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I'd be worried about all of that too, if I was the owner of the site but I'm not

I used to have separate pages for "each color" and other product variations.  However, I changed to one larger page for the entire product group and it has worked better in my opinion.

More is best. C Block refers to the "group" that an IP address links to.  Lots of domains linking from the same C Block might suggest related sites or a network.  Having your links coming from a wider spread of C Blocks is generally seen as good. Like with most things in SEO it is not just a case of "more wins".  the C Block of a site that links to you is just one factor amongst hundreds, maybe thousands that influence rankings.  Most importantly an unusually low number compared with linking root domains can be a sign of something odd.

I'm sorry but this is absolute nonsense. Google indexes those absolutely fine. Want proof? Check my site. A search for [wordpress plugins] reliably brings up my meta description. Of course, if you don't have the keyword someone searches for in the meta description, the chance of the meta description showing up is close to zero, and even when you do it doesn't always show. But don't blame the single quote. I mean, he's single already. Have some pity.

Very good answer - and yes, 2 bad choices but limited resources means I must choose one. Either that or Meta NOINDEX the dupes for the moment until they are re-written.

I have a similar issue. For whatever reason, Google has decided our CEO (Glen Kelman) is the 'author' of some of our site pages. There is no author markup on the page anywhere. In fact, our CEO's name isn't anywhere on the page. Yet, in SERPs, he is the 'author' of our Seattle market page (you can likely see it by searching for 'seattle real estate' and looking for Redfin in the results). Glen is a prolific blogger who not only posts to the Redfin blog, but also guest blogs on high profile sites around the web so it stands to reason that Google is very 'familiar' with him as an author. Moreover, he lives in Seattle so maybe Google is thinking, "Glen is from Seattle...he's the CEO of Redfin...he's a prolific author...Glen + Seattle + Redfin + Author = Glen is the author of the Seattle market page on Redfin!" Any ideas on how to stop Google from making this mistake?

Thanks David, some interesting comments on those posts. Normal, I would not bother with disavowing but in this particular instance the volume is at a level to cause serious concern.

I believe Google constantly updates its algorithms "quietly" to detect structured data. While they have listed several schema markups you can use now (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/99170?hl=en), they are always finding new ways to detect them naturally (e.g. table/lists HTML tags in this case), without explicitly informing the users. The best way forward is to format your site's data in the most semantic way possible, which will likely increase your chances of Google picking them up when they update their structured data detection algorithms. Just my two cents

If you did that - now you have 2 URLs customers can reach you.  I know it would help people, but you now have 2 online "brands"/urls.

Thanks for the tips.  We will create a more basic page that highlights the best parts of the integration, then link back to the home page for more detailed information on the product itself.

It will keep on crawling.  I have seen 6 months to 1 year later they come back.  Especially if there are links from other websites pointing to your old URLs. Why they do repeat crawls on 301s and 404s for that matter is that they know how much the web changes and assume that there may have been a mistake and so want to double check.    Also, you have to consider, they will not recrawl 1000s of pages all at once.  They will probably pick up the most popular URLs first as they crawl them more often and then the less popular pages later. IMHO. You will need to find a long term solution in place. Here is the why you dont want to use htaccess http://stackoverflow.com/questions/209209/htaccess-redirect-performance One suggestion for Apache - RewriteMap http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html#rewritemap That or all the developers who are telling you not to use .htaccess should have at least 2 solutions to use instead that should work.  Go back to them to solve the issue.

Thanks guys!

I think I disagree with a couple of assumptions: Saying that 5,000 out of 7,000 links isn't a huge number seems unrealistic to me. Over 70% of a link profile being any single link type is too heavy, IMO. 80% of them from one site is definitely concerning. I'd suggest some immediate diversification/pruning efforts to achieve a better balance. I agree that nofollow is certainly a good measure, though. In fact, I'd put that at the top of my ASAP list.

If you are seeing a large increase in traffic as the result of the redirects, then removing them will reverse that shift in traffic. If it's SE referrals from long tail keywords going through the redirect, then you're going to definitely feel the hit from moving to 404's. Sure, your newly created pages may replace that traffic eventually, but the 301's are helping them do that now. Just the traffic standpoint is one reason, but passing any and (dang near all) of the link equity through to the new pages in the process.

Don'worry! It will take time. Google isn't lightning quick with drop requests or URL removals. They take time to filter out. Give it time and monitor it weekly to see they start to diminish Cheers!

Hi Matt, Thanks for your complete view on this topic. You're right, it is not a crawling thing but dus adding a PHP line into the template Cheers, Wesley Kelder

Hey Kelly, I've worked with a lot of companies within search engine recovery projects over the past year or so. I've taken a look at your backlink profile and you do actually have a lot of good links in amongst the spammy sidebar links. My advice would be to start looking at getting some of those low quality links removed. Now, if you don't have a good understanding of how to go about this then my advice would be to stay clear of doing it yourself - get a professional to look at it. Start with removing the low quality links and then move forward to create some new high quality links to balance out your link profile. I'm not going to go into all the details of 'how to build good links' but what I would say is that this site is by no means 'a lost cause'. In terms of how the site looks, it seems really good. The only one thing that I would say (and this isn't major, just an observation) is that the site would look a lot less like a template-style site if you had a company logo within the header. I know that you have 'SiteBoss' in text but it seems like that is almost just the default text there, so having a subtle logo might just reinforce the brand a little more. Just to confirm though, this has no effect on things like search rankings, etc - I'm just thinking about user perception. Hope this helps! Matt

Thank you for the additional advise. I have implemented by keyword/phrase policy based on the above UK wide logic. Thank Mark

Greg Awesome! Glad the mozinar is a valuable resource! Gotta love grumpy cat memes -Dan

Hi guys Turned out I was looking to the GWT account of the www version where all rich snippet data "disappeared", it is all good in the non-www version. All indexed and listed. Cheers Maria