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Thanks Sachin So basically on sites that use ECWID for their ecommerce, only the main pages on the actual website (not the product pages that ECWID generates which is the part from the hashtag on) get indexed? Essentially Google is NOT indexing any products because ECWID uses an existing page on a website and shows products there. Is that correct? For example if you look at an XML sitemap for the running boards site that we used as an example you will see there are only 10 pages on it. However there are over a 1000 different types of running boards sold on the site which have their own pages populate after a #tag in the url: http://www.runningboards4less.com/index.php?option=com_xmap&view=xml&tmpl=component&id=1

I went ahead and private messaged you the ip.

I had a nice long reply, but the system crashed. I'll keep it short this time: Rel canonical is the right band-aid for this problem right now. However, you need to find out what is causing the issue and fix that because you don't want Google wasting crawl budget on thousands or millions of non-canonical URLs. I couldn't figure out which CMS / Shopping Cart system yours is built on, other than that it is on a Windows server. I don't have much experience working with eCommerce sites using Windows IIS except for Volusion. Perhaps it is a custom-built shopping cart, or just one I don't know of. Either way, the person who built it or sold it to you should be able to help you figure out why this is happening and help you fix it. If not, I might consider looking into a new eCommerce shopping cart system / CMS.

This has been such a great thread, I decided to add a little more information on my problem redirect and a personal theory.... When I redirected domainA.com to keyworddomain.com, domainA.com had been on the web for nearly ten years with #1 rankings for its products for almost that entire time,  The domain had lots of mentions had, lots of domain queries and a great history with google. When you do a 301 redirect, I believe that only redirects a fraction of your assets.  It is only a mechanical redirect of the file names on your server and search engines know how to follow it and attribute links. However, I do not believe that a 301 transfers all of the mentions of your brand that appear on other sites or the domain queries that you have been receiving, any social value and other off-page assets that search engines might give you credit for.  (I don't know what they can do about local, since that is never a concern for me.) So the more work you have put into your site related to branding the greater your loss will be when you walk away from the domain.  When I put my site up on keyworddomain.com Google's followed the 301s but had every right to ask.... "WHO IS THIS?"... This new domain was a Nobody. No one asks for it  by name through the google seach box, nobody is typing the domain in the address bar of the Chrome browser, the name is not mentioned in association with all of my products on many other websites, in blogs and in forums.  I lost all of those assets and that is why I personally believe the rankings dropped. Robert gives great suggestions for an attempt to reclaim some of these "other offsite assets".  I think he has good ideas that I did not do. People rarely if ever talk about these "other offsite assests" so we are ringing their bell here.

Hey BCutrer, Just wanted to make sure you'd seen a good solution to this and everything was deindexed properly? I haven't heard anyone mention the lack of a cached version as a sign of deindexation about to occur, but would be curious if you still think that was the case. I would sooner guess that noarchive was placed on those pages.

If this is still an issue you're facing, have you checked the sitemap settings to see which page types are getting included? For example, a site with a few thousand tags that are not entered in the sitemap but not yet set to noindex could easily produce extra pages like this. The next step is parameterization. Anything going on there with search URLs or product URLs? eg ?refid=1235134&q=search+term or ?prod=152134&variant=blue If you really want to scrape through Google, get a list of your sitemap and scrape queries like "inurl:domain.com/a", "inurl:domain.com/b", "inurl:domain.com/c". etc. This should allow you to dive deeper into the site map to see what Google really has indexed. For URL subfolders with tons of URLs like domain.com/product/a, you'll want to do the same thing at a subfolder level instead of root URLs.

Just to confirm mosquitohawk's comments, there's not a great way to do this other than sorting through the spreadsheet. Hopefully URLs have distinct enough subfolders that you can break them out into sections easily.

Thanks so much! This is exactly what I wanted to know.

Thank you Gary for your effort and great insight. I didn't realize we were ranking in Google search sites other than Google.com . But it explains why WMT says we are getting some traffic from Google. Unfortunately  we are not showing up for our own domain for the term "Armia" for almost an year now. So it is not a regular recalculation. This is our main corporate site. Most of the blog updates and social channels are updated through two different product sites. The social channels connected is our own product site Good point the keywords. May be it is time to retire it.  I knew Google stopped taking them into account. I didnt know it impacts adversely. Thanks again Gary. Aji

Hi Garrett, It really depends on the nature and use of the image. I'd really take that on a case by case basis. If you created unique images that received a ton of links or social shares, or they provided something important to your end users, than sure, recreating them on the same URLs might be a great idea. You might want to spot check a few in AHrefs, OSE and Google ANalytics to see if they were generating buzz, traffic, links or all three. Choose some likely candidates and find out what you see in those tools and let that guide how you proceed. Cheers, Dana

