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There are two ways to handle load balancing, and it appears that your hosting company / server company chose to use the DNS round-robin routing option. According to the Wikipedia page on load balancing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_balancing_(computing) "Load balancing usually involves dedicated software or hardware, such as a multilayer switch or a Domain Name System server process." Round Robin DNS Load Balancing: Basically you use the DNS routing system to handle requests. When someone visits your site, 50% of the people are routed to www.domain.com, and 50% are routed to ww1.domain.com. Both sites contain the same identical content; it's the URLs that are slightly different. Sometimes the domains are the same; but you have different IP addresses for www.domain.com. Advantages: you don't need a dedicated load balancing piece of software or hardware, so it's less expensive. Disadvantages: this technique exposes the individual web servers to the end user seeing the site. You can also suffer from duplicate content penalties, too. Finally, if you are relying on the round robin DNS system for load balancing, and a DNS server or one of the Web servers goes down, there's not an easy fail-over (as many DNS records are cached). More about Round Robin DNS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_DNS Hardware / Software Load Balancer: In this case, your DNS zone file tells the end user to go to one IP address when they type in www.domain.com. The hardware or software load balancer then sees the request, and then hands off the content to one of the web servers in a cluster. Advantages: No duplicate content penalty; to the end user, they just see one web server and not individual sub-domains (www.domain.com and ww1.domain.com). A load balancer can also cache specific items like a CSS page, so the load on the Web server is even more minimal. Disadvantages: You're introducing another piece of hardware or software (i.e. more cost); this piece could also be a single point of failure into the mix. You need someone to figure out how to set this up and make sure it all works. More on this type of Load Balancing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_balancing_(computing)#Internet-based_services Load balancing can get complicated as soon as you have databases involved, but with a good design, multiple front end Web servers can talk to one single backend database server. The goal would be to cache as much content as possible as "static" elements, using caching systems like Varnish, that essentially turn database-driven pages into static, old-school HTML pages. And then only when someone needs to save something from the database (i.e. making a purchase on an eCommerce site), the system then interacts with it. My recommendation: (1) Move from the Round Robin Robin DNS to a hardware or software load balancer. (2) If that isn't an easy solution, implement the Round Robin DNS solution to use identical A records for each server. For example, you might have identical entries in your DNS zone files for both DNS servers: NS1.domain.com: www.domain.com A 69.94.15.10 NS2.domain.com: www.domain.com A 75.64.18.12 This should at least eliminate your duplicate content issue, but you still do have a few disadvantages (described above). This also could lead to server issues, as the servers might be confused if they are the authoritative ones. And if both servers are sending email, pay special attention to your SPF record, to make sure that you are allowing both IP addresses to be able to send email. (This is often overlooked.) Hope this is helpful! -- Jeff

Recommend reading this article about del.ic.ious getting blacklisted by Google. This is very recent. So, consider this news when using bit.ly internal links in blog posts. Even though the links are going to result pages, this could be problematic for an as yet undetermined period of time (basically bit.ly has two issues to deal with - migration away from their .us domain plus vulnerabilities that make it possible for trojans and scripting elements to be used). Of course, if you're not receiving alerts then the issue is reframed. http://www.wordfence.com/blog/2014/10/a-malicious-del-icio-us/ As stated, "Delicious has changed hands several times over the years and recently was re-sold earlier this year to Science Inc. They also rebranded several years ago to delicious.com which is not blacklisted, but there are likely a large number of legacy .us links out there. [Edit: Thanks Kelson]"

Thanks for your help Travis, that was a really solid answer.

Many Travis, A good detailed answer. thanks for your help ,  I will look at doing this. Pete

Hi Andy, Thanks for a very good answer. That makes sense. Ill keep my article section and the interview section. My current system is "simple". so it doesnt support all the features a word-press blog have and people can't comment on the articles directly on the site. That might be a problem? In that content a sorta like blog-system would be better, but ill stick to what I have for now then. Thanks. KasperGJ

I agree with Don.  Google ultimately wants to see that not only are you an authority in your field, you go out of your way to give your visitor as much information as you can by means of linking to further resources.  Although personally I would avoid just dumping in Wikipedia links as they can be viewed as thinly veiled lazy links.

