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Thank you so much. You have helped me so much. Best of wishes to you

"there is no penalty for have duplicates of your own content" Alan, I must respectfully disagree with this statement. Perhaps google will not penalize you directly, but it is easy to self-canabalize key terms if one has many facets that only differ slightly. I have seen this on a site where they don't rank on the first page, but they have 3-4 pages on the second page or SERPs. This is the exact issue that I am trying to resolve. Evan ps. sorry I hit the wrong button, but you got a good answer out of it

Hey Robert! Campaign updates happen on a weekly basis on the same day every week. If you want to see changes before your next scheduled crawl, you can head over the Research Tools page and run a crawl test. This is a bit more limited in that it will only crawl up to 3k pages and is cached for a 24 hour period, but is the best bet if you don't want to wait. Hope this helps!

Hi Steve, You've asked some good questions! Say, would you mind opening a new thread for each one (i.e., one question at a time)? Please be as specific as possible when writing the headline for a new thread, as well as the question itself.  Thanks! Christy

Hi Alexander, Google says that one website is better than two, and I almost never recommend that any local business publish more than one website, because of the risk this puts them at for NAP inconsistency, duplicate and merged listings as well as often creating thin/duplicate content risks. Google's opinion, as voiced by John Mueller, can be found here: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/rOb2jIctBLQ/discussion So, honestly, my advice is to go with just one site, Alexander.

Hey, I struggle with adding content too, to me graphic on a web page look better than words, I try to add intriguing content and usually keep my wording to 400 words or more. Please seem to like looking at pictures rather than reading so maybe filter in some pictures or graphics within the copy.

Thanks Richard. I appreciate the positive and quick feedback!

Hi Christopher, You have added canonical tags to http://blog.fdmgroup.com/uk/blog/, pointing to http://www.fdmgroup.com/uk/blog/ so this takes care of the duplicate content problem between those two versions of the blog being the same. For pages like http://www.fdmgroup.com/ca/blog/page/8/, you could look at different pagination options to ensure you receive benefit from these pages. Option 1 in that post (noindex, follow) is one of the simpler ways of doing this, but have a look at the others too.

This should be working now. Could you give it another try? Thanks!

Hmm, don't recall this ever happening with Yelp before. I guess we all have a bad day once in awhile

As others have said above, combating scrapers is a big reason, but you're relying on lazy scrapers not removing the tags. Another reason is to prevent rogue content management systems from attaching unnecessary query strings to URLs, creating pages that can end up loading infinite times under different URLs. A canonical tag in the source file would mean that any number of duplicate pages point back to the original. The same reason goes for sites that have issues with redirecting www / non-www URLs to the correct version, or who deal with the same problem regarding secure / insecure URLs. In all these cases, the canonical tag is a bandaid, not a cure - it would be better to fix the underlying problem of the rogue CMS, incorrect redirection, etc. but the canonical tag (self-referencing) is there if you need it. Google doesn't seem to have an issue with it, but if you're at all concerned about the other engines, use with care.

Thank you both! Now when is the damn Penguin update coming?!?! hahaha I wish we could have an answer.

Great, Mark. Hope it works out!

May concern was these screwed up links would somehow impair ranking, but I guess not.  Thanks for the link.

Hi Lynn, I'll be sure to update our webteam so we can tackle this. Thank you!

In 29 I'm seeing it under customize and there's a "Title Bar" button in the bottom left corner.