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The key is to make the meta descriptions unique - if they are not important then the rule which grabs the first sentance would work fine (as you suggest). Another rule (so it reads better) is to limit it to say, 135 chars, have some smarts in place to ensure you don't end the sentance mid word & then append the end with "... Read more here" or something relevant to your site. So the template could look like: "<first 135="" chars="" of="" first sentence not="" ending="" mid-word="">... Read more here." (even if it does end mid word it would be better than having duplicated descs since the pages aren't important) </first> hope that helps!

I would like to know more about this one too.

the hosting company is in the US, it is important for me to make the site load fast, the last thing i want to do is for the readers to get fed up of slowly loaded pages. I have to get the site up to scratch so i can start making money from it which it is not doing at the moment. google analaystics, says under site speed 0.00 so i am a bit confused by this

many thanks. after you great advice alan, it is now turned on

I believe that you have url rewriting to a friendly url. If so, then you should have a corresponding  301. There are 3 steps to a creating a url rewrite The url rewrite itself The corresponding 301 And 3rd you need to do either one of two things, either create a outgoing rewrite rule that rewrites all old urls as a page is requested by the user, so he sees the new urls, or go thought the site and manually change every url to the new friendly url If you leave the old urls in the site, you will be getting un-necessary redirects, each redirect leaks link juice, so you should link directly to the new url

Yes we can re-use any redirected domain , by simply removing 301 page redirect code from .htaccess. And yes when you do remove it you will need to get the domain indexed again in Google.The new authority might go back to the old site.

I don't think rel=canonical isn't going to help this really (as that's more to do with where you can get to the same 'page' through two different routes). Unfortunately there isn't a way round this other than to produce unique content for each product page - have a look at something like firebox.com for inspiration on producing unique content description... though I suppose there's only so many times you can describe a phone case

Agreeing with Brent on password-protection. And everything else he said. Also, if these are CMS-driven sites, I can almost guarantee you you've got paths pointing back to the dev-version. Probably absolute links to images and such. I've had that happen before. Remove the database and files from your dev directories and see what breaks on the live-site

Cheers. Do you know anyone doing one big international site well?

In my permalink structure page in settings, I have it set as follows: Custom Structure: /%postname%.html I know, don't ask why I set it up this way years ago. But thinking how best to remedy the solution without hurting my traffic.

If it's just the home-page, it might be easier safer to put a canonical tag on it. A canonical on the home-page can help sweep up weird variants (which are coming). If you got the htaccess route, just test it thoroughly. It can be really tough to write rewrites for other people's sites (without knowing specifics or testing). That said, I think @webfeatseo is on the right track.

There are two aspects to the issue: 1. Resolve the cause of the problem. Crawl your site, locate any links to alternate URLs and change the links on your site to use the correct version of the URL. 2. Add a 301 redirect from /bad-url to /good-url. This will ensure any link juice to the bad urls is retained, along with providing a good user experience.

Thanks, Andrew! I had done this for handfuls of pages at a time, but not an entire site and it had me concerned. I appreciate the advice!

Thanks Lindz and Tyler. I have got my answer

Excellent!  Thanks Ryan for the personal attention and the advice.  Just what I needed.  Jim