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Thanks David great answer!

Sorry, I forgot to remove the .au

Here's a post from Dr. Pete about doing just that. He lost traffic, he lost indexed pages, and had to beg to Google for a reinclusion request even after he fixed things back again. You don't want to do it. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization

Hi Ryan I have tested this exact situation and actually the test is still running. I haven't seen a penalty, but the page doesn't rank as well as the real page did (They are 7% alike using the tool you mentioned). I'm also pretty sure that the value doesn't get transfered as if you use a 301 redirect. I wouldn't recommend using rel canonical for non similar pages as it's neither relevant or good for the user but also because it's apparently well thought through by Google to prevent webmasters from cheating. rel canonical should only be used if the two pages are very similar or have the exact same story.

I have placed the nav code at the bottom of the HTML doc at times. I can't really say that it is a significant difference for SEO. It doesn't take a lot of work to do if you are skilled with HTML/CSS but I can't really say that this methodology will have a long term benefit for SEO. HTML 5 has new tags that sites should adopt such as <nav>and other tags to indicate what that chunk of content is. These tags are supported by all major browsers at this point. I don't know all the specific browser versions. I would recommend this moving forward where possible. By using this tags the crawlers likely will not factor in position in the document to understand the importance of chunks of content.</nav>

Chad, try speaking directly with the software's developers. They probably offer a forums or other means of contact. They will surely recognize this issue instantly even if the developer you are working with does not. This type of issue does not fix itself. I expect your next crawl report to show the same issue, unless the issue is with the crawl itself or an action was taken on your site to correct the problem.

A 301 redirect is sent to the browser as part of the header of the page. If Magento returns the same page for both URLs, it should return the same header information and you should only have to make the change once.

Google will ignore this tag.

Using the in the header of the page will tell most bots who care that the various versions of the page URL that bring up this content are really the page referenced in the canonical link tag. This is very handy when you have index pages that show up for /, index, and /folderName. Since the same page is actually loaded for these the bot will see the canonical tag and should remember they are all the same (or just go to the page you tell it to). This is usually the easiest solution (if you can automate it for most pages) as you may not catch all of your weird URL situations with one 301 redirect. Hope that helps.

Perfect. Thanks for the help, guys!

Thanks for your answer Bryce. I was going to replace the occupational page with an occupational health services page so all of the relevant content under it will still be within a relevant category. What do you think?

ok, so not sure  sure this was shared.  Matt Cutts talking on this same subject. | [image: play_c.gif] | <cite class="kvm">www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2giR-WKUfY</cite> |

This is what rel canonical tags are for!  Read more about them here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

You really should leave the extension alone for this exact reason - when something gets borked - you will have issues. Making friendly URL's, but like John said, you don't need to alter the extension.

Re #2 it can be complicated. I refer to htaccess hacking as a black magic art of website building. But for straight 301 redirects, the code is fairly straightforward, in your .htaccess file it will be a line for every page that looks like so: redirect 301 http://www.myoldsite.com/page1.html http://www.mynewsite.com/page1.html This is the brute force method. You can also use regular expressions if there are patterns to the addresses, but then you're getting into the esoteric. Re #4 they will be instantly redirected.