Welcome to the Q&A Forum

One tricky point - you don't necessarily want to fix the duplicate URLs before you 301-redirect and clear out the index. This is counter-intuitive and throws many people off. If you cut the crawl paths to the bad URLs, then Google will never crawl them and process the 301-redirects (since those exist on the page level). Same is try for canonical tags. Clear out the duplicates first, THEN clean up the paths. I know it sounds weird, but it's important. For malformed URLs and usability, you could still dynamically 301-redirect. In most cases, those bad URLs shouldn't get indexed, because they have no crawl path in your site. Someone would have to link to them. Google will never mis-type, in other words.

I think Highland covered the basics - it will be seen as a sitewide URL change, so you need to make sure those 301s work. You could lose some small amount of link-juice, and expect rankings bounce in the short-term (although it should recover 98%). Also, it can add a lot of overhead to a site, so make sure your servers are up to it. Technically, Google says it's fine. They don't treat secure pages any differently than "regular" pages. Practically, I'm not a big fan, to be honest - it's adding a layer of complexity. Still, there are big sites that are secure and rank fine.

Thanks Naghirniac, Since I posted this I've looked further in to the CMS update and found that each and every page on our site (around 8,000) has a relative canonical link on it which points to itself. They also cannot be edited thus making them completely useless! Gotta love these CMS developers! URRRGGGGHHHHH!!! Thanks anyway, Brendan.

This is one of my tactics what I was using to a previous site on one client! Is one keyword 35% difficulty and with 3 niche backlinks and 100-120 facebook shares is number 4.! I guess all the kind of techniques works if is made manual and the links are from niche sites! By the way thanks for your time trying to help me! I already plus you! haha

Thanks for sharing this post Unlucky it never made it to the main blog.. Kind Regards. James Norquay

Hi Nikos, I think it would help members here if you could describe what, precisely, you are asking for input on? Do you have a goal the site is failing to meet? Is there something about the site that doesn't satisfy you? In what way are you hoping to improve. Provide whatever criteria you can and hopefully that will help members to give you helpful feedback. Cheers! Miriam

I am saying that you should link directly to the final page, as you have control over the links, being internal, save the link juice leak. The 301's may be there for some other reason I dont know, but you dont want your internal links going though them

Thanks James! I see that the only reliable source of info about seo is seomoz! Haha I am wondering what they are doing now all this spam guys when their tactics are not working anymore! Thanks a lot guys

If that's the case then keep the blog focused on the company / brand and website updates. And use your articles section for the additional long tail things. honestly I think article "sections" are dead and I would suggest merging the two into the blog. but if you want to keep the separate articles section then keep the blog about just the brand.

no. the rewrite rule will apply to all URLs

thanks for the reply...

http://www.stadriemblems.com/ Thanks!

As a response to my own question, I received some other good suggestions to this issue via Twitter: @__jasonmulligan__ suggested XSLT @__KevinMSpence__ suggested "...easiest solution would be to use simplexml --it's a PHP parser for lightweight XML" & "Just keep in mind that simplexml loads the doc into memory, so there can be performance issues with large docs." Someone suggested creating a feed from the XML, but I don't think that adds a ton of benefit aside from another step, since you'd still need a way to pull that content on to the page. There were also a few suggestions for ways to convert the XML feed to another solution like JSON on the page, but those were really outside the scope of what we were looking to do. Final recommendation to the client was to just add text links manually beneath all of the Javascript content, since they only were adding a few portfolio entries per year, and it would look good in the theme. A hack, perhaps, but much faster and cost-effective. Otherwise, would have recommended they go with PHP plus the simplexml recommendation from above.

Robert, Thank you very much. I appreciate the thorough audit. Many great points that make a lot of sense especially since I joined and started reading SEOmoz materials.

Hi :), First of all, tks for the response. About your second awser my problem is this. I have a URL (http://digitaldiscovery.com.pt/servicos-de-marketing-digital/publicidade-online/) that is too long as you can see. The keyword I want to target is publicidade-online that is in the finalle of that URL. However with some test that I already did, I reached to the conclusion that to target the define keyword I have to shorter the URL to http://digitaldiscovery.com.pt/publicidade-online/. Whats do you think? Is this a good ideia to climb in Google with that keyword? Tks in advance! PP

As Marcin said this plugin is the most crucial one as it will deal with the sites duplication and cannonicalisation issues. Also contains XML image and website sitemap. You can also find other relevant extensions by searching here - http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/catalogsearch/result/?id=&s=1&pl=1&te=0&q=seo&pr=0:1180&t=0&p=1 Regards, Vahe

Lakshmi You almost answer your own question with ...1000's of posts and i cant get back links for each... So, you need to make sure you are not spreading your "weight" around the site when you could simply be the Gorilla of a single page. By focusing keywords/phrases to single pages, you do not lose anything to the other pages on your site (slight over simplification). Now, if you have all these posts and they are older and have a bit of weight, you could redirect some of them to the keyword page you want to push. Outside of that, with 1000's the content is likely older and of less use anyway. That said, it does not mean that in certain verticals you won't rank for the same SERP page with different urls. We have some sites that have a specific keyword phrase and we will have two urls on the same page 1. One is an attorney and the first url is thatSite.com/particular-service and the second is thatSite.com/how-to-guide-that-service/ I would not spend time attempting to make that happen, however. Lastly, Marcin makes a really good point in c): ("buy laptop" is highly competitive,... You will need a mix of links with optimized anchor text..... Follow his advice. Hope this cleared up a few ponderables...