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Alot of search bar functions really don't provide accurate results, hence I would agree with you on not having this. Focus on good SEO. Organising blog posts into specific categories and then proper internal linking to encourage site dwell time and utlimately where you would like to end up is far more valuable (but more work).

Using site:yourdomain.com in Google, and then going to the end of the results and telling it to show you all of the results, is a good first start. It should get you enough to get an idea of why there are duplicated pages. The Moz crawl can also help you figure it out, as often with ecommerce you'll have URLs for sorting products by price, name, pagination parameters, etc. We'll throw up a flag when we see a bunch of duplicate content or duplicate titles. Also look for the easy stuff, such as non-www doesn't direct to www. Fix that, and you've cut your pages in half.

Well I didn't see all of that but I did recognize the site wide redirect and GTW wasn't updated to the new https website so I was trying to pull data from the old one and obviously I wasn't getting anything. Thanks for looking into this and laying it out for me. I appreciate it.

Totally agree with you, great points!

Hi Willy, Thanks for the great question. I think the difference you are seeing is indeed the difference between the amount of internal, external, followed and nofollowed links for a specific page as opposed to for all pages on the root or sub domain together. Your friendly Mozzer

Hi there, When developing a new site, if there is no need for subdomains, we generally recommend staying away from them and using subfolders. However as Andy says, there's no reason why subdomains can't be used to create successful rankings and well-performing websites if they're used correctly. I would suggest changing this structure if it appears the site is performing poorly... but if you can see a lot of other things you could fix to improve performance that have nothing to do with the subdomain issue, I would look at doing those first. The exception to this is link building - if you think that link building is what is needed to improve performance, make the decision about whether to keep the subdomains or use pages / subfolders first. You don't really want to do a lot of link building to URLs that you will then 301 redirect - redirection transfers a good amount of authority from one URL to another, but probably not 100%. Focus link building efforts on URLs that probably won't change any time soon. My former agency took over SEO for an aged, successful business a few years ago that was using subdomains to target different regions. We didn't like the set up from a purely SEO point of view, but would never have changed it due to the rankings the site already had. We didn't want to put them in jeopardy (it was a very competitive industry). We worked well with what we had. The decision has to be based upon cost / benefit of changing and risking what rankings the site has currently, and how well you believe the site could do if it were structured differently. Cheers, Jane

Great. Thank you!

Hi Thomas, It's highly likely that a link from a page like this is useless no matter where the link is placed, I'm afraid. Unless the directory is highly cited from other reputable sources, closely edited and genuinely listing the best in a particular business (which I would say it isn't, since it's selling link space and is very long), Google will understand not to pass authority to the sites listed. If there is any boost from having a link on a page like this, it will be temporary and may well carry much higher risks in the long term than it does short term benefits. You may spur on indexing of your URL by having it listed there, but you are also likely adding it to a bad neighbourhood. Do you trust all the other sites the page / site has linked to, most of which will also have paid to be there? The issue is also that if you are well aware that you can pay to be listed, Google is probably aware of this too. It should be very easy to crawl for terms like "submit your site" and look for £, $, € values listed by submission request forms. I would honestly consider removing your site - your competitor likely does not beat you because of this one listing or listings like it (especially if their site has been on this page for quite some time). For context, when we do link clean-up operations for new clients who have a lot of poor links or whose sites are under penalties, we remove all links on pages like this. I hope this helps, Jane

Hi Patrick, My name is Erin, and I'm on the Moz Help Team. Thanks for reaching out! This question is a little tricky, as I can't see any historic page level data from OSE. All I can check is historic domain level data within your campaign. I looked at your historic data in your Competitive Link Metrics, and I didn't see any dramatic change there to reflect this kind of a drop in your LDR's. We are kicking around ideas on better historical databases, but there's nothing set in stone right now. Currently the only data points we have are based on domains in the current index. I apologize that I don't have a more concrete answer for you, but this is the best I've got with the tools available to me. If you have any other questions, feel free to reach out to us at help@moz.com. Happy Friday! Erin

