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Thanks guys. The website is still on a dev server, so I can't use the testing tool, but I will absolutely add that to my list of go-to's.

Hi there Remove the canonical - consider having both pages ranking a good thing. I don't know why you would canonicalize your homepage to an internal page, don't do that! Let your homepage be brandname.com and keep your internal page the brandname.com/cotton-tees - that's just a best practice and logical. Your homepage should NOT be an internal page - it should be the face of your web presence and a way to showcase all of the great internal content on the website. I would also look into opportunities to link to that internal page off the homepage. Hope this helps - good luck!

Hi John; Internal links should indeed be changed to the url's you keep. On the duplicates - it's best to put a noindex,follow - that way the value from the external links to the page is still beneficial for your site (if this article is still valid http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts.shtml) To be honest - for duplicate pages that have incoming external links - I would rather 301 them to the original article (or put a canonical to the original). I rgds Dirk

Hi Alan First - don't noindex pages to increase your authority numbers. That's not going to help. Especially if those pages do hold value. You need to give your site an honest and unbiased assessment. I would take a look at the following: Domain Authority Page Authority I would read the following to see if your content can be cleaned up or enhanced: How To Do a Content Audit - Step-by-Step I would read this to get a good competitive analysis going: The Illustrated SEO Competitive Analysis Workflow I would read the following to see if you can clean up any backlink related issues: Link Audit Guide for Effective Link Removals & Risk Mitigation The reason being - these authority numbers are pretty holistic and not just content related. You have to look at multiple facets to increase these numbers - it takes a lot of honest research and critiques of your site to make sure these numbers increase. They aren't related to one specific aspect of your site. I would also take a look at the on-site SEO factors to make sure you have all the foundational aspects taken care of. Here's a great technical checklist as well. Hope these all help! There's a lot of angles to look at - good luck!

Hi Anirban! It looked like you asked a very similar question here: http://moz.com/community/q/fetch-data-for-users-with-ajax-but-show-it-without-ajax-for-google What additional information are you looking for?

It's essentially impossible to know whether one individual signal is or is not going to cause a penalty (algorithmic or manual) unless the shear volume of instances is bizarrely big in the extreme. Some things to consider: Is that "10%" due to the number of sites out there that have posted a copy of the press release? What's the total "bigger picture" footprint in regard to how many high quality links you have compared to those? What's the rest of the link footprint look like in regard to borderline or spammy inbound link signals? How many links are in that press release? What's the ratio of links to overall text and number of paragraphs? All of these questions matter. So while it's not necessarily good to spam link anchor text, if the overall message across all signals is "strong brand trust", one press release issued one time, with one or even maybe two links that have exact match anchor text may not be so severe or toxic.

Thanks Miriam, I appreciate the response, and the article you wrote. Here's commiserating with all the other SAB SEO's out there who's jobs seem to get harder with each Google update! Cheers

Thanks Dirk - I will try out your suggestions and let you know my results.  I appreciate your help.

Hi Rajiv, If you post the same content on both FR & EN version: if both are written in English (or mainly written in English) - best option would be to have a canonical pointing to the EN version Example: https://fr.sitegeek.com/category/shared-hosting - most of the content is in English - so in this case I would point a canonical to the EN version if the FR version is in French - you can use the HREF lang tag - you can use this tool to generate them, check here for common mistakes and doublecheck the final result here. Just some remarks: partially translated pages offer little value for users - so it's best to fully translate them or only refer to the EN version I have a strong impression that the EN version was machine translated to the FR version. (ex. French sites never use 'Maison' to link to the Homepage - they use Acceuil). Be aware that Google is perfectly capable to detect auto-translated pages and they consider it to be bad practice (check this video of Matt Cutts - starts at 1:50). So you might want to invest in proper translation or proofreading by a native French speaker. rgds Dirk

That will all depend on what CMS you are using and how your site is built.

Hi, You could check this tool http://flang.dejanseo.com.au/ to check if the tags are properly implemented. rgds, Dirk

Hi Laura, thank you so much for your response. Apologies for the delay in my response, I wasn't notified and forgot to check back in. I will give it a shot and work through it with our dev team. Very much appreciated. Saving me a great deal of stress.