Matt Cutts covers this in some detail on a Webinar.  If you can fix it, do so, but it would appear that Google do try and make allowances for e-commerce sites where content is duplicated across size colour matrix, being the product description is often duplicated without any other option. Check Youtube for Matts webinar Bruce

I was going to say the same as Trung. A couple things that might help you differentiate the pages to think about include: The reasons people get married in Palm city The reasons they get married in Stuart The reasons they get married in Port St. Lucia It might come down to criteria such as following: transportation budget, the venue, the atmosphere. Those are just a few of the things you can do to differentiate the pages. Really dig in and discuss the benefits and display that you understand what it is like to at least witness a wedding in all of the areas. Show them that you know what you are talking about. I am positive as a Florida resident that there is a lot you can say about these areas regarding travel for the guests as well as the reception and ceremony. Do not create a bunch of URLs just because they have your keywords in them. Especially when they are identical to the others. Try creating a URL called "wedding locations" something like that then you can have them choose the city in which they want to plan the wedding. Create pages around the venues "best place's to get married in Stuart". You see where I am going with this? If your locations are brick-and-mortar businesses which means you must do face-to-face business at the address specified, you can then add them to Moz local making it much more powerful. https://moz.com/local/ Add schema, and use these tools to help: http://www.microdatagenerator.com/local-business-generators/ http://schema-creator.org/organization.php This can be used to promote weddings: http://www.productontology.org/doc/Wedding_photography Local schema generator tools: http://localu.org/blog/hand-google-virtual-business-card-schema-markup-local-businesses/ http://tools.seochat.com/tools/brand-organization-schema-generator/ I hope this helps, Thomas 6YOS9QA.png

Hi DeploySEO, It does sound like you're on the right track realizing that content development is going to need to be a major priority here. Don't underestimate the amount of creativity this process requires and deserves - you want to create a finished body of content that your customer love and of which your company is really proud. Wishing you good luck:)!

_Definitely _don't create any duplicate content here. I think you're on the right track, though: create some navigation pages that are optimized for unbranded search, and use those as an alternative way to find product pages, beyond just the original branded way. Good luck! Kristina

Hi Alan, you've received some excellent responses. Did any of them help answer your questions? We'd love to hear from you! Christy

Great Answer! So for your larger sites - what structure do you use for your XML sitemaps? Focus on loc, priority and changefreq? Also is there a risk if a lastmod date is left to be 12-18 months old the search engines may start penalising the site as they deem its out of date or am I assuming they will do this by analysing the cached copies and seeing there have been no changes? Does lastmod only really benefit sites that update frequently (even daily) and for sites with static content it should be left off? I do have a further question about large ecommerce sites - is it best practice to have a one XML sitemap for the main pages and top level categories and then a separate XML sitemap for the products (I'm thinking for a site with 500 products.

I use Sitecore and it doesn't change the URL if the title is changed. In my case, you first enter the name of the item, which becomes the URL, and then you go on to add the title and content and so forth. (But this may have been an add-on--I wasn't here when it was set up.) If yours changes the URL if you change the title, I'd definitely get that fixed. You don't want a nice outside link to get broken because someone decides to tweak a title and changes the URL! In Sitecore you can easily add aliases however, in case your URL gets changed and you want the old one to still be available (just be sure to add the appropriate canonical--that is a custom field you'd have to have added, or at least it was in my case). There is also a "rename" option you can use to change the URL to whatever you want, again just be sure there weren't any good links to the old URL or if there were, use alias and canonical as above. And as others have said, the title and URL do not need to match exactly, but they should be closely related.

Unfortunately, this issue has been up for debate over the past few years and there's no clear-cut answer. You might like to take a look at this staff-endorsed answer from 2012, which indicated that Google will look at how much unique content is above the fold. If your content is buried deep in the source code and duplicate copy comes first, then this _could _be an issue. If you can place your unique content higher up within the source code, then this wouldn't be a bad thing, but I have suspicion that chances are there's always more pressing things to optimise. Sorry there's no '100% yes!' on this, but IMO this has always been one of the vaguest areas of SEO; especially as we know G has become more adept at crawling in the past few years (javascript support, etc).

Cheers Dennis, I see so it may see the changes in the short future rather than the long run.

Hi  T and RafalJ Thanks for your question and reply - it got me doing some more research and I followed RafalJ's lead (link). It was not clear to me how RafalJ's solution solved the initial problem which was avoiding duplicate content problems but now I see how it works. I found this question has come up before on Moz: Geotargeting Duplicate Content to Different Regions (http://moz.com/community/q/geotargeting-duplicate-content-to-different-regions-href-and-canonical-tag-confusion) and includes a link to this article in Dejean SEO (http://dejanseo.com.au/canonical-vs-hreflang/) (recommended by the ubiquitous Gianluca Fiorelli). The DejeanSEO articles provides another angle in support of RafalJ's suggestion. cheers Neil (sorry about the naked links - typing on my ipad and the links popup does not play nice)