Hit the nail on the head here!  It's all about improving click through rates, and enticing the user to click through, after reading an enticing meta description

Just to add to the chatter.  I agree, do not go out and buy a bunch of local URLs in this case.  I run several large sites that we have to focus on local search for them.  I do not use the subdomain, but use a local folder/file system such as www.domain.com/$service-I-offer/$st-$city You can do other variants of this, but you get the idea.  I do not use subdomains as over time when I build links, etc for my city pages that also builds up the authority of my site.  This has worked very well for me across multiple sites that focus on different services/areas. I would present this to the client that you are building for the long term.  All of those separate domains are now dividing up the authority between them, vs building the authority for a central brand.  It is divided attention and in business, that is not good on multiple levels.  My other point is that, do you know in fact that all these competitors are ranking due specifically to the local domains?  That is an assumption, and may be false.  You can present to the client all the history around EMD and if you do a deep dive on those other sites, it may be they have a better on page optimization, link profile, load time, etc etc.  Do some homework and you will probably come back with at least 5 things that you need to do for your clients to improve ranking and none of them will be to go out and buy local domains. Cheers!

Hi Edmond, If you are going to use "search results" pages as good landing pages, they need to be made useful and high-quality enough that Google has no problem ranking them. To keep using ASOS as an example, this URL ranks very well in the UK for [black dresses]: http://www.asos.com/Women/Dresses/Little-Black-Dresses/Cat/pgecategory.aspx?cid=9419 Using the site's internal search, this page appears if I search asos.com itself for [black dresses]: http://www.asos.com/search/black-dresses?hrd=1&q=black+dresses There is little difference in the pages, but one sits beneath a folder structure, is linked to, includes a description and has a slightly better optimised title tag. But most importantly, the search results page is excluded via the site's robots.txt whilst the similar landing page is not - http://www.asos.com/robots.txt For sites without the authority of Asos, I'd say you'd need slightly more than Asos' short black dress description, but in truth this is a search result page by any other name that has been made into a well-ranked landing page. You see the same thing as you go down the SERP, e.g. http://www.debenhams.com/women/dresses/little-black-dresses versus http://www.debenhams.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Navigate?langId=-1&storeId=10701&catalogId=10001&txt=black+dresses I hope this helps.

Thanks, Jane! This is a very valid option, though in the current website architecture coupled with client expectations that could be difficult. I will keep this in mind but am open to other thoughts if anyone has any.

lol...   I get mad and delete them... but maybe I could get some giggles here instead.  

Hi Anthony, Unless you find a campaign or individual who has been tracking results, either for a specific keyword or for a specific domain, you can't retroactively do this through tools like Moz. You can use Searchmetrics' domain visibility tool to see how dominant a site has been in its niche over time, however, which gives you a rough understanding of whether it has ranked well or poorly for its keywords over time: http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research/domains/visibility My former agency has an in-house process like this that we used daily (I wrote about how it works in this post, although it has been developed into a tool and is more sophisticated now). It's useful for when you want to look at historic performance but don't have specific ranking reports and Searchmetrics is a great public alternative. I hope this helps! Jane

Hi Kerry, Certainly in your circumstance, it makes sense to keep everything structured, as long as plastic wallets do fall within badge accessories, of course. There would be little point trying to go down the route of keeping everything just one level up from the domain as this wouldn't allow for any crumb-trail that made sense, and people like a nice easy way to go back to a particular area. Sorry, I forgot too add that as long as the navigation is clear and google has an easy route to follow, there is no reason why your current structure won't be just fine. I hope this helps. -Andy

Hi, This does seem to be a bit of a problem as I am not getting redirected to the non-HTTPS version of the site, and the HTTPS version is not loading CSS for me: http://i.imgur.com/WoA66F4.png http://i.imgur.com/T7pf7zU.png You need to put or fix a 301 redirect on the HTTPS URLs (I take it it was working properly before?). Also place the canonical tag on each page, referencing itself with an HTTP URL. Cheers, Jane

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