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Thanks for the reply, should I 301 redirect the other sites to relevant pages in the main site, or just let them die off? My competitor's sites do not link to each other, but have very similar layouts, similar products and same contact numbers. What would be the proper way to report him?

Well there's nothing in the page source. No clue what to make of it. Here's another screencap from Analytics. FvZ5g1Z.jpg

This is where you would find it! x8bNGRG.jpg

Yes that makes perfect sense. I had no idea that Google would use its own discretion on whether to honor a canonical tag or not! Totally agree that noindex is the way to go then. Thanks!

OK Gary. Thanks

I'd just use Webmaster tools for something like this. you can export the spreadsheet and if you don't have a keyword listed, you're either not ranking anywhere that matters or there is no traffic the that KW anyways.

Thanks Erin! Cheers, Lucy

I have done this myself and I see no problem with it at all.

Personally, I would agree with you an opt for the following option: clone.com/Apartments/New-York?price=30&size=100 I don't think it matters whether that section of the URL is readable to everyone. I would actually say that anyone who has a technical background would find the URL above easier to change than the other one, as having /'s in the URL almost symbolised different directories rather than a parameter (that's how I would generally interpret it anyway). I think in the grand scheme of things, It's going to make little different as you don't want the additional sections to actually be indexed in the search engines. Like Gary correctly pointed out, you can setup 'URL Parameters' in GWT and I think that's your best option. There's more information about that here - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/improved-handling-of-urls-with.html You could also use robots.txt to block the parameters in the URL but this depends on whether the search engine crawling your website chooses to use it. Hope this helps! Lewis

I would not do too many of these, but I agree with Gary. As long as there are no penalties associated with the domains, owning them and 301-ing them to your website should be fine and may get some domain traffic when someone types theexactproductyousell.com Having said that, I don't think this will do what you want. If these domains don't have links pointing to them or any authority, so It's not likely to do much for positive rankings.

Jorge- Can you check the age of the domain name?  I've seen instances where sites that have been alive for a long, long, long time can outshine other sites with better statistics, but they've withstood the test of time for Google.  That's one place I'd look to see if there is a substantial difference.

Step 1: http://yoast.com/wordpress/video-seo/setup/ Step 2: http://yoast.com/wordpress/video-seo/how-to/ Hope this helps

Hallo Lewis, I hope you had nice weekend:-) Unfortunately the error still appeared:-( It just did not want the: require('./wp-blog-header.php') But was looking for this one in the error require('wp-blog-header.php'); So I did all the steps back as I thought it did not sorted out:-(

I would absolutely use 301s in this case as the client is, in essence, picking a new URL. Switching from .uk/uk to .org/uk could Have unintended consequences for your rankings, but this could be offset by an international bump upwards. Without knowing your traffic, it's difficult to codify the potential issues of keeping or leaving the .uk TLD. However, it's always fun To make statements after A disclaimer, so to steal Google's own PPC targeting terminology: People in, searching for, or viewing pages about your targeted location <-- May go down. People in your targeted location <-- May go down. People searching for or viewing pages about your targeted location <-- May go up. At the very least, I would be sure that regional targeting is set to within WMT to ensure that Google knows your target region, based on your audience.

Very curious Google would send you those links. Is there any reason to think they are non-editorial? Perhaps they were placed as part of automation or copy and pasted from another site template? Is there any relationship between the tree sites? In my experience, there's no safe level of anchor text ratios. And exact match branded links can cause you trouble, especially for sites with lower Domain Authority. Mix these with low quality links and it's a headache combination. Unfortunately, even if the links are editorial, your best bet may be to get them removed. You could also try submitting another reconsideration request and explain why those links are editorial. By definition, most blogroll links aren't editorial (as they are placed by a CMS automatically on each page rather than a human) so this may be an uphill battle. Keep us updated. Best of luck!

I have run into this same problem in multiple industries. John Mueller at Google has answered my question multiple times on this subject saying that internal duplicate content is NOT an issue and especially if you can justify it being there a manual review of sorts would not identify a problem. Google will make a judgement call on what the best page to serve is by the users query. In your case you are doing what should be done, the least helpful page is the actual product page and in many cases in the past I have no indexed them. This same problem arises for many industries, real estate, office space, used cars etc...

Hi David, we'd love an update on this. Thanks! Christy