Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Sandra, There's no outright way to compare google's cache of today with its cache of a date in the past that I know of.  If you had google analytics installed at that time, you could go about getting useful info from that source.  Since the primary matter is really which pages were bringing in search traffic  then that are not bringing in search traffic now, you could compare landing page stats from today vs. two years ago to see which pages are not bringing in traffic any longer. Any chance your website was redesigned in the mean time? Sometimes change of navigation, architecture, or URLs can be the culprit.

I don't think that would be relevant since it's not a copy of the article and any way, it just references it. I also doubt that the huffington post does rel canonicals because that would lose them traffic.

Not the most helpful answer, but it's the best anyone can probably give at the same time...the truth is, no-one really knows an exact answer. Some people report it taking a few weeks, some a few months; it just varies and can also be affected by algorithmic penalties too. It's important to note that with these algorithmic penalties you won't be informed about them, so if there has been any poor SEO methods used in the past then it's probably worth correcting ASAP.

Hi Tom, The php server request uri way would be a good option except that the URLs are different on the different domains. For example: www.example.com/about-us/ www.example.nl/over-ons/ Therefor i really need a way to define the correct url on a page by page basis. Manually doing this in Wordpress is going to be a pain.

Have these a common structure? I had the same issue some time ago, but was lucky enough to have them under fewer subdirectories, so that I could just work on them to actually inform Google about all the pages. I managed to do that using a redirect 410 (url permanently gone) in my htaccess: Redirect 410 /category/ Redirect 410 /category2/ and so on. So that every article in those categories went away. After that, I also disallowed these categories in my robots.txt. Hope it helps.

Thanks! That is exactly what I wanted

Thanks

I think the question you need to ask is "Would my ideal customer bookmark this page because it will help them time and time again?" Google is fairly clear that it doesn't like low quality pages so this is really the test of what you have to do. I have exactly the same issue - and it's every day I try and add a few more bits to my resource page. That way in a month it will be ok, in 6 months it will be great and in a year it will be totally amazing

Hi lynnp! Thanks for explaining! That was very helpful.

I got it... managed to change as you've suggested, let's see next Moz crawl how we will behave... thank you so very much and the others for the help, a nice weekend for all!

If you are concerned about "link juice" following to the new pages, you will need to set up 301 redirects.  I  don't know much about web.com but some of these services don't have a way to 301. It looks like some of your pages have different urls now but Google still has the index from the old site. The pages that have exactly the same names will be OK. If there is no "link juice" to worry about, you may be all right just waiting for Google to figure it out. They will eventually re-index the new site. You might also consider a different solution for your site using a CMS like wordpress and self hosting. That may give you more flexibility in the long run and a blog on your site would be good as well. Do a little reading here as there is a great deal of good advice. Congratulations on finding MOZ!

I think in this case you're fine using a 302 since you don't need to pass any pagerank onto the shopping cart. It can be considered a "temporary" redirect in some ways because you're redirecting the user to their own shopping cart, which changes for each user.

Yeah, couldn't have said it anyway better. domain.com/xxx will be better for your SEO. I would strongly suggest to keep everything on a single subdomain, if you are to look further into the case, Moz did some pretty good experiments on this post: http://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomain-vs-subfolder-does-it-need-updating

Hi, It sounds like the setup should do what you want and not hurt visibility as such. It would be worth checking google webmaster tools for indexed pages to verify that the canonical urls are the ones that are indexed and there is not a large difference between total products/pages on the site and what google has in the index - which might indicate an issue. If the product range does not change much then it would be worth editing the sitemap to show the canonical urls. Having non canonical urls in the sitemap isn't ideal since it ads an extra step between the urls you are declaring and the urls you want in the index. That being said I have seen magento installs with similar issues with the sitemap urls and have not noted any major problems.

To add to Jen's reply, I ran a quick curl and it looks like you're blocking us on the server level: http://screencast.com/t/qUWsfpozhOz1 I recommend reaching out to your Web Dev to make sure the HTAccess file is configured properly and that you're allowing AWS access. Hope this helps!

Thanks Lynnp for your answer, but unfortunately the suggestions given and documented with those previous Q&As are not valid anymore, because Google has since few months offered a new interpretation to the hreflang/rel="canonical" co-existence issue (read my answer).

There are a number of things that go into the decision to use ccTLDs or not. Will your content change at all across the different country sites? So if you had .dk and .co.uk, would those two sites have different content at all? What countries do you sell to or are you world wide? Do you users in different countries need to see different content? Meaning are there any substantial differences in buying behavior or needs? Answer those questions and we can go from there.

They should be indexed next time the page is crawled. I don't know that they're very effective anymore. Obviously they're worth doing since they're pretty easy to set up, but Google continues to be highly selective about showing them.

Travis, your comments are a massive help. Thanks so much. That Screaming Frog tool is also really helpful. I had noticed that different backlink checkers were giving me different results, and so I've been working with several (Webmaster tools, webmeup, Moz, and ahrefs) Originally, i was just working with webmaster, and so it was something of a revelation when I first looked at the data provided by the others and found that there were about five times as many spam links pointing to our site as I had first suspected. I think many of the sites pointing to ours have been deindexed, so won't show up in webmaster tools. I had also noticed that recent reports I'd generated were picking up on far fewer spam links than older ones, despite me not having managed to get rid of that many links. The post from Robert Fisher helps explain why. With most of the links I'm deleting, I think they're clearly spam. The seo company we used depended mostly on article directories, but also some forum and comment spam - some on legitimate sites, most on forums that were clearly just created for SEO spam. What I'm thinking is that I will focus on deleting the links with the most repetitive anchor text, and leave a few of those with more varied anchor text. From my understanding of penguin, google doesn't so much penalise you for having a large number of links from spammy sites - it penalises you for having a large number of links with identical anchor text, so I'm prioritising those links with keyword rich anchor text ('Tanzania safari', in our case) and leaving in place for the time being some of the smaller number of links with less repetitive anchor text (a small number say 'trips to Tanzania', for instance). The content audit looks like a mammoth job, but I'll try and work on that this weekend. I know that our site has a lot of duplicate content, for one thing (in some cases for good reasons). Perhaps we've been hit by panda as well as penguin. Thanks again.