On Page Analysis and Grading

[Confections]

I am new here and happy to be!  My site is an ecommerce site with hundreds of products.  I  have set up campaigns to track specific products.  For the on page analysis where SEOMOZ gives you a grade I have 2 urls showing.  But 1 of the urls is getting an A, and 1 is getting a F.  But they are the same url and obviously go to the same page.  Any help would be appreciated!

[JarnoNijzing]

you could try avoiding this problem in the PRO section by adding a rel="canonical" tag to the page saying that it is one and the same page. Use it in combination with a .htaccess document stating the page links to that location and the problem should clear...

[Thommas]

Can you show us the urls?

[Confections]

Certainly...and thank you for the response!

|   |

monogrammed dry erase board

/category/personalized-gifts-product-types/personalized-magnetic-dry-erase-boards | F | | 12 | |
|   |

personalized dry erase board

/category/personalized-gifts-product-types/personalized-magnetic-dry-erase-boards | A | | 36 | |

[Confections]

I am embarrassed to admit I don't know what this means....

[Thommas]

ok, and what keyword are you using ?

[Confections]

We have a whole host of keywords that we are targeting, but the main two are:

monogrammed dry erase board and personalized dry erase board.  But that brings me to another question. Are the on page reports done for all the keywords in the campaign or is each keyword have a grade?

Thanks!

[JarnoNijzing]

The part of rel="canonical" is for the meta item in the head of the page. I offcourse don't know how far your knowledge of HTML goed but if you know the basics then this should ring a bell:

<title>Title of your webiste</title>

the rel="canonical" is for Google to know that this page is the one and only original version of this page. Lets say i copy your entire page and post it on my website. Normally your and mine page would be indexed both by google and maybe my page would rank higher then yours or the other way around. If you tell google that this page is the original page (by using the rel="canonical") then Google knows this and will only index your page or make sure your page gets indexed a lot better.

Hope this part is now clear to you..

Then about the .htaccess file. This file tells yours browser to do something. Let's say you move a page from one url to another. How will google find this and even more important how will they no to drop the old page? Most important is your visitor. If the enter your site on the page you just moved they get an error message stating that the page no longer is on that location and they decide to leave. If you use .htaccess you can tell the browser (and thus the searchengines) to follow the old location to the new location by redirecting it with a 301 redirect like this:

RewriteRule ^oldboxer.html http://www.mysite.com/newboxer.html [L,R=301]

This states that the visitor (can also mean seachengine) will be redirected from the page oldboxer.html to the page newboxer.html within the same site. This way you dont lose your visitors.

In your case you can have your htaccess follow visitors from the duplicate page to the original page but i would rather use the first method with the canonical reference in it.

Hope this solves your problem.

[Confections]

Thank you!

[Thommas]

the report gives you grade for one keyword only, so if you run one report for say "dry erase board " and then a 2nd report for "monogrammed dry erase board" the results would be different.

[Confections]

Ok, that makes sense.  So that is why the A and the F...understood.  Thanks so much!