Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi! Yeah, that's what i said. I would just ignore it and mark as fixed. Just be sure you crawl the whole site so that you dont have the old one linked on some page on your site.

For the most part I'm going to restrict my answer to the technical part of your question but do have a think about whether the pages are actually duplicates. If they represent different franchises of companies then they may well be relevant content pages. Think in terms of resources. You can't assume the query string will remain undiscovered by Google. It only takes someone linking with the query string attached for it to be found. Over time many of the near-duplicates may be discovered in this way. You can instruct Google on how to handle URL parameters.

It looks like the url's being shown are unique categories. I don't know if switching to a flat url structure will help, or just change the url-ref (rho-1..). I think Magento (at least community) needs a better canonical handler than what is built in, I find that Ultimate Seo from Mageworx takes care of most of these issues including ones caused by pagination and layered navigation. If these are unique Categories, then unique content should be created or you will need to overwrite the default magento canonical's with a module and point to one Rho category. You might also want to consider making 'Collections' apart of your layered navigation instead of creating unique categories for each shopping style

My opinion is that the URLs are less important than the actual content on the page, including title tags, headlines, body text, etc. Unfortunately, there's no way to manually determine when you've crossed the line of "near-duplicate" content, so it's best to make each content experience serve a unique experience targeted towards a specific purpose.

I'll reserve my answer until you hear from your dev team. A massive site for sure. One other question/comment:  just because there are 13 million URLs in your sitemap doesn't necessarily mean there are that many pages on the site. We could be talking about URI versus URL. I'm pretty sure you know what I mean by that, but for others reading this who may not know, URI is the unique Web address of any given resource, while a URL is generally used to reference a complete Web page. An example of this would be an image. While it certainly has its own unique address on the Web, it most often does not have it's very own "page" on a Website (although there are certainly exceptions to that). So, I could see a site having millions of URIs, but very few sites have 17 million+ pages. To put it into perspective, Alibaba and IBM roughly show 6-7 million pages indexed in Google. Walmart has between 8-9 million. So where I'm headed in my thinking is major duplicate content issues...but, as I said, I'm going to reserve further comment until you hear back from your developers. This is a very interesting thread so I want to know more. Cheers!

Duplicate content isn't a big deal for ecommerce sites, you're unlikely to be penalized for it.

Similar questions have come up a few times. I am not sure there is a clear answer, but you may want to look at this thread: http://moz.com/community/q/612-home-page-banned [Or search on 612 in the forum search.] Good luck!

Are you just looking for an explanation of what C-blocks are? There was an excellent explanation here a while back: http://moz.com/community/q/linking-c-blocks "It refers to the part of the IP address that's different. The same class C address means something has the same third octect in the address. In the following, the first three IPs are in the same class C, and the fourth address is not. 192.168.1.1
 192.168.1.2
 192.168.1.3
 192.168.100.4 The reason we care is like what searchpl says -- it's a hint to Google that the sites are all related to each other and on the same server, and that the links may not be very natural since there is the good possibility that the same person set them up." (from Keri Morgret)

Hey Mike! Here you go! https://seomoz.wistia.com/medias/jp9rbddwo4 Let me know if this helps!

Thank you all for your responses.

long time ago I saw that on a client website - as german we could block bingbot in robots.txt with no risk to loose traffic. I don't know why but the server was highly stressed by bing bot.  So yes I saw something like that - a little bit more than a year ago - but I wasn't interested in the "why?" - I just blocked the bot.

This has effected us just the same. We have not discovered anything in regards to SEMRush with our site, but our linking C blocks dropped. We're having a hard time understanding what happened with this as well. Even through the updates, our ranking on Google has stayed the same. Searching for more information about this. Anyone that can help, we'd greatly appreciate it.

Here's the step-by-step right and easy way: 1. Sign-up for Google Webmaster Tools and create individual sites for 4 variants of your website: http non-www http www https non-www https www 2. Set the preferred domain among the above four. 3. Add an canonical URL for all pages for either https://www. or https://.., whichever you choose. 4. Add 301 redirect from http:// to https:// via htaccess using mod_rewrite. 5. Use Google Webmaster Tools "Fetch as Google", under "Crawl" in your http:// sites to confirm that http://.. gets redirected and optionally submit those redirects to be indexed by Google (just to make sure). 6. Build and submit a sitemap for your preferred domain site (one of the https://..) via Google Webmaster Tools. 7. Optionally, connect your Google Analytics property with your preferred domain site in Google Webmaster Tools.

My company gets a ton more traffic from Bing than Google. I have found (could be a coincidence) that I get far more conversions and technical support questions from Bing as well. I have lost some rankings in Bing because of the changes I have made to my site to keep up with best practice for Google. However strange it might sound, I haven't suffered any traffic or conversions from the loss of rankings in Bing. Do you ever use your Bing Webmaster Tools? They are a little less insightful than GWT, but BWT does offer some insight to help your rankings. I would start there first. Good Luck!

ok thats great thanks for the info

Hi  Karl If it is a brand new PPC account with no or very little history I would advise you to start bidding on brand terms only to build up your quality score. Use exact and phrase match only. Once your CPC has come down a bit do your generic keywords research and try to find keywords that are a) relevant to your brand and its target audience, b) have decent search volume and c) affordable d)are present on the landing page of your PPC campaign. You might have to select / create several landing pages for your PPC tailed for individual PPC ad groups each with its set of narrowly themed keywords. Keywords' components like "luxury", high-end", "quality", "designer" etc may be relevant, but it depends on your product category and brand. You can also right away add certain keywords to negative list e.g. second-hand, cheap, ebay, gumtree, amazon etc, basically all the keywords that are opposite of luxury and premium.