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Are all 2000 pages 404's? Do they all have unique URL's? If all 2000 are 404's then Mozbot would pick these up as dupe content as well as 404's but if its only reporting duplicates and not all are 404's then other pages would also be duplicates. 1.) Confirm all duiplicate pages are 404's 2.) Do a scan using xenu link sleuth and see which pages are linking to 404's.

Hi I'm actually using 2.5. I will take a look at the module but for my own piece of mind, I would like to understand how to use Redirectmatch\RewriteRule better. Thanks Stefan

Thank you guys. I'll move to the UK based company and keep it on shared server so far. I just need to do some reasearch on which company is reliable over here. Regards, Jan

Everrett had a great post on the SEOmoz blog the other day.  It covers this exact question.  I always thought like you did but he makes a very strong case for the shorter URL.  If the only difference in the product is what category it is listed in then bread crumbs should do the trick.  If they are distinct pages and products then the user is going to be able to figure it out. I really think the breadcrumbs is going to be the solution you are looking for.  Most Ecommerce solutions have this in it's core development but some allow you to add it in with little effort.

Thanks George! Fantastic detail and I think between your suggestions and Ben's too we are going to get further to solving this than we've ever gotten before. Perhaps we'll even solve this. That would be so great. As I mentioned, the company identified this problem 4 years before they hired me, and it's never been solved. I feel like part of why I am there as there SEO strategist is to pound away at these problems until they're fixed. Thanks so much to you both. I can't wait to go in on Monday morning and use these suggestions to solve a five year old problem! Awesome. I'll let you know what happens. If we fix it, I owe you and Ben dinner! (at the very least)

I have seen tons of duplicate content errors in the SEO Moz REport.  The pages that I have are same but the sidebar ads and others are dynamic based on the store they are coming from.  So we send store name as query string.http://www.appymall.com/apps/numberland-learn-numbers-with-montessori%20&store=Appy-back-2-school if you look at teh source code, we defined the canonicalURL. The system is still calling these duplicates. Can you help address this issue? What we are doing wroong?I did  checked the on-page keyword tool and it has green check after Canonical URL Tag Usage

Structured data (microdata etc.) is markup that specifies what a section of a web page is about. So for example you can markup a review so that Google can identify the star ratings and knows that the product got a 4/5. This type of data is part of the semantic web - which is a WWW where bots like Google stop seeing Sites and start seeing entities. So for example in the current web a search engine might see links to a site with the anchor text "shoes" and interpret that to mean that the site is relevant for "shoe" based queries but if those links went to that brand's Facebook page the connection with shoes would be a lot weaker. In a semantic web the search engine would be able to tell very easily that a brand's Facebook and Twitter pages are part of the same organisation and that links to either count the same as to the main site. That's a pretty crude example (and to some extent search engines are already doing this) but you can see how it can affect SEO. That's not to mention the benefits that you can be getting right now from having rich snippets (Google them, they're cool). It depends on the purpose of the video. I'd put informational videos onto Youtube just because of the traffic floating about on the Youtube platform. I'm not an expert on video SEO but if you read this then you will be.

Have you tried http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/?

Great to know. Good luck with the work ahead!

I would also suggest buying Artisteer, which is an inexpensive template creator that is not only amazingly simple, but fun to use as well. Then you can create your own themes for multiple platforms.

Our tags are a little more specific, but I can't see what value they are adding to our site users and thus this seems to be a great solution. Thank you.

Hey George. Thanks for cluing me into the Holiday Express reference. Very funny. And yes, you were able to help me out. Thank you!

They have faked the pagerank.  Faking only works for the checkers - google isn't actually fooled by it.

Thanks for the helpful response, Oleg. So far in examination, pretty much all of our ranking terms point towards a category page, whose URL would not change. While some of our product pages are indexed, very few seem to come up in SERPs. I still worry there might be a ranking drop on the overall site. We do ok in G for some terms, though not nearly as well as I'd like. I guess fixing other major issues should be a priority. I think we'll look at using canonical tags and 301's to correct the problem, at least in the short term.

Thanks for the answers everyone. I'm currently going through and making a spreadsheet of the sites who are linking more than 100 times. Some of the sites I have no idea why there are links or why there are hundreds for them for that matter. We are going to contact them all (if we can find their contact details) and then apply for reconsideration. Thanks for the tips everyone.

Probably not a big deal, but since we don't know everything that the bots are looking at, if it is an easy fix I would consider just updating the CSS.

Would the same hold true for comments on blogs?  If I'm leaving comments on relevant blogs, would it be ok to leave a link to my website in there, just as long as I'm not using exact-match keywords everywhere?