I think you'd get more results from removing "frogs" so many times from the URL. We had a client doing this with insurance: theirinsurancecompany.com.au/business-insurance/insurance-details.html And it was a disaster. We changed all the URLs to types of insurance but without the word so: theirinsurancecompany.com.au/business/insurance-details.html And rankings improved dramatically over the next month or two as the URLs were recrawled and reindexed. Now they rank for all sorts of insurance related keyphrases with FEWER instances of insurance in each URL.

Hi Emmett So good to hear! For reference, here's what I recommended to Emmett... I would just goto the category pages creating duplicate content issues and add some text. Here's an example from an Inflow article I often reference (http://www.goinflow.com/duplicate-content-ecommerce-seo/ "Category pages on eCommerce websites typically include a title and product grid. This means that there is no unique content on these pages. The common solution to combat this is to add unique descriptions at the top of category pages (not the bottom, where content is given less weight by search engines) that describes what types are featured within the category. There is no magic number of words or characters to use, however the more robust the content is, the better chance the page will be able to maximize traffic from organic search results (due to long-tail keyword traffic). A benchmark of 100-300 words is common. It’s important to understand screen resolutions of your visitors and ensure that the product grid is not pushed below the fold on their browsers. Doing so could limit user discoverability of the product grid upon visiting the category page. Tip: Intro descriptions on category pages offer a great opportunity to build deep links to related sub-category pages, related article content that may exist on the site, and popular products that deserve attention and link equity." If you have the opportunity to do so, try that out. You're developing unique content for that page and also giving the user a bit of perspective to really "sell" them on your products. Again - glad to hear this worked! Let me know if you need anything else!

Hi, When you say that referral traffic was unaffected - did you see the burst of traffic in Analytics or not? In webmaster tools - do you see that clicks go down to zero during this timeframe. Was there an increased number of crawl errors during this period? Was your site able to handle the traffic or did it go down - sometimes when sites are unstable or frequently offline Google temporary removes them from the SERP's until the situation has normalised. Without additional info it's difficult to judge what exactly could be the cause. I never heard that a sudden peak of traffic from one source had an impact (in the negative sense) on search traffic - normally more visits from other sources are rather positive for your rankings. rgds, Dirk

Thanks Tom - that's incredibly helpful - much appreciated Luke

Many thanks Patrick, I will take a look at the article etc.  These pages are gone and wont' be coming back , so It looks like a 410 would be fine. Many thanks Pete

Hey Dirk I think that's the crux eh - keeping the 1 to 1 ratio. Makes it a bloody cinch to do too. Still doesn't quite sit right somehow to have canonicals on top of canonicials mind you but sod it - works for me. Cheers Dirk. Alex.

Hi, Matt is very rightly said "If you want to sell worldwide, I wouldn't use .london extension" . Apart from that Matt cutts said in 2012 "Google has a lot of experience in returning relevant web pages, regardless of the top-level domain (TLD). Google will attempt to rank new TLDs appropriately, but I don’t expect a new TLD to get any kind of initial preference over .com, and I wouldn’t bet on that happening in the long-term either. If you want to register an entirely new TLD for other reasons, that’s your choice, but you shouldn’t register a TLD in the mistaken belief that you’ll get some sort of boost in search engine rankings." Hope that helps Thanks

Hi, It's quite possible that it's just a matter of time before the label shows like Patricks mentions. However, if you check your site with PageSpeed Insights there seems to be something strange with the way you implement the redirect: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pssl.com which could be the reason why the label does not appear: Your page has 2 redirects. Redirects introduce additional delays before the page can be loaded.Avoid landing page redirects for the following chain of redirected URLs. http://www.pssl.com/ http://www.pssl.com/!XkggQFlbOgq2yNN3W1icyA!/ http://m.pssl.com/ If you want to check this "manually" you can check the headers yourself using web-sniffer.net with a mobile user agent. I would check with your technical team how to avoid this redirect chain.Apart from that, if you check the insights for speed, your scores for both mobile & desktop are not really great. Testing on webpage test  http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150429_62_19PT/1/details/ - loaded in 3.7 sec is not extremely bad but not great either. You could probably reduce the load time by combining your 19 js & 6 css files. For mobile 400K images & 270K javascript (!) is probably a bit too much to load over a mobile connection(the test also shows the double redirect).rgds,Dirk