Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Are you asking about why Moz would or would not consider them duplicate, or why Google would or would not consider them duplicate? We don't have knowledge of exactly what factors Google uses to detect duplicate content. We approximate the best we can, and give a notice when we see things that look substantially alike. I did get the two pages in the original question to load. There are only a couple of words that are different, and the rest of the content is identical, including the related events. As a side note, I don't know that people looking for MLB tickets would consider "The Mu Gamma Gamma Chapter Seersucker and Sundress Summer Affair" to be a related event.

Hi Noah, I've looked in our help desk queue under both your username and your company name, and I'm not seeing any tickets from you. If the link Erin gave doesn't work for you, you can also email help@moz.com and we can help you that way. Thanks, Keri

Hi Jeannie, Sorry to hear you're still running into these issues. Unfortunately I don't have a direct email address. For troubleshooting purposes it's best to keep all requests in our Help Desk, as it's much easier for me to loop in devs and engineers if I need to do additional troubleshooting. I've emailed you from our Help Desk several times, so my guess is everything I send is being gobbled up by your spam filters. Have you done a search for noreply@moz.com? My messages should pop up. I'm more than happy to help you troubleshoot this from there! Kindly, Erin

Thanks KeriMorgret, I've entered this as at ticket and look forward to working it all out!

The on-page grader lists the pages that rank in the top fifty for a keyword in one of your campaigns, so it is not the on-page grader that is choosing a particular keyword for a page, it is Google. In other words, even though your "bracelets" page is not optimized for "rings", it still showed up for "rings" in the search results. And obviously since you did not optimize it for "rings" it did not do well for that word. When you see a grade of "F" for a search term that doesn't apply to that page, you don't need to worry about it. Sometimes pages do rank for keywords other than the ones we are optimizing for. If you get a bad grade for a search term/webpage combination that are supposed to go together, that is the time to go back and re-optimize.

It really depends on your developers and your budget. I do development and SEO, so this is how I would handle it. On searches that are returning just one result, I would put something in place to see how many results are returned, if it is only one result returned, in the head of the page I would set the canonical url for the search page to the actual page that is being returned as the result. If more result is being returned, you can handle that in many different ways. One way would be to create a pseudo category out of the results page. I would use this sparingly and only for popular search terms. But you could have an extension written for your site that can give you some on page control of the text, the url, the meta areas, and things like that. I wrote a module for a platform I use a couple of years ago that does something like it. http://blog.dh42.com/search-pages-landing-pages/ You can get the gist of the idea by reading about it there, but that is one good way to handle a limited number of them to get them to rank better.  I would not do it with every search result though, you might get a penalty.

Thanks for all responses, extremely useful.

Thanks Andy, great help!

Hi there, you've received some good responses. Did they answer your question? If so, please mark one or more as a "good answer". If not, please let us know where you need clarification. Thanks! Christy

First of all, all comment sections I have ever seen on blogs are nofollow links so they are really a waste of time in terms of SEO, in terms of driving traffic they are ok. Spend time writing quality over quantity content, but more importantly when writing it have a list of news sites / blogs / contacts in mind who you are planning on outreaching the article too. The hardest part is the outreach, anyone can write a great article, but you need to get it picked up and distributed. In an ideal world, you would all ready have made contact with the journalists before hand and see what articles they want. IMO journalist are very busy and if you can provide them with a great article which happens to include a link to your site, if they are rushing to hit a deadline, then you have a higher % chance of it being accepted on their site. Social media the way to go: depends on what industry you operate in some industries this could be a complete waste of time. Especially if you are a B2B company. Plus with Facebook's latest algorithm update its actually quite hard to get a social media post in front of your audience. Biggest tip would be, quality articles over quantity and spend as much if not more time on outreach to relevant blogs, websites to get your content picked upto and linked to.

Hi Anirban, Martijn provided a good response. Did it answer your question, or do you need clarification on anything? Let us know so we can help, thanks! Christy

Hey Guys! Pigeon is definitely causing all kinds of shakeups, some good some bad, for individual business owners. Best post I have read so far on this comes from Mike Blumenthal's little study of one of his own clients before and after Pigeon. Don't miss this, as it may help you start to get a sense of what is going on with your own business: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2014/08/03/pigeon-an-anecdotal-impact-report/

Hi Mason, you've received some good responses. Did one or both clear things up for you? If so, please mark one or both as a "good answer". If not, let us know where you need clarification, and we'll do our best to help! Christy

Which leads me stumped as to whats stopping these two subfolders being ranked.. we're no.1 for branded keywords in the US for some pages on example.com/us and not even ranked in the UK for example.com/uk for the same keywords.

Great to hear you've recovered. Did you ever have a subsequent conversation to learn why this happened? Do you think it might have been an error?

EGOL makes good points here. I've seen the opposite happen, too. An SEO firm links to the Wikipedia definition of website, and I can only assume it's meant to show the search engines that they link to authoritative sites. However, it really doesn't fit in the context of the site, and makes things appear very odd.