Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I can't imagine why any CMS would be designed that way or, why, from a coding standpoint, it would be hard to remove. I try not to second-guess third-party providers (because I've been in their shoes), but that sounds like borderline BS to me. "Can't fix it" is far too often "Don't want to fix it". My gut feeling is that Google will ignore a standard port 80, and will only index the port if it's non-default or if the entire site (including internal links) is explicitly using the port. By adding that canonical, though, you're definitely sending a mixed signal, and there is risk. I've never seen this actual situation in play, so I can only speculate. Is it possible to remove the canonical tags on these pages and using 301-redirects or some other approach? Unfortunately, a lot of this depends on how the pages actually resolve and what other signals are in play. It's a bit tough to tell without looking at the specific site.

If you add a host name with your registrar the site then becomes available for everyone in the world. Even with a login you could have some leakage. If your site is set up to only answer to http://test.sitename.com and the only place you put the translation for that is in your local host file there is no opportunity for leakage. You don't have to worry about trying to block access other ways.

Yes, I'd also put the canonical tag on Page A referencing the Page A URL. In general, self-referencing canonical tags are a good thing to implement site-wide. Then, when you do need to make a change and have one duplicate page's canonical tag point to another URL (in this case, Page B to Page A), the tag is already in place and you can make the change more easily. But if self-referencing tags are in place from the beginning, they can also help squash lots of other duplicate content problems that end up occurring on more complex websites. Hope that makes sense!

Hi Dylan, Just wanted to check and see if this took care of your duplicates, and if you have any more questions. Happy New Year! Keri

Hi! I'm not sure exactly what you are asking. Can you provide links/screencaps to specific examples of what you have seen others do, and are considering doing yourself? Thanks!

yep

IMHO, Google has essentially tied our sites together, looking at the rankings and other metrics. We've upgraded some product pages with the same result - the upgraded page and the old page on the other side are stuck on page 2. They even mirror each other in the SERPs. They both move up and down by similar numbers. If Page A drops 2 slots, page B drops 2 slots. It's like the pages are attached at the hip...

It's a big site, and the most important category page. It explains a lot.

Martijn,  thanks for your response.  I could see Google saying that on a given page the same source image shouldn't have more than one alt description, and either penalizing such or just picking one of them or ignoring it altogether.  It's the penalty I'm concerned with, of course. . But, I can also see that if they are seeing a blank.gif for the source and some code related to lazy loading they may go ahead and give credit to each alt as though a real src was loaded--and maybe even tying it to the real src image name for image search.  Just looking for a bit more feedback from real-world experience first.. Has anyone else worked with this and determined if it is a pro or con?

Hi Kumar, Moz has a great list of companies that they recommend working with. You can check out the full list here Gr., Keszi

I would recommend that you run your site through the Panguin Tool  - http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/ This maps your Google Analytics against the Google Updates to give you a better idea if you have been hurt yet. It also sounds to me that you need to talk to your SEO and see what their complete strategy is - what are they doing on your site to optimise it naturally for terms you are targeting? Have basics such as your page titles, meta descriptions and other on-page factors been systematically optimised? In terms of your off-page what have they been doing to earn you links or has it just been some directory submissions? There needs to be a strategy to strengthen your site and the exposure of your site in order to help gain exposure. Do you get a lot of social interaction on your site? Do you have a content strategy in place? These are just some of the areas that you need to consider in order to start to get a proper SEO/Marketing strategy in place...

Can you elaborate more on your experience on certain penalties being passed vs being ignored? Would like to hear more. To your second point, if I understand you properly your are saying that a domain with authority may be able to counteract a passed penalty? If so, that case would not apply in this scenario as the new domain started from scratch and had to build up authority. However, the domain ranked pretty much from the first month.

I dont see noticeable bumps because Im usually ranking at 1 already when the box shows up in the serps for me I would assume that it does get more clicks. From my stats a couple %'s doesnt count for me.

This would be correct and a simple job. Find a WordPress developer and have them make an edit to the theme to include an H1 tag. Send me a message and I could help.

Hi, Paramaya raises a good point, you should use Google Webmaster Tools to set certain URL parameters to be crawled, ignored, ect. However, I wouldn't rush to say you don't want Google crawling those pages, since they may add value in some way. I think you should add canonical tags to the pages with URL parameters that point back to your site's main page. This way, Google knows and crawls the URLs with parameters and attributes value and relevancy to the page being pointed to through the canonical tag. I help run a top 50k ecommerce website, we use canonical tags and GWT to handle such issues.

you're off on a tangent here....let's not do that...my comments referred to the 'why' not the cause.... go to the 'recommended' list and pick a few to vet....then get a deal and they will undoubtedly do that complete web audit first to see where you are and why... all else is rhetoric here....time to get the tasks started, eh!

A similar thing happened to me once. In my case, the DNS settings were incorrect. Check that

The majority of your inbound links will likely be to the homepage. If one set of keywords describes what you do but are shorter tail than the rest, those are good homepage keywords.  You will naturally attract more homepage links though - so the authority should be much higher overall.

Hi Giovatto, Thanks for your thoughts.  I had thought that too, but it looks to me like while it crawls both, it indexes only the desktop.  I think it crawls the mobile to see what else mobile links to, but that the main purpose is to see if the pages render well for mobile.  Here's my otherr thread that goes into this in more detail: http://moz.com/community/q/mobile-search-results-show-desktop-crawled-content

Thanks to everyone for the comments and suggestions. So, to be sure I am doing this correctly. I am building a totally new site. I will probably continue to use my primary domain name, even though it really has no relationship to my business in terms of key words. It has been out there for over 20 years and has domain authority of either 18 or 30 and authority of 21. The domain authority of 18 or 30 depends on whether you are talking about XXXX.com or XXXX.com/index.html. Obviously this is another issue that I need to address. I have an early version of the new site out there on the net, and Moz is telling me that I have a problem with duplicate pages. It is the same issue, YYY.com or YYY.com/index.html. (This is a new domain name that I am presently only using for testing, although it does contain excellent keywords in the domain name.) My next question refers to 301 redirects or canonical. I suspect canonical is easier. The question is, which is the best canonical page, YYY.com or YYY.com/indexhtml? I assume YYY.com, since there will be many other pages such as YYY.com/info.html, YYY.com/services.html, etc. My plan is to make many pages that will refer to various services that are also keywords, such as YYY.com/keyword-phrase-A.html, yyy.com/keyword-phrase-B.html, etc. I assume this is the best way. Also, I will have a number of instructional white-papers that will be keyword rich.