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Haha I couldn't agree more Travis- as the one responsible for updating the site I have no access to changing where the number is, the lack of social media buttons, or the broken video links / bad videos. These are all reasons as to why we need to change the layout of the website completely. Question: Literally the only part of the website I can edit is everything below 'Search Louisville homes on our website'...if I delete all the text won't it hurt my SEO for keyword rankings?

Thanks for the info. I'll check out the orientation script, it should really help with planning design changes

Thank you, I did not think it would have been an issue either but the customer did not like seeing that on the report and wanted it fixed. I will look into how to setup a robots.txt file to take care of this. Michael

Hi Rob, Great question and I am glad you are looking into how your site responds to mobile users. It sounds like you are having some issues with smartphone users. To be clear, it's best if you approach this problem from a screen size rather than a specific phone type. Your website works fine on tablets, but it's smart phones you have a problem with. You can do a responsive design that changes based on the user screen size rather than phone type which can get really hard to develop for really quickly. Here is a guide we have developed for all things mobile design and SEO. We highly recommend making your site responsive (no need for m.domain.com or domain.com/mobile), which will take care of any issues with linking in the future, shares, and all other forms of user confusion as well as search engine confusion. Also here are mobile recommendations straight from Google. Hope that helps!

Not an expert on JS by any stretch, but Richard Baxter at SEO Gadget suggested this post: http://seogadget.com/javascript-framework-seo/ It's focused on Angular JS, but a lot of the core principles should apply more broadly.

Honestly speaking this happens a lot as this is one of the cheapest way to get your website ready! -          Email them and ask them to at least remove your GA code from the headers so that you can stay in peace. Most of the times, people give a damn so give it a try and see what happens. -          DMCA takedown notice to their host server! This should be the right way but not sure how much time will it take. -          Get the New GA code and move on! Quick and easy way out. Hope this helps!

Hey Dylan Either of those are possibilities for Google finding and indexing a page like that. There could be many ways that happened - I've seen them spider "links" in a drop down depending on how it's implemented. One thing you can do to check how, is looked at the text-only cache of the page (type cache:www.domain.com/page-name in your browser and click text only) - and look to see if the drop down items actually appear and clickable links. You can also try crawling the site with Screaming Frog and set the user-agent to GoogleBot and see if they got picked up. If the filter is just for example re-sorting the list of items in a category, there is probably not a need to have this crawled or indexed, because it's just the same content in a different order. If you do want to remove them from the index, you will want to add a meta noindex tag to the HTML, wait for them to drop out of the index, and then block crawling with robots.txt or nofollow the links that might be generated. Hope that helps! EDIT - I'd also check to be sure they are not showing up in your XML sitemap.

Hi thanks that pretty much answers the question was basing the more complicated version on the Amazons of the world so wanted to check there wasn't any fundamental reasons for doing it that way as opposed to the more simplistic way.

I have implemented the robots method for the moment and I will look at the exclusion of parameters too. thanks , i will now wait the next crawl from Moz .

"duplicate content is normally not a penalty." This also depends on just how much there is. If you duplicate a page, that is identical information. You can get around this problem Jon, by using the HREFLANG markup that will also work across domains, but remember that it works on a per URL basis, so you would need to use this for each of the URL's with the duplicate content. Have a read of this article from Google on how to use the markup. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en I hope that helps. -Andy

Hi Renait, We found out that our guys forgot to install analytics on the Mobil pages so the only way traffic would count is if people visited the few pages that we didn't convert to mobile.  We fixed that and everything went back to normal over time.  We dropped a little in rankings early but bounced back with time.  Hope that helps.

Hi Edmond, The Moz Q&A probably isn't going to be a great spot for this to be list. Perhaps you should consider posting this to the Inbound Jobs board.

Hello Carsten, I am not a developer, but hopefully I can be of some assistance. If not, we'll leave the question open to see if anyone else can be more specific for you. First, I came across a good list of eCommerce sites using Isotope: http://isotope.metafizzy.co/ . If you scroll down to "Isotope in use" you'll see examples from Anthropologie, Rimmel London, Lexus, Biodroid, etc... Perhaps looking at how they handle things will help. For example, it looks like Anthropologie uses unique identifying URL for each product that is its own .jps file (e.g. 4130265414412.jsp), or is meant to appear that way. A lot of AJAX sites will use a hashbang (#!) to enable crawling of dynamically created content on the same URL each time. Here is more information about that. The solution you provided above sounds good, but I'd want to see it in action first. Be sure to view the page as Googlebot, and to see how it looks in Google's Cache Preview in the SERPs to make sure they are treating it the way you want them to. Good luck with this, and please let us know how it turns out so we can be more informed on the issue in the future.

Glad it's working for you now, Jimmy! So sorry you had to deal with this. Thanks for hanging in there, and for the thumbs up

Michael- Thank you for that very helpful response! This provides that context that I was looking for to approach the issue. I'll report any additional findings back to this thread. Thanks again! -Chris

Have you gone through your site to make sure that there are no longer any links to the old 404 pages? You probably don't need to worry about external links pointing in, since those pages are now redirecting, but I think it would be best practice to correct all of your internal links.

HI thanks for the response, This is exactly what I thought I am not sure why they are so confident that this will cause a penalty. The structure of the sites are  definitely different a no links have been made between them as they are essentially two site competing in the same market under different brands. I am going to send them this thread so I can finally end this ongoing debate. Its a waste of my time. Thanks again.

Thanks will check out the post.  To be very honest the affiliate sites were very iffy in quality. They had little in the way of unique content and were more a working test of Matt Cutts' notion that if you put lots of differently sourced duplicate content on one page then the page won't be treated as unique. It appears I was wrong! I'm not fussed about these sites, they made a bit of money but their main purpose was to test the content theory as we are considering adding a few affiliate type products into our proper magento site. I think it's safe to say that the working hypothesis that lots of different bits of duplicate content = one unique page is very much disproved, hehe. Lesson for next time...if trying to get a site banned by google (which was pretty much the aim of the test). do it on a different server to the proper websites. Time to buy a new ip for the magento stores just to be safe

Hiya, I know a lot of people have enjoyed the following for ease of use - http://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/ The point of the tag is when you "tag" a post it helps people & search engines find the content via its related content. e.g if people like photography they may want to find all posts related to that tag. The problem is as follows: you have two posts both different but both with the tag photography for example you cant redirect that tag to both posts. so you could either not use the tag, leave the tag so it helps enforce the keywords etc. Last option you rel=canonical to the post you want to rank the most. Having said all of that the problem is restricted-robots-txt which means the crawlers may not even be getting to your tag posts which may be fine depending on what you want. Hope some of that helps and hasn't confused you.

Thanks Don! I'll look into that