Isn't the main question: Why do you have duplicate pages, are these essentials - the easiest option would be to remove them. But in terms of whats the best option, here is a great article from Moz: http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt I would read that and decide based on your websites and situation the option best suits you. In my opinion I would suggest:

Hey Matt, The best way to tell what the news organization or site is using is to turn off javascript or view the google cache to determine how Google "sees" the page. This article is using the second option in the article I mentioned - snippets. Here is what the article has to say about that: "If you prefer this option, please display a snippet of your article that is at least 80 words long and includes either an excerpt or a summary of the specific article."

Hi Marcus Thanks for the reply. Yeh I think you're right in that it needs to be reviewed on a case by case basis taking into account the goal of the page. Off topic: Just checked out your latest blog post (cracking post btw!),clicked through to the kwfinder tool out of interest and the keyword data it returns for UK searches appear to be American? Have you tested the tool yourself? Do you find the same problem as me? Feel free to reply to me on Twitter given it's noting to do with this Q & A thread Cheers! Anthony

DMCA is free, yes.

Alex, sorry it's taken a bit for us to get this one published -- but I wanted to let you know, this Whiteboard Friday will be published tomorrow morning, 10/24.

"You are better off putting up a separate review page for every review that page gets but still, I would choose putting it on the same page to take full advantage of it." Yep this is exactly what I want to do. Sounds like Laura's idea is amazing and I need to do some more research on how to design a page to act in this way. Thanks heaps guys!

In this situation it shouldn't be an issue as it isn't a purchased link.  However to be on the safe side you may be best to make the site wide link a no follow. You could place a non site wide link somewhere else on the blog that points back to the main site if you would like to pass some link juice. You can find a discussion on site wide links here: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2340986/Are-All-Sitewide-Links-Unnatural

I thought pagerank algorithm was largely redundant these days? But good points, thank you! Yes, I am very interested in universal search.

I only use canolonical links on the same domain as your telling google which is a master page. If you use them accross domains I don't think it would pan out very well for the site giving away it's content google juice. I'd like to know the colution to this if anyone has got anything to add, as I also have a site in Ireland which sells the same as the site in the UK. Luckily for me the majority of the contnent isn't duplicate.

Yeah, if sites that are linking to you have been hit then you may lose rankings. Penguin may have devalued some of your links as well (not the same as penalised, be aware), which would also lose you rankings. Like a previous commenter has said, wait a week or so before panicking. Look at onsite stuff as well, really a site doesn't need that many links if the content and site are well built and follow best practice. (by not many links I mean not many high value ones - you'd need thousands of poor value ones to rank well - but you'd always be looking over your shoulder for a big fat penguin chasing you down!) Also, look at your competition - what's happened to the sites that share your vertical? Has any of them suddenly shot up in the serps? Maybe they've had a penguin penalty lifted and you're the collateral? Sometimes we lose ranking because another site in the same vertical does something better than us - hard to admit I know, but worth bearing in mind. Best of luck with this! Amelia

How big is the site in question? How many pages are there to de-index? What does Google Webmaster Tools tell you about the old domain? Does it show pages being removed from the index over time? If you do a site:{old domain} query, can you see that the number of results being returned is gradually decreasing? How have you implemented the redirects? Have you submitted a change of address request in Webmaster Tools? On the new website, have you submitted a sitemap fom the old website as well as the new one? What does the backlink profile on the old domain look like? Can you start to get authoritative links to the old site updated? What about any embedded internal links in your content - have they also been updated? More guidance from Google here: Webmasters Tools Help: Move a site with URL changes

Long story short, if you can host your sub-domain in a sub-folder, it'll be better. However, a lot of times for security issues and hosting constraints, companies end up hosting blogs on separate domains or sub-domains. I'd suggest you look into reverse proxy. That can make your blog URL look like yourdomain.com/blog I hope that helps

Our concern is that the search result for au pair was, at one point, the correct title tag. However, it changed a few weeks ago to Au Pair - InterExchange and we can't figure out why.