yes. If typing the address in your browser works, but putting in that exact same address in GWT results in 404, then I'm stumped. Only thing i can figure is your WMT is experiencing a glitch and you might want o report it in the Google Webmaster forums. If you want to send the site URL by personal message here I can take a last look. Paul

shouldn't be hard to check the robots file. go to www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt and tell us what that says. could be a server side issue as well even if they said "no changes.." looking at the sitemap might help you figure out what's happening. like, which of the 65 pages are missing. Are they all pages located in the same sub-directory? etc.

This plugin is just the perfect one more me. Thanks a lot. Himanshu

If you are looking for my adivce i will suggest you to go without changing the hyphen and here are my reasons for that. Changing hyphen simply means changing the domain name for your website and redirection on the domain level always loose the link juice so your overall redirection from old domain to the new domain will loose the SEO power. Changing eCommerce platform is great but for that you should always keep in mind that the new platform have lots and lots of Seo plugins like the platform should allow the cahngings in robots.txt, indepandance on the xml sitemap level, titles, descriptions and more SEO related areas should be covered within the new platform. My point of view about your situation!

Hi Spence, IMO you may have two situations: if the old international sites were in other languages you may consider redirecting them to the same language version on the main site if the old domains were focused on specific markets (countries in this sense) you'll better point the 301 the to the specific directory pointing to a specific country (if it was domain.es focusing on spanish users point to domain.com/spain/)

Of course! Glad I could help.

Recently discovered this: Indicate the canonical version of a URL by responding with the Link rel="canonical" HTTP header. Addingrel="canonical" to the head section of a page is useful for HTML content, but it can't be used for PDFs and other file types indexed by Google Web Search. In these cases you can indicate a canonical URL by responding with the Link rel="canonical" HTTP header, like this (note that to use this option, you'll need to be able to configure your server). Link: <http: www.example.com="" downloads="" white-paper.pdf="">; rel="canonical"</http:> Google currently supports these link header elements for Web Search only. -http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

Hi Miriam, I appreciate the response and will read through the suggested article.  Thanks for listing out the steps as well. Jon

Thanks, Tom - I'll have a go at that and make an actual robots.txt file and upload it. It is odd though and when I was creating my WP pages there are Yoast Options for each page - several of them I set to noindex, though looking at the virtual robots.txt, these isn't the case. My file just has: User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-includes/ Thanks again for all your help, Iain.

ok thanks!

I just saw a huge jump for rank on a keyword and went to the SERPs to verify it and found it to be a mobile version of the page (it does not look pretty). From what I read, I should put rel=canonical tags on the mobile site's pages that indicate the main website's pages to be the canonical version. Yes?

Hi Andre, I'm not sure I totally understand your original question. You are only entitled to creating a Google+ Local page for a business for which you own the business name, address and phone number. If other companies (with different names, addresses and phone numbers) re-sell some of your services under their own companies, you should not be attempting to appear in control of those businesses. They should be creating Google+ Local pages and doing Local SEO for their own businesses with their own NAP (name-address-phone). I'm sorry if I'm not correctly understand the business model. Feel free to provide further detail if you're not sure you've gotten the right answer.