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Technically..... using 301s produces almost immediate results...  I used rel=canonical on a few hundred pages and that took months and months to take effect.  (and these were active pages with good PR and thousands of visitors per month) What google thinks of cross-domain 301s vs. cross-domain canonicals is a whole different question. Good luck!

Agreed; I take SF over Xenu any day.

Hi Vistage SEO! Okay, I'm glad I understood. Now, this might be easiest for you, if your website happens to be WordPress based. It's a WP plugin for schema encoded reviews: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/review-schema-markup/ If your site isn't WordPress based, Search Engine Watch coincidentally just published a really good piece on this topic today: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2223886/How-to-Add-Reviews-to-Your-Site-Using-Schema-Structured-Data-Markup I think you will find that article answers pretty much all questions you might have on this. If anything isn't clear after looking over these two resources, please come back and ask.  Good luck!

The URL can be counted twice and this is duplicate content.  If Google sees a link to that second URL with the parameters on the end, it won't assume it's the same page as the page with the URL that doesn't have the parameters. A few things you can do to mitigate this: In Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools, if those parameters never result in unique pages, you can tell each search engine to ignore each one of those parameters.  If you ignore all of those parameters within webmaster tools, the second URL example above will resolve to the first URL in their eyes of each search engine. You can set a rel canonical on all of your pages to the root page URLs.  Then no parameters will ever affect the indexing of your pages. I'd be a little wary of setting rel canonical on all of my pages (I don't do this so I can't report if it works or not), so I'd personally opt for option 1 and not option 2, although theoretically each one should solve the problem.

Hi Again, I recommend one page per physical address. So, if you've got 3 offices in a single city, that equals 3 pages.

Hey Marcus, Thanks for the thoughtful response - much appreciated! I was aware of WhiteSpark's citation tool, but wasn't aware that they had collaborated to form citationlabs - very cool - I am experimenting with it at the moment. Naturally, many leads arrive at dead-ends, but no one said link prospecting was easy - right?

I think this is a good opportunity for making experiments: Try to re-write content on one of these sites and keep untouched the other one. You can always say the same with different words. Try different keywords for each specific page on one site and another and monitor them. This way you can evaluate the suitability of each keyword. Obviously, due to those legal reasons, I imagine there is no chance to use redirections from one site to another, so the best option is to generate different content for each site. Hope it helps. Sergio

Hi Irving, Thanks for responding to my thread. Yes, that's also what I think. The only thing that worries me is that when you click on the link, because of the Javascript, instead of taking you to www.example.com it just triggers the script. Have a look at an example here http://www.surfdome.com/Mens_Boots-677/ - Links under "Related Styles" at the top. Cheers, Carlos

Do you want to give me the old url to double check for you? You can personal message me if you don't want it to be public.

That makes sense. Good luck!

Hi Todd, Oh no, looks like all your canonicals are pointing towards the homepage.... <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="[http://www.cherrycreekspine.com<](view-source:http://www.cherrycreekspine.com%3C/)"/> Also looks like there's an extra carrot "<" at the end of the URL. Looks like it's coming from the wonky code. Regardless, this isn't what you want. This basically tells search engines that every page is a canonical of the homepage - and that all these other pages aren't important on their own. It's likely search engines will start to drop these pages out of their index unless this tag is removed immediately. Reminds me of Dr. Pete's canonical nightmares. In short... remove that canonical ASAP. It's probably better to have some duplicate content than a sitewide canonical that points to your homepage. Have you tried the Joomla Canonicalisation Plugin? Haven't tried it myself, but it might be smidgen easier than trying to code the php yourself. You can find it here: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/seo-a-metadata/url-canonicalization-/5355 My guess is you can completely remove whatever manual canonical code you wrote, and the plugin will take care of the rest. Remember, when the code is working properly, each page with point to itself (without extra parameters and so on) the way a proper canonical should. Best of luck!

Hi Manish, The notices are just notices to let you know that you have a canonical tag there -- it's not an error, just an alert for you.