Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you.

If they are truly gone, then a 410 would be the best option for you. Since they are indexed even if there are no links pointing at them, people can still find them besed upon what they are searching for. You never know when your link will show up, because you dont know how long google is going to take to get rid of the links. http://www.checkupdown.com/status/E410.html  "The 410 error is primarily intended to assist the task of Web maintenance by notifying the client system that the resource is intentionally unavailable and that the Web server wants remote links to the URL to be removed. Such an event is common for URLs which are effectively dead i.e. were deliberately time-limited or simply orphaned. The Web server has complete discretion as to how long it provides the 410 error before switching to another error such as 404" We did this for a client that needed old defunct pages removed. Once you set the pages to return a 410, and use Google url removal tool, you should see them dropping off really quick. (all of ours were gone within a month) Having that many pages return a 404 may be hurting the experience of your users as when they see a 404, they go right for the back button.

Hi Bob - Good question! Well, what is easy for one person is difficult for another. (And what is manageable on an iPhone may be impossible on another type of mobile device.) To know for sure what your specific audience prefers (and that's what it all boils down to), test, test, test! A/B testing tools like Optimizely can show you how users respond to design changes based on device and browser.

Still relevant: http://moz.com/blog/tactical-seo-how-many-termsphrases-should-i-target-on-a-single-page My honest opinion is that these terms are so related, you could comfortably target them on a single page. Let the content decide the targeting, not the other way around. The risk of optimizing too many pages around the same content are many, including: It comes off as spammy A real risk of a Panda penalty Who wants to write 20 near identical pages of web content about London Scaffolding anyway? So if it were me, I'd target a single page around these keywords, then create supplemental content that answers questions folks might have and also search for. Pages such as: Scaffolding costs / price of scaffolding Scaffolding towers Scaffolding jobs, scaffolding supplies FAQ about scaffolding UK Scaffolding regulations Mobile scaffolding I'd try to make each piece of content the best I could make it, and I'd naturally link back to my money when it made sense. When done right, this method will grab more long-tail traffic, and help your main content page to rank with contextual links from topically relevant pages. Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi, All good points I hadn't considered. I'll try just that. Thanks

Thanks Everett, I appreciate it!

There was actually a pretty solid Whiteboard Friday covering a similar topic. The Googles are only 'pretty good' at figuring out which page is the original, and which site should be given better placement for the same content. So you're not being silly for being concerned. Panda. I honestly think you'll find something you can use in the video, so I won't get too carried away on that subject. Your next problem is buy-in. Will your client do what needs to be done? To get the sale you have to sell. Present it as something that hurts resellers as well as the client. Which it likely is, or will, hurt both in a material way. If the resellers aren't being seen well enough due to the duplicate content issue, your client is losing on sales. The reseller is directly losing potential revenue. So whatever you put together out of this, the wise will heed your words - as they're losing money.

I'm with Eric on this, it seems highly unlikely that only loading a block of content is causing a load on your pages. I would start with teaching your developers what the best purposes are for SEO so that they can come up with better alternatives for these kinds of situations. That might pay off best in the end.

Thanks Travis, that's exactly what I wanted to know!  The links are definitely gone from my forum posts so I assumed it was a crawl issue but wasn't 100% sure.  Thanks again for all your help!!!

If the content isn't there, you can setup a 410. That will tell the search engines and users that the pages are gone for good. GWT will also show broken links to your site as well. So you will want to distinguish between the inbound 404s and the pages that are no longer there. There's a possibility that the pages have been gone for so long, they're no longer indexed. So I'm not really sure how much good a 301 will do from a link perspective. However, if you have access to referral data - you may find some of those inbound 404s are worth redirecting to a relevant page.

QUESTION 1: Setup a catchall .htaccess 301 redirect to point http:// to https:// (So the age of your page is transferred to the https:// pages) QUESTION 2: In short: No But It wouldn't hurt to make sure you have a canonical tag on all your pages pointing to the preferred url structure For example these 2 pages load 1 page (and both URLs work): http://singlespeedbikes.co/abacabb-2-0 http://singlespeedbikes.co/abacabb-2-0/ But the cannonical tag on this page tells Google which URL it should index to avoid confusion with duplicate content etc, example: <link href="[http://singlespeedbikes.co/abacabb-2-0](view-source:http://singlespeedbikes.co/abacabb-2-0)" rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" />

When I manually fetch, the /images folder isn't on the list anymore. For now I have just reuploaded the images in to a new folder and I'm creating my feed by hand, so that should get around it for now. Thanks for your help.

Hi Guys, I don't think its any of those updates...it just strange that my keywords rank well on Google, but not Yahoo and Bing. Could it be a sitemap issue, I am working with my developers to get that fixed and there is no priority and dates on the map. Thank you

It kind of makes sense to include it on 1 account. I notice Google is trying to get users to consolidate google accounts now (if you have a few google accounts you'll notice the: what account do you want to login with option) Definitely stick to 1 brand 1 Google account (for youtube and G+) This works out well when using G+

Actually, canonical tags are the absolute last-ditch way of dealing with this issue. The correct solution is to use 301-redirects to force all version of the URL except the primary to redirect to the primary (also called canonical) URL. Canonical in this instance just means the primary or most authoritative version of something. Nothing to do with the tags of the same name. The only reason to use the rel=canonical tag for this is if you have absolutely no way to do it through 301-redirects. (For instance your host doesn't allow access to the .htaccess file and your DNS system doesn't allow it either.) Use Travis's info below for exactly how to do this in .htaccess. There are also many other posts here in Q&A that address this if you want more reference points. Paul

Thanks very much Niner52, I will pay attention to 301 and sitemap! Feeling more confident with the decision