Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I almost always use absolute URLs. Dana has a point about efficiency, and a lot of developers HATE writing anything but relative URLs, but I think most modern servers can handle the load just fine, and developers can be bribed with cookies. The advantage of Absolute URLs is they're less likely to break with various CMS's (content management systems) and on-page elements. I've seen javascript do some crazy things to relative URLs causing 1000's of broken, uncrawlable links. And when your content is scraped, either for black hat reasons or perfectly legitimate reasons like embedded RSS feeds, then you get full credit for the link. But to be fair, and to recognize Gamer07's point, Google likely devalues most of these links anyway once they detect the duplicate content.

This is tough. Most of the time, best practices would be to simply 301 redirect the expired pages on your domain to the closest category page those products belonged to. But in this case, you want to transfer link authority to other, more relevant pages, but those pages happen to be on another site. If the pages across the 2 sites are duplicate, or very-near duplicate, one option would be to put cross domain canonical tags on your site to point to the correct pages on the sister site. Another option would be to add the "sorry.... look here" links you mentioned. The problem with both these methods is they don't address the primary problem, which is there is no reason for the pages on your own site to exist anymore. For example, you really don't want your visitors spending any time on these pages because they offer nothing of value. So if it were me, I would probably 301 redirect them to the most correct page... on the sister site. Yes, sometimes weird things happen when you 301 a bunch of pages to another domain, but as long as both the backlink profile is clean and the new pages are similar in theme and topic content, then you should be fine. This is what the 301 was intended for and in most cases it works well. This should hopefully transfer a good amount of link equity to the sister site pages (keep in mind, the ability to pass value does depend on how similar the pages are. I like to keep everything as close as possible - title tag, content, etc) In the off chance that something goes wrong, and rankings actually drop on the sister site, simply pull the 301s and file a reconsideration request, explaining what happened. Other SEOs may recommend a different approach, but I'm comfortable suggesting this method. Hope this helps! Best of luck. Let us know how things turn out.

Hi Nakul Here is my stab at question 1, my methodology is trial and error so if any guru's want to take another shot at it please do so. Here is a nice 301 reference page lots of examples RewriteEngine On RewriteRule ^(.)_red-widgets-cid-1234.html$ www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-4567.html [R=301] #Example 2 RewriteRule ^(.)_red-widgets-cid-1234+10.html$ www.domain.com/red-widgets-cid-6789.html [R=301] #Example 3 RewriteRule ^(.*)_red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5.html$ www.domain.com/american-red-widgets-cid-6789+5.html [R=301,L] We use ^ to denote start of string We use $ to denote end of string We use (.*)_ to look for a keyword. In the examples above we are looking for what each page name has in common We use [R=301,L] for the Last rewrite, previous rules just use [R=301] One thing that (maybe) needed is escaping the +signs in the string so like example 3 would be ^(.*)_red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5.html$ www.domain.com/american-red-widgets-cid-6789+5.html Also I may missed a wildcard on some of these.... ^(.)_red-widgets-cid-1234+10+5(.).html$ www.domain.com/american-red-widgets-cid-6789+5.html Question 2: Canonical to self canonical tag is okay. This = That and That = That ..........Okay This = That and That = The ..........Not Okay Hope that puts you on track

Thanks Oleg, There is no site on the old domain, and I'm not positive that there ever was.   I have attempted to reach out the site owners that currently hold the links in question, and have yet to receive any sort of reply.  But thinking about it now, I did not try from an email on the same domain.  So I may create one and try that in the near future.

LOL I didn't want those types of links, but these guys are vancouver based and we purchased a link building package from them. I feel their techniques are pretty poor and I am not happy with the little they have done so far.

Hi Dave, Thanks for the reply, the video content idea is a good one.  My main concern right now is not differentiation as I am confident we can do that.  I have built up a couple of other successful trading sites including Dailyfx.com when I was at FXCM, informedtrades.com (my youtube videos have millions of views), and more recently learnbonds.com. While I know a lot about writing and promoting content I don't know a whole lot about the technical side of SEO.  I know the basics, use the YOAST seo plugin etc but nothing more.  Have you or anyone else reading this ever bought an existing site and if so what where the initial steps that you took to make sure that everything was setup correctly from an SEO standpoint?  Any additional thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks Dave

Very good point relating to credibility of review and great relief  that I do not have to perform spellchecks of thousands of reviews. Thanks. Still may follow also Cristinas suggestions as poor spelling in user review may also reflect on visitors perception of website's credibility.

That is true, but I also have them 301'd to the http version and canonicaled! That is pretty much every possible signal to tell them those pages aren't pages and don't index them. I suppose we can submit the URLs, unfortunately there are a LOT of tag pages. Thanks for the advice Dana!

Thanks Keri, this gives me a place to start

Thanks Keri. Cue, the song, "Wind beneath my wings."  Thanks for helping me avoid self-flagellation Cheers.

A bunch of forums are talking about it. Here's a post mentioning several of the places people are talking about it: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-webmaster-tools-link-count-16315.html

We have generated new business from links that we have on client sites linking back to us. The new client will call/email us saying "we see you did example.com website, which we like, would you mind quoting for a redesign our website".  Without that link we may never have got that new piece of business. We always ask the client if we can place on link on their website and they all say ok. We don't do this for purely for SEO. The only thing we have done previously is to include the link in the footer of every page on the client site, which we are now in the process of changing to being only the client home page. With that in mind, is the following ok to do? Place text/image link in footer of client home page Link to be "nofollow" which goes to specific page on our own website e.g. oursite.com/portfolio/clientname.php on oursite.com/portfolio/clientname.php page we link back to client's home page, again this would be a "nofollow"

I would leverage the domain name and create a sub domain. Its still the same company, but with a different service so a sub domain would work best imo.

I know this is an old thread, but I actually spotted this issue while trying to fix it myself. I was able to fix it by using quotes and a literal space. So for example, instead of RewriteRule ^/products/product%20name$ http://www.site.com/products/new-url [R=301,L] use RewriteRule "^/products/product name$" http://www.site.com/products/new-url [R=301,L] Hope that helps.

Hi Bob, I am glad your happy with the answers. Sincerely, Thomas

Why are you using more than 1 site map per domain? the answer could be so many things but I think it's this you're using more than one site map per domain Google gets confused and does not index your entire website. Your server could be too slow if it's e-commerce are probably not speeding up your site fast enough to have Google actually index the links properly. Remember the faster your website the deeper Google goes when indexing the site. E-commerce sites with more than one site map on possibly slow hosting it sounds about right that Google would not actually index every single one of the pages that you have submitted over and over again. Clear out the multiple sign-ups then pick a single site map if you're using plug-ins choose just one if you're using generated choose just one. Add it to your website remove the other site maps then submit the site map to Google webmaster tools when it says index this one page or all pick all and if that doesn't work you can use fetch with the Google bot to get your individual webpages crawled then have them submitted by hand. I would use a content delivery network if you're using e-commerce make sure your site speed is fast. Check out  your site speed using this http://www.webpagetest.org/ then use the tool below to figure out why and what you can do about it. http://torbit.com/site-optimizer/ I strongly suggest you invest in a content delivery network

I am just the opposition.  Ranking very good for Google but hardly not at all on Yahoo and Bing. Boo