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Hi jassy, I think the question is basically "is it a problem that most of the external links are pointing to the original page and not directly at the one I prefer (and have redirected to)". Since the chances of getting external links altered is slim & most of the link value is passed with a 301, then the broad answer would be "no", but the more important task would be to fix the redirect issues you highlighted as quickly as possible. Sha

Having a lot of duplicate content will make you vulnerable to Google lowering your rankings sitewide as they don't want sites with thousands of "thin" pages to rank well. You can focus on improving the content on your most important or popular pages and expand from there. Also, if you can encourage customers to review products that can be a great way to generate a lot of unique content in an inexpensive and scalable way (for example SEOMoz encourages UGC (user-generated-content) by awarding points and maintaining a leaderboard of top contributors).

Hi there, I'm not sure of the percentage of sites who have specified all bots as opposed to just Google, but I also have to assume that the percentage depends on the sites' territory. For instance, there are few sites in the UK who would think of Bing or Yahoo, due to those search engines having a tiny market share. In the US, Japan and several other places where non-Google search engines have more share, the consideration will be much higher.

Hi there, The nofollow and the canonical tag can exist quite happily together: if you are using the canonical tag as suggested, the nofollowing of the "next" links definitely strikes me as more of a safe-guard than anything else. The canonical tag should do the job just fine - there is also no guarantee that Google won't find those pages elsewhere, making the nofollow tag obsolete. Again, the "sort by" pages' links can be nofollowed, but nofollowing links to them doesn't mean that Google will never find them. For instance, someone could link to them on Twitter, in a blog post, etc. Noindex, or a canonical if they are largely identical, should suffice. Cheers, Jane

Hey Shady Similar thing happened to my site over the weekend.  Could be just a local temporary rumble in the search results.  try from your mobile device for a less geo centric search result. I got some great answers here.   http://www.seomoz.org/q/have-we-been-penalised

Hey, Thanks for the clarification - that makes sense. In that case I think that what you're proposing should work - as long as the new pages are very similar (ideally the same). As I said before it's a request rather than a directive so it might be ignored - I've tested cross-domain canonicals before - but not quite like this so it's hard for me to say precisely what might happen. Obviously I'd also recommend undertaking some link building direct to the new site too - although I'm sure you plan to do that in any case Thanks Hannah

Hey Ericc - Thanks for your question! Could you expand a bit more on what you mean by SEO benefits of using Lulu? I used to work in publishing and know some people who have published through Lulu. I believe you are correct that you can distribute on Amazon through it, as I think they use Ingram as their provider/carrier/lister. If I were you, I think publishing through Lulu is fine, but I'd also get a copy of it and put it on your site. If your site has a decent following, maybe try running a social campaign around it to get more traction. The "Free Download" title often will help get downloads as well. So I'd recommend putting it on your site. You may be able to get a link back to your site from Lulu (I'm not sure about this), which would be a quality link as it's a strong domain, so if you can do this send the link to your eBook-specific page. John

If you know right away what the parameter does, I'd go ahead and tell Googlebot what the parameter is or how to treat it. It's one more signal to help fight against duplicate content, and I'd take advantage of everything I can give Google to help tell them about how I want them to rank my site.

Hi Max, As you know, SEOmoz uses a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to host our static content. This greatly improves the load time of our pages by distributing our content across a cloud network, and results in an improved experience for users. If I understand your question correctly, you have set up a CDN and have created duplicate content issues. To solve this, it's important to set up your CDN only to serve static content, like images, stylesheets and javascript. That is what a CDN is designed for. Do not duplicate your entire site - your HTML - as this will cause duplicate content issues. If for some reason you need to replicate your entire HTML, then there are some steps you can take to mitigate the damage, although it's going to depend on your exact circumstances. For example, you can set full URL canonical tags so that all your mapped CNAMES point to your primary URL. To revert back to one copy of your HTML, you might want to put 301 redirects in place on the duplicated content (pointing to the original) before removing them from the CDN. But even these aren't ideal solutions. It's best just to serve your static content, and only one version of your HTML.

Thanks for the posts everybody. Confirming that I've done everything I have influence over, I guess that settles it. I just tried searching for more on this after reading Matt Cutts, Eric Ward, Joost de Valk, and others SEO pros share different info. On to other SEO issues. Awesome to be back at SEOmoz guys!

I think you have a good grasp of the pros and cons, some points I would like to add I would not be too worried about the 301 redirects; they will leak a bit of link juice but not much. You will get about 85% or more on the link juice. The url-rewrite .asp to aspx method will stop any leak,  but I just don’t like the idea of having file extensions, aesthetics are important to conversion. But I like method 3, for the reasons you list. File extensions are so yesterday.  I think extension-less URL’s are better for conversion What you don’t want to do it revisit this question next year or the year after, you need to make a choice now and get it over and done with and move on. I would of maybe looked into ASP.MVC that has no file extensions at all, and I believe is the future of ASP, but it looks like you have already gone past that point  in the decision making One more point, if you go with method 3, decide if you are going to have a trailing slash or not and stick to it in all your linking. Myself I favour the non slash as people hand writing links are unlikely to add the trailing slash, leading to an un-necessary redirect. Good luck

Here's the information about how to file a reconsideration request with Google and let them know that you were hacked but you fixed it. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35843

A very late answer to the question, but you want to put in the 301 (permanent) redirects as soon as you know of a problem. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world has some great help regarding duplicate content.

Try a Google search for "health supplement directories"  this should give you some great ideas. Just remember to check your SEOmoz tools bar to check for PA DA etc.

The way you have to look at it is... Best-case scenario: write completely original content for every one of your pages, and receive the highest ranking from search engines. OR - Use existing content provided by manufacturers and not receive full potential in the SERP's.  That's just the way it is. I know exactly what you're saying though, don't get me wrong... writing unique content for 1,000's of pages can be a pain, especially if you're adding new ones on a regular basis.  I just gave you the Pro/Con of your situation. If you could ever find the time to write unique write-ups for every product, and get that out of the way, and then you're at a point where you're only adding a new product every week or so (even daily isn't that bad in terms of maintaining a website, really), then you'd be laughing and you'll see a massive difference in the SERP's as your content would be 100% unique and people would start scraping your site for theirs.

How's your internal linking structure? Do a site: domain.com check to see how Google perceives your internal linking.  Are your relevant pages on the first page of your site search?  If not, you may have an internal linking problem. To check this I used a web based program to find all the outbound internal links of each page on my website (only 200 pages).  I then transferred this data into Excel where I sorted it by page.  From here I was able to see that my most important pages had 20 less links than the unimportant pages in front of it. I then went through my website adding additional links to my important pages, using the same keywords I was trying to rank them for, until they had the most internal links pointing at them. Internal linking is typically a problem with websites that didn't plan ahead for SEO.

I guess that's what SEO is all about..you need to test the water and find what works for you :-). Think i'm going to go stick with subfolders for this one! Thanks for getting involved anyway Alan! Cheers Ari