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That's an interesting question. Yes, I don't  see why you couldn't rank such a page—I have had some pages accidentally rank in an even less likely situation. (Marketing pages that accidentally got exported into the sitemap.) But even if you make the different color choices canonical to the color choice page, a canonical is a suggestion and if Google decides that people are really, really looking for blue shoes when they do this search, that is the page that will rank. [Is there a reason you can't have the color choice page along with the individual colors? You could strengthen the signals for the choice page by having more links to it.]

The concept is sound, but their delivery is misleading. Keyword cannibalization is definitely a real thing, you should always avoid targeting the same keyword or topic across multiple pages on the site.

Hi, Yes! You would need to do this for every specific post that you have as Google (and other search engines) would like to know about the specifics of 1 URL to see where the copies of that one are in multiple languages. A feature that I could imagine is that you would have an input field for multipe languages. If the URL structures + language always have the same way of being structured you can make sure to automate this. Usually HREF lang is something that you have your developers code into your codebase. Martijn.

Hi Marie, Thanks for taking the time to write up such a lengthy reply. I completely understand that a trained SEO eye is what is needed, which is why I set about training myself, and in the past 4 months have learnt and conducted more beneficial SEO on my site than in its 7 year history. Moz is a great tool for tracking, after conducting my own SEO changes my ranking keywords doubled, and even with this latest drop, are still higher than they have ever been. My weakness is link building, as opposed to onsite SEO. This is my next area of focus, but without being able to identify what Google has changed it makes it incredibly difficult to make the correct changes. I suppose I can do nothing else but keep searching for my definitive answers and employing them. Thanks again!

Hey there! I took a look at this--it is definitely possible that search engines might have flagged this QR code & copy to your pages as being duplicative content, but it doesn't seem like a large enough issue to have caused a continuous downward trend to your traffic. Are there any other things you've done to your website since December, or things you did around the same time as this QR code addition?

301 redirects no longer lose pagerank. https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo But, even though there is no loss of pagerank, I would recode those links promptly if they were on my website.  Each redirect places load on the server, creates a small delay in page delivery, and it is simply best practice not to redirect links on your own site.

Phew, what an adventure a user must be going on each time! Now the horror part of the adventure - audit! - ARGH! That fun time in an SEO's life when they get elbow deep into numbers etc. The best strategy is to find all the links and rejig them  rather than have link to link to link etc. just cut out the middle man and go direct. Assuming that the link is even worth doing that for! but to directly answer: 1. The original domain is still there so the value is still there, it's just going to a dead domain, if you repoint that should still work but this is a bit of a grey area! 2. Same as if they went to a 404 on a live site, they are still there just not going anywhere, you resolve it the same way if you had a 404 page with a redirect that can benefit a user looking for a resource. 3. Yes, you just need to go to the original source and ensure it points to the correct place. Its all a bit of a grey area and may  do more harm than good especially if the links are a bit dodgy but you can still move a link that points from A to B same as you would an internal link with a 404.Hope that helps and good luck! (formatting edit, seems to have gotten lost!)

Hi there, In any case I would not expect a lot of traffic to posts that are syndicated. Generally people use syndicated content to supplement what's already there. So if the idea is to get more traffic through these posts, I would suggest finding another way. Having said that, my understanding is that syndication-source still works, but canonical will override it. If you have something that says they no longer recognize it I have never seen it. I've used syndication-source when I don't know the URL or where a CMS/API doesn't allow me to get the URL, as you can point syndication-source back to the root domain URL. I've also seen sites just post something like "Originally published on http://example.com/page" without incurring any penalties. To do it by the book, I'd suggest canonical first, syndication-source second, and a source link third. And in this case I'd suggest doing it by the book because syndicated content is generally not going to give you a lot of organic search benefit. Hopefully that helps.

Thank you for your response! Unfortunately, we're not working within wordpress, so it's not as simple. The article you referenced was very easy to follow but im concerned that it's a bit outdated since it was from 2010 and we all know best practices change. I'm hoping I can use it as a basic guide to share with my dev team. Thanks!

Hi Stephanie, Did Logan or Martijn's responses answer your question? If so, please mark each one as a "Good Response." And if you need more assistance, please let us know. Thanks! Christy

Crawl stats are improving if anything. The last few weeks our pages crawled per day increased and our total indexed pages has steadily been increasing.

It seems you didn't get my question. There will be no duplicate content in pages. All I am discussing is about how to optimise sub-domains pages with "keyword" and "brand" at page titles. Generally we have given "brand & keyword" in all pages of website. Can we do same for pages of sub-domains? Is so many pages added with "brand & keyword" helps or kills in ranking?

Is this a manual action that you can see in Google Search Console --> Search Traffic --> Manual Actions? It sounds like you're saying that this isn't a manual action, but rather, the site was not ranking well and then when you implemented https it recovered to high rankings and then shortly after it resumed ranking poorly. There are many different filters and algorithms that Google uses to determine quality. When a site switches to https, the URLs are different and I do think it's possible that some of the dampening filters (such as Panda for example) could lift off. However, as Google recrawls the site and assesses it in the eyes of these algorithms, then whatever quality problems were there previously would eventually surface again. To me though, this situation is exciting because this really does seem like evidence that the site is being suppressed. Often it's hard to tell whether there is suppression present or whether the site simply doesn't deserve to rank well. It sounds like there are some issues that still need to be addressed.

Thanks, Jordan.