Welcome to the Q&A Forum

If you know what is happening to pages with this session_id I would always add/ change the purpose of the URL parameter in Google Webmaster Tools. I would never let Googlebot decide what to do with the URL parameters as I never will know how they exactly interpreted the data.

I had a nice long reply, but the system crashed. I'll keep it short this time: Rel canonical is the right band-aid for this problem right now. However, you need to find out what is causing the issue and fix that because you don't want Google wasting crawl budget on thousands or millions of non-canonical URLs. I couldn't figure out which CMS / Shopping Cart system yours is built on, other than that it is on a Windows server. I don't have much experience working with eCommerce sites using Windows IIS except for Volusion. Perhaps it is a custom-built shopping cart, or just one I don't know of. Either way, the person who built it or sold it to you should be able to help you figure out why this is happening and help you fix it. If not, I might consider looking into a new eCommerce shopping cart system / CMS.

Fix broken internal and external links, like the Yoy-search url. That should solve one area of your 404 problems Identify why you have 404's in the first place. Find the root of the problem. Are these dead product pages? Definitely 301 them to the correct URL. If the product isn't there, consider redirecting to the homepage (or asking the linking site to change the URL to a relevant page) or showing a custom 404 page to show their other relevant offers.

Hello All, Have you guys seen any positive increases in search traffic since you have implemented this schema to get the search bar within the search results?

Looks like Google doesn't trust your site enough to offer the pages you think are logical as results for the query.  I'd say G Bot isn't confident about your content, and is triggering an algo filter.  True, internal links may be causing the confusion, but I'd also suggest checking your external link profile to make sure relevant sites are leading G Bot back to your blog.

Thank you Amelia

Thanks Abe, I tried again and it seemed to work OK now, Paul

It's a great question and as the article Andy mentioned points out, there are benefits to optimizing your titles and metas for mobile.  However if the site is responsive, then there is only one page and therefore only one title and description.  If you serve different versions then you can do it.  You'd need to host the mobile version on something like m.example.com or do what Google calls "Dynamically Serving Different HTML On The Same URL".  You can learn more here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details. -M

This is also happening for us.  I've cleared cache, tried new browsers, etc.   No go.  Please let us know when this is fixed! Thanks! Phil

If it were me and my client, unless it was a huge monetary purchase, I would just redirect it to the current domain. The reason being is that you can 301 redirect everything and the link juice is suppose to stay very close to the same; but why would you? Sure it might be easier for people type in the browser. But people already know the name more than likely. What I would do is redirect the new domain to the current domain. Then I would use the new domain in print advertising. That way you can really monitor how many people are coming from the print advertising (if the company even uses it). But from everything I have learned when you change domains and 301 everything the traffic tanks for about a month or two. If this is ok, then it might be viable to switch.

I'm in agreement with Chris on this one as well. That said, your checklist is an excellent idea, just don't put it on the home page. Instead use the home page to explain why your company is different from all the competitors you have alluded to, and direct them to a separate page with the checklist. Make it compelling. "Get real-world, practical advice in the form of a checklist" or "Avoid over-spending using our requirements checklist" or something else that clearly states what's in it for them.

It worked! Thank you!

Google is pretty finicky when it comes to displaying maps listings. As others have mentioned, it can take ages, and they don't make the process an easy one. Did you make sure that the box indicating that your business serves customers at its location is checked off? Google doesn't want to show businesses on maps unless they actually serve customers there. Here are some updated rules for showing up on maps. I hope they help!  http://localu.org/blog/rules-for-google-plus-local-for-business-listings/

Thanks very much to all you for your thoughts. Very helpful indeed.

Houston, As per Moz's help resources  for crawl diagnostics, Moz doesn't actually index pages and your noindex tag will have no effect on their crawl.  Rather, if your pages are blocked by your robots.txt, Moz will not crawl them.

awesome. thank you. i had no idea that made a difference. ma

Hi Dom, Here is my opinion for your query: You can have 2 separate landing pages for your organic & paid visitors (visitors from your paid marketing efforts like AdWords). For your paid marketing, you should create a page where you can accommodate both important aspects- Content & Functionality on the same page. Content is equally important even if you are using landing page for paid ads. A perfect combination of both can give you better quality score, higher rank at low cost & more conversions. Here, I am not suggesting you to write big paragraph on your landing page but you can just highlight very important aspects which can compel the visitors to take action. I would advice you to write little content with catchy headlines along with functionality. A modification in page layout should work here. For your organic visitors, you can make your landing pages content-centric to make it more informative from search engines & users point of view and then can lead them to the main functionality page via creating a button as suggested by OlegKorneitchouk. Content will help SEs to find you and help visitors to understand more about your services and then take necessary action. Please avoid to push "Call to Action" below the page as many a times visitors don't want to read too many content and they can leave the site without taking any action. One more suggestion: I noticed that you have provides Login button on the top right on http://www.rentcollegepads.com/marquette/search. I would suggest you to make it Sigh In Button coz there are chances when visitors not member of your site already. Hope this will help.

What I mean by one-to-one redirects is redirecting each page on one domain (the ones with incoming traffic or links) to the equivalent page on the other domain.  They are standard redirects. Ex:  fullcompanyname.com/category/product1 to compname.com/cat/product1 Hope that helps.

Thanks for the thanks, Patrick G. An amusing sidelight: one company that refused my request for company email had previously  entrusted me with use of their corporate credit card -- and continued to do so after refusing my request. Go figure. (sigh)

Hi Ray, Thanks for responding, I don't know my programming too well, but from the way you are saying it, it seems like this is a standard process. I will send this to my developers, thanks for your help!