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Whenever you use domain "masking", you're setting yourself up for search engine ranking problems. You're essentially making the same content available on both domain names. That leads to duplicate content, and the search engines (mainly Google) will pick which domain they prefer and show that on in the search results (usually the one that they crawl first). The only proper way to deal with this is to set up 301 Permanent Redirects from one domain to the other.

Thanks for the update, and good luck!

Thank you Logan! Very helpful. I'm in process on a website overhaul but I appreciate the heads up.

The fact they are hiding content IMO this is black hat. But, don't get too caught up in it being black hat. I know your site and in most searches you are ahead of them. They have 4 backlinks all no followed. I think there are things you could do on other pages on your site to push them down and end up with more than one page on the SERP. Go get em!

1. It's not bad to have pages that are not directly linked to your site. In fact a good lot of PPC landing pages aren't typically linked from anywhere within the navigation or website itself. Keep the page in the sitemap if you want it to remain indexed but if you only care about the direct traffic, it doesn't need to stay. You can definitely 301 the old page to the new one but you said you previously hid the parent? I would only 301 redirect if you're 100% sure this is the way it will stay forevermore. So it really depends on why you're removing and what you essentially want to happen.

Hi , Did you follow all of Google's Change of Address instructions? If redirects are in place, chances are you missed something else minor that can have a big impact.

Hi there. No, IP canonicalization doesn't make any difference, due to the way of how dns works. Even if you do this type of canonicalization, your website still will have that ip, it's kinda like a pointer. Kinda like geo coordinates vs address. It's the same place, and even if you rename the street, you still have the same coordinates. Read this here, it might help: https://moz.com/community/q/how-to-do-ip-canonicalization

Hi Eric, Thanks for your answer, but as said in my original post, I can't get rid of these URLs because of tracking (these tracking parameters are used all across the website in order to know from where products are the most clicked etc). One of the only spot where the product URLs are 'parameter free' is in the sitemaps xml. Most of the time, a link from a list page to a product URL will look like /style/cuff-gold/804-item.html?ref=by-shop%3afashion-and-lifestyle%3a, while the 'true' URL is /style/cuff-gold/804-item.html. In order to prevent duplicate content from these tracking codes (I have seen some products being indexed twice or more because of this), the 1st URL has a meta robots 'noindex,follow' and has for canonical the 2nd one (which has a robots 'index, follow'). I just wanted to make sure this could be the best solution in our case (as we unfortunately can't get rid of these tracking codes) in order to have only clean product URLs indexed, and only once!.

If they are new products with unique descriptions and content I could not see it being flagged as spammy however thin content could be an issue. I think it would also depend on if you handle product variants properly too. I could see it being an issue if you build a separate page for each product variant though.

Hi Matt. I have one more question in regards to your initial reply. I am on board with redirecting the .co.uk site to .com/UK/ but what would you then suggest we do with the new .com homepage? I originally thought from your answer that you was suggesting to redirect the new .com homepage to .com/UK now I don't believe this to be the case. Would you suggest having a location selector page on the .com homepage with ? We currently only have 3 main locations (although we are expanding rapidly) so I am not sure this is really required. Or would you have it set in GWT as targeting no specific location, and again set . Would this give us the best chance to try and grow in areas we do not currently have a regional website for? Thanks again for all your assistance so far. Much appreciated!

Logan is correct--if you look at the canonical tag in your example in the source code you're not using the full URL, you're only using a snippet (the relative) URL. So, rather than /barn-junior/tilbehor/hansker-votter/junior you need to change it to https://www.gsport.no/barn-junior/tilbehor/hansker-votter/junior.

Yes, that should work just fine. As Logan mentioned, I recommend you test it in the robots.txt testing tool in Google Search Console.

Yay! Awesome!

Here is one I wrote a long time ago on the Moz blog, looking at different relationships between Wikipedia's link profile and other sites.

Yes, I would like to see some study data on CTR success/failure of Capital First Letter Of Every Word vs. not. Or legibility study for fast reading comprehension. I see this as more important for ad copy than meta data, since ad copy is much more limited in characters and visual real estate.

It would affect all your mobile / tablet rankings and wouldn't affect your desktop rankings as much. Like I said it could be your competitors have improved theirs, rather than yours getting worse, if you can work out when roughly the decline started to happen - ask your devs what they rolled.

Even if the image is decorative, it is still describing the contents of the image to visually impaired users. Here's more from Google: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/114016?hl=en From Google: "The alt attribute is used to describe the contents of an image file. It's important for several reasons: It provides Google with useful information about the subject matter of the image. We use this information to help determine the best image to return for a user's query. Many people-for example, users with visual impairments, or people using screen readers or who have low-bandwidth connections—may not be able to see images on web pages. Descriptive alt text provides these users with important information." The image's decorative value is for the user to judge, it's about providing the full story and experience to all users not some.

This tool can help store owners to move one cart to other cart with keeping all current SEO ranking you have built up for years. It supports to migrate 301 SEO URLs of categories and products, so I think the first thing you can do is keep ranking of domain B. After that, you can rise it. http://litextension.com/seo-urls-migrations-plugins.html

Hi Rob, thanks again very much. I will implement more links and switch the title tags! Thank you very much again! I'm really grateful for your help and advice! Best regards Marc

Additional responses to this question can be found here: https://moz.com/community/q/best-sitemap-for-large-website