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Zora you could also use htaccess to rewrite the urls to lower case. See this article on stackoverflow.com Hope that helps, Don

The whole purpose of errors and warnings is to indicate that it is a problem that needs to be fixed. The SEOmoz crawl should be able to realize that there is a canonical tag on the page and not count it as a "warning"

Hi BeytzNet, The answer to that question really depends on another question: Are you looking for a short-term solution that may or may not get your current penalty lifted, or are you genuinely interested in dealing with links that really shouldn't be there? If you're after the band-aid solution then you can try going with the arrogant suggestion from some Googlers that only links which offend Google at this point in time need to be dealt with. (Given Google's current propensity for adding to its list of what is "unnatural", their attitude borders on sadistic.) If you really want to get some control over your backlink profile and future proof your site in the face of changing spam targets, impending Penguin updates and whatever else may be coming down the line, you might find it useful to try this little exercise: Download backlink data from as many of the following as possible (free download limits for the tools you don't subscribe to will give you enough of a sample) Google Webmaster Tools Bing Webmaster Tools Open Site Explorer Majestic SEO ahrefs Raven Tools (pulls in data from Open Site Explorer & Majestic SEO) Open each csv, select all and change text color so that the data for each list is a different color. Copy and paste the content of each into one Excel spreadsheet so that all of the URLs are in one list. Deduplicate the list. Check out the different colored URLs left in your list...the takeaway is that every tool will bring you different link data. If you want a true picture of your backlink profile, you are now much closer to having it. Incidentally, Google is not the only search engine to apply manual penalties. Others just don't talk about it as much as Google does. You might also find it helpful to read this post from Ryan Kent about identifying the source of your link penalty. Hope that helps, Sha

Hi there! There can be geolocation factors that could affect your mobile search results, additionally maybe some of the sites that you're competing against for desktop are not that relevant towards that location but your site is, or maybe for some of these sites Google identifies that they're not suitable to be displayed in Mobile and even if you don't have a specific Mobile version your site can be still identified as suitable to be shown in Mobile search results and for any of these type of reasons you might you end-up ranking better. In order to verify well how you attract the visibility with your desktop site with mobile search results: Take a look at your Google Analytics, verify specifically the organic search traffic coming only from mobile devices. Identify which keywords are bringing this traffic and the pages that these visitors are going to. Go to Google Webmaster Tools and select the "Traffic >> Search Queries" and select the "Mobile" filter and see which keywords and pages are giving you mobile search visibility. Use a mobile emulator or a user agent switcher to simulate a mobile search result and closely analyze how your current pages are shown there, who you're competing with, your link popularity and relevance against them, etc. All this will give you a much better idea of your current mobile search situation. If you identify that you're already getting a reasonable amount of traffic and there can be potential, I would suggest that you do a Mobile targeted keyword research, following the steps that as I described in this Mozinar... you might identify much more opportunity through Mobile SEO. I hope this helps!

Hi Nikola, The reason I'm suggesting the above tool is that I think you need to research competitors who are managing to rank for both keywords to discover if they are doing something different or better than your business is. The answer to your question may lie in this research. If Google is providing local results for both keyword phrases and you are appearing in one and not the other, there is some reason why Google is considering your company as a relevant result for one query but not the other. This isn't something that can be diagnosed without research into your unique company and your unique competitors. Perhaps a competitor has a better optimized website, more links, different types of citations, more frequent/fresher relevant content, more reviews, an older domain than you. There is a lot to explore. Thus, my recommendation of competitive analysis. Regarding social media, yes, this likely plays some role in your local rankings, but the extent of that role is unknown. Clearly, Google is moving more and more towards social factors (think Google+) but the weight of these factors is not really clear.

Do people really search for red Boston Bruins hats? Or do they search for Boston Bruins hats? Frankly, as a consumer, I'd find it annoying to have to sort through that many more pages if you implemented A. But since color may be important, I'd make it a filter as AWC suggests. I'm not familiar with Shopify, so don't know if it's built in. If not, I'd build it. I'd address your last usability concern the same way - i.e., customize your software.

Do you let the old URLs 404 or do you redirect them?

