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Darren, nopes. You should be good doing this. You are essentially doing a 301 redirect and you are trying to tell that (current) page is the most important / most relevant page and that's the information/directive that Google is seeking from the Webmaster. Just do it.

So, technically, according to Google, the answer is really ugly. You should canonical to the page level (e.g. "page=2"), but then rel=prev/next to pages 1 and 3 with the same parameters have the current page. So, if you call page 2 with "sort=20" then, "sort=20" should be in the rel=prev/next tags, BUT the canonical should go to page 2 without the "sort=20". Repeat this for every possible parameter, and welcome to Hell. You could just use rel=prev/next with the base URLs, and then rel-canonical to the page level. The other option, though, is to hide these parameters completely. Could you store the results/page option in a cookie, for example (that's what I do on a lot of sites) or leave it default, unless someone changes it? If Google always gets the default, then they'll never see that in the URL. You could also block the sort= parameter in Google Webmaster Tools, although I think combining that with rel=prev/next gets a bit messy.

This is a really weird blend of virtual folder and CGI-style parameters. Typically, we'd see a URL either like: (1) /page.php?condition=New&keywords=Ford+Focus&category=Exterior OR (2) /New/Ford-Focus/Exterior I think either would be preferable to what you have. By using the hybrid style, Google isn't going to understand how to interpret your URLs, and it could lead to some minor SEO problems. I don't think it'll disrupt crawling or anything huge, but it's always dicey to use strange URL formats. If you can move to something like (2), I really think that's preferable, but even the longer (1) style would probably be safer. Honestly, though, I've never seen this style of URL in the wild, so I'm making an educated guess here. I just find that different isn't always good, in these cases.

Good advise, Thanks agian.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-do-i-redirect-index-html-to-the-root Hope this helps.

Hi Allen, So you have your .com.au that is set to target Australia and you want a .com which will have the same content and will target some other country? All you need to do is implement the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tags - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077 If you implement those tags your sites will not experience duplicate content issues. Implementing the Rel=canonical will result in only one of our sites ranking, with the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tags both your sites have a chance to rank in the respective countries. Thanks, Carlos

The obvious answer (but not necessarily the correct one) is you lost some important links pointing to your website somewhere. This would cause a drop in your metrics, and could cause a corresponding drop in your organic traffic. I might run a check with Majectic to look at your historic backlink profile, and also Google Webmaster tools Impressions report, to see if it matches the drop in traffic you've found. Are you aware of any links that you've lost? You can comb through your referrer data in Google Analytics to see if any good sources suddenly dried up in the weeks/months leading up to the drop. On the other hand, it could all be coincidence. The drop in DA could be a random event caused by the Mozscape crawlers simply missing an important set of links, which happens occasionally. And the drop in rankings could be due to an algorythm change (Check the Google Algo Update History to see if any of the dates match up) If you find any missing links, you can work to regain them. Otherwise the only way back is probably to build new, better links. Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!

Not sure, sorry. From experience though, 500 errors are commonly caused by the wrong permissions. Make sure you CHMOD your feed to 777 and see if it works. If it does, try 644 (reducing permissions for security). If not, are you using a CMS? -post in their troubleshooting forums

Hi Kristi, If you choose to create local listings for each of your installers, then, yes, you would have to use their home address and local area code phone number (I do not recommend putting your 800 number on your listing even as the second phone number). You would then need to choose the hide address feature in creating each of the listings, because employees are going to customers rather than customers coming to the employees' home. Do not overlook this step, or the listings are likely to be yanked. Honestly, if you can avoid the bulk upload feature, I would. I'd do this individually. Google will eventually merge the + and Place pages. Recommend you study this article regarding the category selected when you created the + page to see if you are eligible for a manual merge request or if you need to wait (http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/06/08/google-for-business-places-forums-wrapup/). Also recommend you read: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/08/03/google-business-and-local-merge-process-is-now-live/. Because you are dealing with what is essentially a multi-location business (like a franchise) Google has not yet announced a solution/intentions regarding how it will handle this type of business. Where does your Place Page say you serve all 50 states? The description? Can you please provide a little more detail. Don't feel badly about being stumped. The changes have made everybody's head spin! Mine, too! Miriam

HI Sanket, The poster is not talking about international content, but three locations within the same state. If you quote from another source, it's helpful to let the community know the source of the post so they can find more information (and is a courtesy to the blog author as well). For more information about the first main paragraph, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world is the source article from Dr. Pete. As for spinning content, I would not advise spun content.

Thank you, Keri! Everyone here is so helpful! This was my first Q&A and it certainly won't be my last.

I checked and it is a magento feature to rewrite caps to lower case. I added this to htaccess anyway <code>RewriteMap lc int:tolower RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [A-Z] RewriteRule (.*) ${lc:$1} [R=301,L]</code> One last question before I take this question to a magento forum - how can I look at a page with a caps URL and lower URL and see if they are really different pages or link to the same address. When you change random letters to caps in our site it sends you to the right page but my browser still shows the mixed caps url instead of replacing with an all lower url - but is that really a different page or is the browser just not changing the caps display when it is really getting the lower case page ```