Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Cheers Bryce!

Hey Keri, Thanks for your input. Copied. I'll give it a try on tuesday with another title. Have a nice week-end.

I would get them in the shopper mindset and transfer it to the street. Ask them, do they go into a retail outlet and ask to see the '82374 in category?' as the shop assistant looks at them with a blank expression, or do they ask for a 'womens rain jacket'. When you bring it back to real life examples, I find customers understand what you are trying to convince them. So, why should it be different on line, if you want any rank benifit from the url it needs to have your key words in it. If you are targetting 'womens rain jacket' and you get a mention in a blog etc a anchor of 'www.company.com/womens/jackets/rain' still includes the keywords where as the cookie cutter url does not. It also makes the site look more professionally created than a DIY cookie cutter version. Brent makes good points and you will see a inital wave ride in rank but it should bounce back higher. I like to also add Canonical head tags to make the new origin of the site's pages. I would also prepare a new sitemap and submit it, if there are a lot of pages, make the move in groups, with a resubmit after each group. We have had pages bounce back much quicker than 30 days too, some in as little as a week.

I usually do one of these: put the duplicate content in an iframe (ugly and not flexible). I use this for static content like ad spaces load the content async with Javascript. All googlebot will index is an empty div. The user will see the content loaded with JS after the page loaded. In most cases there is no noticeable difference in how the page renders.Very easy to do with Jquery. My favorite solution.

In general, I would suggest using the below tag to prevent the use of ODP and Yahoo directories:

Agree are you talking about a specific keyword ? It could make sense that an internal page would be ranking higher than a homepage on a keyword due to on-page content of the page.

Hi Peter, Thanks for your reply.  I have removed the header already that seems to be causing the issue.  Will let you know if it resolves it but I suspect it will. Many thanks, Gordon

Yeah... you'd probably want to redirect those offline advertising URLs depending on the device being used.  Unless your site is primarily mobile, you'll probably want to distribute your regular URLs in offline advertising, not URLs with mobile.example.com. For usability, you should have links to go between the two version of the site.  What would be even better is if you did this: set a cookie when you change the version of the site you're on, to prevent the redirect in the future.  So if you change from the default version of the site from the version that we think you would want for your device, and come back to that site later, we'll use the version you selected. For example, if a user prefers the desktop version on their iPad, the first time they go to your site it'll take them to the mobile version.  Once they click the link for the desktop version, they'll always receive pages from the desktop version of your site (for 1 year unless you renew the cookie or they clear their cookies).  This will work even if they click a new link to your site from search result pages.

If you're not going to serve the pages from mysite.com/countryname/, then you wouldn't need to put the canonical tags on. If you are going to serve those pages, but not link to them from within your site, you might want to add the canonical tags anyway, in case people link to the URLs  under mysite.com/countryname/, so they'll pass their pagerank along.  You should also disallow that directory in your robots.txt, as Google has a way of finding pages and indexing them even if they're not linked to. I wouldn't expect you to get penalized.  I thought from your original post that the Is the content between the sites different?  If so you shouldn't have anything to worry about.