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301 redirect it and you will be able to pass most of the link juice to your sales page.

Hey Robert The best way to think about this is from a user perspective and both categories and tags are useful structures to organise and browse content. So, from a pure user perspective, which is what really matters here, then, yep, use both. But, you are right in that this can be a problem with WordPress in that it can create so many different taxonomies which are essentially duplicate pages. If we consider a single user  blog you could have homepage author page tags categories date archives All of which can be duplicated or substantially duplicated. If you don't use the read more tool as well this can be made worse. Fortunately, there is a really easy way to deal with this and the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin will pretty much do the job for you. Install that and then just noindex all of your non essential landing pages to keep the uniqueness as high as possible. Again, much of what you do here depends on how you use the categories. Will you have one parent category that has everything in it or lots of parent categories? Are these landing pages? Could you not build your content and build better landing pages if you no indexed them all? If you have several categories and articles are only going in one category then by all means index them and try to add some unique content to each one beyond the post previews. Maybe use the excerpt on categories and a snippet on the homepage to keep them even more unique. Plenty of options, no right or wrong answers, just try to keep the site as unique as possible and the above should give you plenty to be going on with. Shout if you have any questions! Marcus

I would defiantly not tell Google to ignore parameters since you have pages ranking high with URL parameters in them. Be careful if you do implement a canonical, because you could end up removing a few good ranking pages since the URL parameter pages are the ones currently ranking best. Personally i would just ignore these errors since Google has done a pretty good job choosing the best page already. You could block Rogerbot from crawling parameter pages.

Thanks Martin, not 301'd the pages before so it's still a mystery why this has happened! They're not new pages, been around for years without this problem! We're aware of the underscore issue, this is how we found the URL's when we took over SEO, as the pages are ranking well I feel it best to leave as is. Thanks again, Lee

You bet.  Just to be clear, I was talking about pulling the content from the page in some automated fashion into the title.  Finding elements from each page that should be in variables and then inserting them into the title, description and H1 in a way that you can make each page unique. You would need to make a final call on if you think the content is unique enough.  We had 5000 locations that we used data in the database to make 5000 unique pages as each location has the name of the business, city, state, zip, address phone number etc. We are now working to have user generated content/comments/reviews on each page so that each one page becomes more unique and more useful over time. Having a IT guy who appreciates SEO is key for this and for the URLs.  I would talk first about how he organizes the data in his system and then how this translates into the URL.  You can then then just have him rename the URL using the same logic. Show him some data on click thru rates on more readable URLs and how Google prefers not to spider them.  I work to educate the IT guys as much as I can without making it sound like I know it all.

Hey there Kristy O, You want to noindex follow meta tag your paginated pages beyond page 1 as you want Page 1 of a series of pages to rank for the keywords that you are optimizing for.  By preventing pages 2 though X on a given series from being indexed you "clear up" for Google what pages you want it to focus on. You have Google follow the links on all of those pages as they all point to product pages that you do want to have indexed and ranked.  There is also the rel next and prev attributes, but I like the noindex follow meta tag approach as it gives me more control.  I If you want to use the canonical tag in this situation.  It was recommended that you use the Canonical to link back to a master page that contains everything on page 1,2,3,4 X.   They want you to use canonical to have the parts point back to a whole.  On most larger sites this is not practical as to load a page with everything on it would take too long. See here for when to use view all page vs not http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html I think that the use of the canonical in this case was more for a 3 part article vs pages after pages of a product catalog. I really only use the canonical to help with things like having the printer friendly version point back to the main version etc. If you want the Guru on pagination - Google Adam Audette http://searchengineland.com/five-step-strategy-for-solving-seo-pagination-problems-95494 Good luck!

yes...the wordpress plugin I used took care of that....

I second that opinion about Everett's webinar Nathan. It was awesome. Thumbs Up to you Everett.

definitely let them 404 and create new URL and make them much better, don't use any of the same content.

out of curiosity, what did you think this page was for?  thanks for your insight.

So I am best of finding some phrases that are more targetd and going to pull in traffic with a higher conversion rate than wasting time on terms that as you say are going to near on impossible to rank for. Having said that top spot in the UK only has a DA of 43. I think i'll focus on the terms that are more targeted rather than spending time optimising for keywords that are going to be tough to rank well for. We do have a big update to teh site that going to give us functionality and something over the competition that will allow us to go after wholesale orders online which opens a massive door across many markets.

Ah, simple, nice work!

Entering the subdomain into the box without any slashes will indicate that you are trying to remove the site - and after submitting it, it will indicate the request as a "Site Removal" Example: Enter the URL that you'd like to remove (case-sensitive) Enter: testing.website.com

It certainly wont harm you having non UK sites linking to you, a lot of the wrong sites may harm you as long as the sites are varied you should have no issues. If you can find some relevant UK links based around you theme these could do really well for you, but certainly don't discount any link as long as its deemed natural and not a link just for the sake of another link.

Lots of money is at stake here, so doing a great job is essential. I don't think that any answer given without doing a detailed study of the traffic sources, keywords, link sources, etc. is going to be a good answer.  There is also the question of conversion rate related to branding.  So, I would evaluate as best as possible, make a chart, and use that for your decision.  I would involve the company in the decision as branding, sales numbers, profit margins and more could be part of producing the best ROI. Running both sites could be the smart way to go.   Wilson could be such a brand that moving their products to Buehler would result in a lower conversion rate.  They also have international domains which could produce good revenue. Good luck with your analysis. Forty years ago I used Buehler products every day... but that was in a different lifetime.

This YouMoz post may also help some too. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos

If you 301 to the new page from that url it may change idk if having 404s after a redesign is a good idea

yes you can definitely do that. the only problem is that "luxury towels uk" is not a real phrase like "web conferencing services" which fits into a sentence and has good search volume. "web conferencing" and "conferencing services" "luxury towels" might be but "towels uk" is probably pretty weak So basically you would need to incude instances of the phrase in your content "Shop our store for a wide variety of luxury towels uk and see our quality" it doesn't read proper. I would rethink the keywords. Also, yes include the singular as well as the plural and variations and synonyms. Put similar words on the page that Google knows are related to towels such as bath, beach, microfiber, cotton etc and you can rank for long tail searches as well.

In google webmaster tools the sitemaps report 14 urls in our category listings not indexed. However, I have had trouble identifying which urls it is