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Hi, I think your H1 idea is fine. For the meta descriptions I'd write a new one for each page and make it so that it compels searchers to click your page. That may or may not be the first few words on your page. If the words do not capture interest you may lose a searcher to another search result. The meta description is important for click through. As you identified, just a product name or half a sentence will not serve you well.

Generally I'd not worry too much about duplicate warnings like this, especially if the duplicate pages are being created by parameters. Though Moz won't be able to see it, check Google's search console (AKA webmaster tools) under parameters to see how many portfolio IDs are being crawled. You can even set the parameter manually, though I find "Let Googlebot decide" usually works just fine. The canonical tag is a good idea. Definitely use a canonical tag that to point back to the original version of the page. Without seeing the site I can't give you more specific info than that. I'd probably not use robots.txt, just because I'd worry your content would be harder to crawl once a session is tagged with profile ID. It all depends on where users/bots pick up the profile ID variable from.

Thanks Patrick, that's really helpful.

Thanks Everett - Just popping across to Stack Overflow now!

Thank you, really appreciate the insight. We'll work on this.

If you delete the page, and it had links pointing to it, the server will return a 404 not found page, which makes you lose any authority they had to pass to the main domain or subdomain. Using the 301 redirects at least you take a portion of the authority back to your Website. If your CMS is somehow advanced, it should be easy to hide those "expired pages" from the page list avoiding any confusion. But again, if you redirect the page, lets say about am  inbound marketing conference in Boston to the main domain that does not "serve" any kind of useful content to the user that was actually expecting the page of the Boston conference, that won't help at all. Instead, try to 301 them to something that the user may be interested in, even tho the event he was looking for is no longer available; in this case, it could be a page listing all the upcoming inbound marketing conferences (in/near Boston). By going that route you favor your site by making the pagerank flow to the other page and you also help the user, which is the primary target.

That didn't even cross my mind. Thanks a lot!

Hi, I am contacting you guys again. Google has re-indexed our site completely. The only thing is our home page which remains with the old title tag... Any reason as to why this remains unchanged? See screenshot here: http://screencast.com/t/COF3cN9zC5

Thanks Everett! yes there's definitely seo benefit from having the title in the URL, and I think it's pretty significant - from what I have seen previously when we made a massive url changes for one of the websites I worked on - went from /{id}/ to {id}-{product-title}. Also there is a study shows that display url in search results is still a prominent element to influencing searchers' clicks. This is from 2012 but I think the same still applies today. http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/155941/domainbias.pdf so I'd prefer to have the titles included. It is completely possible to make the very original static, and that would be my preferred option - but we need to assess whether the changes were made because they were "mildly" or "totally" incorrect in the first place, and also at the same time need to convince others - who feel keeping the original urls (when the product titles change) would worsen ux. 301 redirects would be totally mental - so this would not be an option. Also adding canonical tag to the "non-original" urls method - potentially ok in the short term. I think using static (hardcoded) urls would be the only long-term solution.

Oh I see, I think I looked on the wrong section, I was checking on the Images section instead of External. Thanks for your help!

Not a problem with link structure. Doesn't appear to be a problem with code, either, from a glance just now. The good news? Your title tags work fine for me in Google search results and I see you at #1 ranking after the image pack for "press release examples". http://i.imgur.com/z2LTwcc.png IMO this is probably a personalized search result problem that you're seeing, and I would guess it's limited to you unless you've confirmed it with other people outside of your company computers. Never hurts to resubmit the URL in Search Console, either.

Great thanks, that sounds like a plan.

This type of duplicate applies to far more than just the homepage...so by implementing a single redirect rule, you handle this type of duplicate for every single URL on your site, and neither people nor search engines will ever see the undesired version. If you do this via canonical tags, you have to include the canonical tag on every page, which could be very time consuming depending on how large your site is.

Thank you for the response. Great suggestions on looking at source and the blog - will do that. thank you again!

Hi there Owler is your site yes? If that's the case, you're fine, and this even has SEO benefit hosting on a subdomain. I would definitely make sure you develop a image sitemap and submit to Google and Bing. Before anything, make sure your images are optimized, being as detailed as possible with all of the above. This should definitely help! Let me know if you have any questions or comments - good luck! Patrick

Hey guys, thanks for your reactions. Appreciate it! I guess it's time to roll up the sleaves... cheers, Boris

And since I can now stop being cryptic, I was referring to the new Keyword Explorer.

Roman, Awesome! Glad to hear you tackled the issue! Let us know if we can be of any further assistance! Trenton

Logan is correct, whenever you use a 301 redirect from one page on your domain to the same domain the link equity is passed (all of it, 100 percent). So, migrating from http to https isn't going to hurt at all. You won't lose any link equity. I still prefer to updated any links on other sites whenever I can, such as links from social media profiles, etc. and any other links I can get updated.

Whatever the case, if you have more than one link to the same page on the same page, only the first one is counted. So, there may be no need for the second link. What I would do, though, is use Google Analytics' in page analytics to see if you are getting clicks on that second link and which link is getting clicked more often by visitors to that page. If no one clicks on one of the links, you might consider removing it altogether.