Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi, You could add the following code to your .htaccess to redirect all dated urls to non-dated version: RedirectMatch 301 /([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/(.*)$ http://www.**domain**.com/$4 Change domain.com with your domain name. This should create a redirect from http://www.website.com/blog/2016/04/10/topic-on-how-to-optimise-blog to www.website.com/blog/topic-on-how-to-optimise-blog (and every similar situation).

Hi Becky, I am also faced with the same issue as you and after intensive research, I found that the best solution would be to make the server to an automatic 301 redirection for all HTTP pages to the their respective HTTPS pages. This would enable you to preserve all SEO value of the pages and at the same time, avoid having duplicates. However, since you have not yet moved all the pages in HTTPS, then a canonical would work the best, but this needs to be manually defined for each page, unless you have a CRM that can pull the respective absolute URL accordingly. Hope this helps. Tej Luchmun

Agreed, I'd happily answer here to leave both the questions and answers available for others to find when they go searching

ccTLD geo-targeting doesn't always work well. I've worked on a few sites that had AU and NZ versions and always found the AU site was getting a decent chunk of NZ traffic. Implementing hreflang tags between the sites fixed this and made sure people in NZ were served the NZ version of the site. Don't assume search engines are going to handle everything the way you think they should do. Use hreflang and remove any doubt.

Hi Manish, There is some confusion in your question: If you have inbound links that concern you, you can disavow at the domain level once and you should never need to repeat that I'm not clear what you mean by "redirecting to our Sitemap" -- having a redirect from their site to yours is unlikely to hurt you - especially if you have disavowed the domains Thanks - good luck.

Typically, if you 301 redirect one URL to another URL with the exact same content, you're going to get little to no reduction in link juice. Google's more likely to reduce link equity passed if the new page seems different from the old one. So: be pretty specific about how you set up those redirects!

Hello Yusa, IF you can, I´d suggest you to merge both pages. They are for the same. That top level category doesn´t carry any importance in the structure of the web. Even, with the second URL, you are repeating the keyword: Roller Blinds. That would be something to take care of. IF you can´t merge, I´d change the latter URL so as the wouldn´t be repetitiveness. And of course add the canonical tag so there won´t be any keyword canibalism. In a general rule, you should prefer: The page that has more content and/or is better optimized and/or has better user experience. Hope I´ve helped. Best luck. GR

James is completely right here! You submit all of them so you can keep track of issues in case they come up with other versions of your site. But there is always a preferred one to use.

Hi Yusa, Please check this old thread on the same issue @ https://moz.com/community/q/best-tools-for-identifying-internal-duplicate-content Hope this helps. Thanks

It's not necessarily a bad thing to have a product page rank over the category page. As you said, it depends on what experience you want to give the searcher. If they've searched broadly, they might expect a broader result and will therefore result in a higher conversion rate with the landing page as they are given the options they were looking for. Rather than being given a specific product page that they weren't exactly looking for, and bouncing immediately back to search despite you offering what they were looking for on another page... If there is really not much at all that differentiates the products in a certain category, it might be worth having a look to see what kind of traffic/keywords the product page pulls in. If the category page is stronger for that term and the products, I'd even go so far as to "follow, noindex" it and work on optimising the category page for search instead (including all the long tails that the products would otherwise pull in. Optimise it for both the category _and _the product), and focus more on user experience on product pages. Obviously, this would be a case-by-case basis and I would not recommend applying this en masse. If this tends to be a pattern with your products, that you have a lot of products that are similar differing only in things like size or colour, then maybe it's time to rethink your site structure and system. Could all these product pages be a single product page with different options for ecommerce? Would this not benefit your user too, as they could land on the page and see all the options available from the single product page? Think about clothes websites (for example), you choose the model which takes you to the single product page where you can choose colour/size/etc. Would probably make SEO easier for these kinds of products too.

Thank you Marcus !

Hi Aviad, It depends. I recently managed a full eCommerce re-platform where URLS changed due to a new site structure. I mapped thousands of old urls to new (your option 1) and had minimal ranking fluctuations. Be aware that there will be fluctuations, however if you're meticulous they should be minimal. In the day to day running of the eCommerce store I actively keep old, well ranking URLs alive, rather than unpublishing them when items sell out (your option 2). When similiar items come into stock I can simply change the image, title etc etc and leave the URL. The slight discrepancies in URL to page content has not been an issue for usability at all. So depending on your situation both options could work. Send through some more information and the community will be better placed to recommend the best way forward. Jake

Product / content focus. Some products supplied internationally not supplied in US. Should say that we are not intending to have a complete US sub-folder or sub-domain, simply a variant homepage.

Hi rgamedia_seo! Could you tell me a little bit more background about your problem?

Hello Murray! Do you have any specific advice for sites on Shopify? It seems they made the decision to move to https in 2016 and just leave a swaythe of small site owners to sort out redirects etc after it happened Sorry, i've little to none experience in Shopify. Can't help here. One 'gotcha' that I keep finding is with backlinks. When the site moves to https, backlinks that were previously set up to point to http are not recognised as backlinks on https, which appears to impact backlink profile and domain authority on the new https version. Does this make sense? Therefore, all the old backlinks need to be changed to point to https. Is this correct? Here there are 2 points make. On one hand, if the redirection to https is done correctly with a 301 all the backlinks will point to the last page. On the other hand, IF, only IF, you have some way to change the URL in the backlink, it could be a nice idea. I'd prefer assuring a correct redirection rather than changing the pointed URL in old backlinks. Remember that non-google backlink profilers (such as Moz, ahrefs, magestic or others) will take some time in collecting all the information in the HTTPS site. That is simple it is a whole new site/page for them. I typically use the Traffic Control app to redirect URLs, but they seem to use relative links. So how do we redirect http to https? Don't know how large and/or complicated is the site. I do handle (or say to the IT team to handle) the redirection strictly with 301 redirection rules. Most of them with some sentences in the .htaccess file or with a plugin if Wordpress is used. Hope i've helped. Please feel free to ask more if i haven't answered you or if I haven't explained well. GR.

Hello, With Wordpress I believe you can just add it under all that code, like below. After you make the changes, I would suggest opening a private browser window or clearing your cache and make sure the site, pages and redirects are coming up as intended, since .htaccess changes can sometimes be a bit hairy and cause the site to white screen or cause infinite loops. BEGIN WordPress RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] END WordPress RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !^on$ RewriteRule (.*) https://example.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Super, thank you. I thought I was going crazy. I didn't realise Google now serves different descriptions based on search intent.

Hi, Pages without internal links are referred to as “orphaned pages,” and they can be a reason for reduced indexation in Google. To determine if your page(s) are discoverable, it’s recommended to crawl your site with a tool such as Screaming Frog. and then search for specific URLs in question. Using sitemaps has many benefits like easier navigation and better visibility by search engines. Every site must have at least xml sitemap. Hope this helps. Thanks

No problem. It's important to ensure that your client doesn't see this as an opportunity to build a PBN (personal blog network) and build backlinks between all of the websites, this is caught very easily by Google etc.