Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you both Lesley & Jim! This tool is exactly what we needed! Fingers crossed now we have resolved the issues we had with all that duplicate content. How long has the parameter tool been available?? I never even knew it existed!

Thanks for the response. Point 1 already did... Point 2 might be a solution,I was kind of blind with the mess so I tried to block that domain.... Will try with redirects now Any other suggestion it's welcome Dan

Hi Joseph, I definitely feel you on this! I hope you'll hear back from someone who can show you measurable results of a small real estate agency managing to run with the big boys, but my take on this is that many of Google's local-oriented SERPs right now are very narrow in terms of brand diversity. Something I've been noticing for the past year or so is how dominant Yelp has become for practically any local search term relating to restaurants, hotels and a ton of other searches. Pretty much any search in these areas returns Yelp results, but few other directory-type results. There used to be more diversity, in my opinion, and it's almost as if Google had tightened their belts. I'm going to actively watch this thread to see if you get a response from someone who is specializing in real estate SEO in case they can provide some screenshots of their small business clients managing to outrank the giant/aggregate sites. Crossing my fingers for you!

Thanks guys - yes, we're using canonical tags already to help resolve this, but I'd like even better if we didn't have to resort to this. It also makes me nervous that these characters are technically classified as "unsafe", but I haven't been able to find any official word from Google on whether or not they will index URLs with brackets or not.  It's definitely not the web standard....

Hi Lynn, Yes many thanks it does, as with Matt I am doing the same as him but will of course make sure only the products are the same and change the store information descriptions, currencies etc. Luckily enough I am starting fresh with 3 stores, one here in the UK, one in Germany and the other in Poland but all from a UK server. Cheers!

Hi Kurt - very true - they should be taking the time for sure. I think part of problem is legacy of duplicate content - glad I'm not in their shoes! Yup - rewriting is what I'm doing for those guys - inc new ideas for engaging content. Will let you know how it goes - an interesting project for me as never worked with a directory before!

Thanks Gregory, its a tricky question.

Alan, I agree with you and Ash. Providing we are willing to commit the proper resources to support separate efforts like this, I think that the ccTLD is the way to go. -Alex

Hi Maria What do you mean by "Low quality directory made just for the purpose of gaining a link" -- Is there an issue with linking back from directories to your site? Does this apply to submitting my website to social bookmark websites using a specific anchor text that am optimizing for? Thanks James

I'm associated with a site that ranked fairly well. Earlier in the summer, the blog was moved from a subfolder to a subdomain for various reasons. While the reasons seemed valid at the time, the site's traffic plummeted about 1-2 weeks later. We've still been trying to analyze as many other changes were made a few weeks prior; however, the arrows are pointing to the subfolder to subdomain change which may have really caused this plague. We're now looking into moving it back to see if it will resolve the problem.

I have had the same issues and am still working on them but this tool http://linter.structured-data.org/ has help find markup that google validates but has Word copy and paste chars in it that cause errors.

HI Tom... You will have to do 301 redirect, Same thing as Moz did when they stop being Seomoz and became Moz. The task will get more complex based on how much content you have. The flow for a small site would be: 1 - Move all the content for the new platform: 2 - Make a spreadsheet with old url and new url. 3 - Create a 301 redirect. 301 do not guarantee you will keep 100% of your traffic, I noticed the most times the sites lost about 15-20% on traffic right after the 301. Also I think that if you self host your WordPress you will have more freedom than if you just use WordPress.com Felipe

Thanks everyone!

Thank you guys, I got it. I will remove all the internal nofollows from my site!

This is a friend's tool that has some more options. http://incredibill.me/htaccess-rewrite-wizard

That's a good point Federico, I didn't think to ask if they only wanted to nofollow external links.

I've refined this to a new question here: http://moz.com/community/q/should-each-physical-store-have-its-own-ecommerce-store-on-subfolders-or-share-a-single-national-one

** using 20-30 unique informative words per product, would you consider this substantive, informative and of great interest to visitor?** In my opinion, 20 to 30 words is insignificant.  I try to have a few hundreds words for a product description.

Been looking for this for ages. Thanks