Welcome to the Q&A Forum

**These are duplicate URLs that we can't figure out how they are getting created. ** I want to be sure we are talking about the same thing here. When I hear "duplicate URL" I am thinking of multiple URLs which point to the same web page. Depending on how your site is set up it is possible to have many different URLs point to the same web page. Possible examples are: www.mydomain.com/tennis-rackets www.mydomain.com/tennis-rackets/ mydomain.com/tennis-rackets?sort=asc Above are three examples of URLs which can all lead to the same page. You can have dozens of URLs all lead to a page with identical content. How these issues get resolved depends upon how they were created. The best tool to help you figure this out is your crawl report. Use the SEOmoz crawl tool, then examine the crawl report. It can be a bit overwhelming at first, but you can narrow things down real fast if you use Excel. Select the header row for your data (begins with the URL field), then select Data > Filter > Auto Filter from the menu. Then start by looking at fields such as "Duplicate Page Content", "URLs with duplicate content", etc. Simply choose YES in the drop down menu to filter for that particular data. This will help you uncover the source of these issues. The URLs in my example should all be 301'd or canonicalized to the primary page to resolve the duplication issue.

Mike, Great advice, thank you.  I am in the health care field.  I have done well optimizing my on page seo (I get an A from seo mox grading for my keyword).  I only need to optimize for a local keyword, which shows to be low to moderately competitive. So local search and off site seo is what I am looking for. I am happy to pay for a quality service, I have not had the best results with my previous company as far as results.  What I am looking for is a very credible and competent SEO firm that works with small businesses.  Once I am successful with this keyword I am interested in optimizing or ecom site for a more competitive keyword.

Thanks for your input guys. I will definitely forget the Z option and carry on looking for a non-hyphenated alternative. Since reading your replies and taking on board your advice, I have found a couple of possibile alternatives and I am even considering a domain without the keyword in at all. Sadly, EGOL, buying www.keywordguides.com is probably not an option. The budget for this project is tiny... I guess I am just going to have to be a bit more creative

Hiya, Your best bet to begin with would be to read the following: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research And go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal Then enter a few keywords you think might be about right. The keyword tool will suggest a bunch of others and show how many people (roughly) search using each word or phrase each month (on average). It's a good idea to check the box for "Exact Match" on the left to get a close as possible figure. Other than that, try a few of the keywords in Google and go on to the sites that come up (competitors for those keywords), then right click somewhere on the page (in a blank area around the outskirts) and click "View Source" (or something similar, depending on your browser). A new page will open. Do CTRL+F to find, and type "Keywords" (without the quotes) then you should find a list of META keywords that site is using it their header. It may not be there though (if they have any sense), and it may not necessarily be good keywords either... it should give you a general feel though if you look through a bunch of them

If you're asking if the shift alone is going to affect you I'm not really familiar enough with either platform to tell you if one is better at SEO than the other. But I can tell you this. The learning curve of the functionality of a new CMS will no doubt have an effect on your SEO if you're not up to speed with how it works and how to best utilize it. I would advise you to become as familiar as possible with your new CMS before porting over to it. Try to get a trial of some sort and ensre it has all of the SEO features you need. Make sure all of your questions about SEO functionality are answered before you take the change live.

Thank you. If that was my site, I would redirect your /index.html and /default.html pages to http://www.normas9000.com/. I would then update your canonical as well. Lastly, there is no reason to have both the default and index.html pages so I would remove one of them.

You don't want the content to be the same, it's still dupe even if in different countries (even if in different languages from what I've read on here once) and whatever you do... don't have a pop up that asks people to choose a country when the page/portal first loads up. Lot's of sites seem to be doing that now with some CMS plug-in, not realising that it makes it difficult for the site to be crawled (Googlebot can't choose and click, etc...). Maybe have a call to action for people to choose location, but don't force it on page load. I would keep them on their current servers, if you move one to be hosted with the other it will likely affect the rankings for that countries serps. Don't forget to 301 EVERYTHING!!! So when you change any addresses with the new page URL's you don't lose link juice, etc...

As long as this is only part of your site you will not be hurting yourself.  While it may help a small bit for SEO purposes, I can see that the crawl rate may significantly increase, as well as the indexing rate of new material that is posted. I would just make sure that I have enough original, unique material that the yahoo feed doesn't overwhelm your site.

Same... I see "True" or "False" in the first bunch of columns as an indicator of an issue, then many columns along I get the actual URL's.

I agree with EGOL, a new hosting option may be best. But if cost is the issue then user-experience is the most important. Server locations may effect SEO, but conversion rate is more important for your business, therefore high bounce rates because of slow load speeds will have an adverse effect.

Does having the line: DirectoryIndex index.html Have any use in addition to the lines you posted? Thanks.

Hey mike, I'm not sure if I understand your question completely but I'l give it a shot. You are saying that links you used to find in OSE, Yahoo site explorer, majestic etc are now not showing up when you repeat searches? If that's true I wouldn't look to much into it. I've used Yahoo lots of times and the links jump in and out of their index. What about Google webmaster tools? I'm assuming if they are clients you have access to that data, have a look in their as to which links Google reports, these tend to not move as much since Google don't seem too bothered about telling you information about your own site. In any case if they are crappy links you should be focusing on getting them taken down, in which case it's nothing to worry about. