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You wouldn't want to do that because most likely Google would just ignore your tag. Here are some good write ups: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/ http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Tony, whether or not you decide to index these categories you won't be losing any strength on the already indexed pages. The non-indexed pages already have juice flowing to them - you just can't see them in the SERP

Thanks for the reply. There is no duplicate data. I am very confident about this and I have properly constructed 301's to the correct Canonical link. I should have laid the question out a bit better. I am clearly defined through and through to the NON-WWW address but most all of the inbound links are to the WWW link and have a 301 to them. It appears as if I am missing the link juice from the links.

Thank you for your answers. As far as I can see, everything is getting crawled, but I also submitted an XML sitemap via webmaster tools. I decided to disable the cookie redirect for a few weeks to see if there are any changes in ranking.

All things being equal it would make no difference to ranking, even dot infos should have the same chance. In reality though a number of factors could have a knock on effect, people automatically type dot com (or hit ctrl+enter like me), people looking for local results may trust a ccTLD more, dot infos are cheap and riddled with more spam sites than other TLDs, so on and so forth. So, were it in a bubble, no; but there are secondary marketing factors to consider.

That's a good point. Does your CMS allow you to updaet the URL of an existing page? If it does, I would recommend doing this (rather than recreating the pages) and then making sure you have a static rewrite setup for that page. This is pretty easy to do in Apache and IIS (there are plent of guides available through Google)

What I'm about to add is more philisophical than hard data oriented. Don't be afraid to link out to relevant pages. Yes, you will lose some "juice", but you gain goodwill and "link karma" See, I tolld you it was philisophical Seriously though, if there is a natural fit for a link out, I'd include it. Feel free to throw this advice out the nearest window if you are in a tightly competitive space. then hoard all the link juice you can.

Richard, Are you saying I should redirect to pages like this /name/ vs /name

Anybody else out there?  I too have found these tools to be unreliable....

Thanks I will get the full URLs implemented to avoid any future confusions. I can't give an exact size of the site but I know it is much larger than it should be. It seems as though our CMS has been unnecessarily producing new URLs for the same pages over and over which we are aiming to fix very soon.

Our experience as well, generally months on end and an endless stream of duplicated listings. I'm at least looking forward to the listing separator tool they're supposed to release spring/summer '11.

Thumbs up and helpful answers always appreciated

I would do both at the same time that way if you take any hit/penalty for the changes it is only once. You may also want to submit a change of address through webmaster tools for the subdomain switch.

Interesting approach, thank you.

I dont think that you should have a problem if you place the links in a container, you should not have a problem. You can fight it out with your colleague on this. Its not a banned technique on Google.

Geotargeting is not uncommon and the search engines are pretty good at negotiating sites using it, depends on your implimentation though. We use geotargeting of users on our site to send users to /country/ based on their IP, with a few conditions. Users are only redirected when coming to the homepage, either as direct or from search. If a user from France is coming to the main dot com we'll send them to the /fr/ site automatically. If the user tries to get to the homepage via a search engine we redirect them to the appropriate language site. This is because the main dot com often shows up above or near the /country/ sites in search, especially for brand terms. If a user has been given a subpage for a search (e.g. site/cat/page/) then they won't be redirected as we assume the search engines have done a decent enough job at matching them to a page they want. Users/bots can override the routing. Users can internally navigate to other languages through the language menu. If we send somebody in France to the French site, but they only speak English, instantly forcing them back to the /fr/ site will just frustrate them. Link to the other language sites on your pages and check referral headers, if internal do not redirect. All language folders are specified in WMT and it definitely works. So Google comes in to the dot com, in the header there is a link to the /us/, so they'll crawl down that link getting both versions of the sites in their index. You biggest challenge here is getting the /us/ ranking above the dot com in the USA, which will require some creative link building Make sense?