Being Penguin a link penalty, once you clean the "infected" link profile, then the recovery should quite fast after the penalty is lifted. Said that, cannot be addressed a black or white kind of answer, because if the links eliminated were representing the biggest % of all the links, than the site won't jump back to the old traffic volume for the simple fact that it misses now those benefits those links were offering until Penguin. But if the % wasn't huge and new better links had been created while eliminating the bad ones, then it is possible to see traffic having a steep recover as the one shown in your analytics. Said that, this is just my opinion based over what I've seen, hence don't take it as it was the rule

Well, links/shares are good. But of course I'm just begging the question of how you can get those. Rand gave a great talk called "Inbound Marketing for Startups" at a Hackers & Founders meetup that was focused more on Inbound as a whole than SEO in particular, but it's full of valuable insights: http://vimeo.com/39473593 [video] Ultimately it'll come down to some kind of a publishing/promotional strategy for your startup. Sometimes your startup is so unique/interesting that it has its own marketing baked right in - in which case you can get a lot of traction by simply doing old-school PR to get your startup in front of the right people. Other times, you've got to build up links/authority on the back of remarkable marketing. BufferApp is a great example of a startup that built traction off their blog. Of course, they weren't necessarily blogging as an SEO play - it was more in the aim of getting directly in front of the right audience for direct signups for their product. But they definitely built up some domain authority as a result. I'd also take a look at the guides Mailchimp has created - they created the dual benefit of getting in front of the right audience in a positive/helpful way (which benefits the brand and drives sign-ups directly) as well as building a considerable number of inbound links, boosting their domain authority overall. Unfortunately no quick/easy ways to build your domain authority, but things you do to build your authority can also get you immediately in front of the audience you're looking for - and SEO just becomes a lateral benefit to that.

Thank you.. We were concerned that we were doing something really wrong..

Well there you go. If you have a page (Page A) that was ranking poorly due to over optmization, then you 301 Page A to a new page (Page B), the 301 passes pretty much all the negative link equity from Page A to Page B.  Therefore, Page B is going down the toilet now. You just kicked the can further down the street, vs fixing the initial issue.  aka  You just kicked yourself in the pants.  (you can insert what ever kicking analogy you like here for emphasis and/or humor, but don't beat yourself up over it). That is why I mentioned above, the 301 is really not a solution in this case and you need to noindex the page or 404 it. I am of the group that I try and minimize 404s as much as possible.  There is only one page to 404 here, so is really a non issue.

No, pinging Google will just give them an idea that your pages have changed. That is completely different to changing ranking. I would monitor for shifts over the next month

Thanks. I submitted some links but then deleted the file. Hopefully I didn't do any harm . . . Our average link quality is artificially low because of these garbage sites linking to us. That's why I thought it might be a problem.

Allright guys, thanks alot for the answers. Gonna try some things out coming monday. Canonical url's and pagination (rel=prev) will work i guess. The hard part is, i'm working on this site with a development company that tells me they can url redirect all the 404's to the homepage while they must be redirected either to other products or category pages. So only solution is that i have to do that by hand, one by one via a tool they build. But it's a hell of a job! @ Andy , I checked it and it actually says : Total indexed : 98.000 Ever crawled: 929.762 And when i check the questionmark at total indexed it says: Total number of url's added to Google index. Thanks again for your answers

The general approach we take on our sites is to have the URL in the following format: root-domain.co.uk/county(state)/city/district I would not worry overly at having the full address in the URL as that’s very specific, so long as you’re hitting the local area your users will be searching for that will be sufficient for local targeting. It will also keep the URL shorter and cleaner, and in my opinion more user friendly. The user will be able to find the specific address on the store page. This whiteboard Friday doesnt focus on your specific query but you may find it of use. Hope this helps.

if you 301 redirected you should be fine. I find http://www.marthecarrara.no/ in the SERPso its indexed (thoug not yet ranking first - build some links to the new domain!)

Thanks for everything. i'll stick to the slower method and see what's going on in the index.

Again Thanks

Hi Jackson, It would be better if there was just one uniform URL for the product but for some websites that have thousands of products it is just too big a development cost so they get around it by using the canonical tag, this is perfectly fine and there aren't any issues from an SEO perspective. So if you can, I'd change it so that there is one URL per product but there is nothing wrong with using the canonical tag

While you visit those pages that SEOMoz tags as duplicate, is the content duplicate? If it isn't, then there's nothing to worry about. We have duplicate content notices too, and those are usually tag pages that at a certain moment have the same posts within the listing as all those posts use the same tag. It would be great if you post a couple pages that are reporting duplicate content and where it can be found so we can take a look at that.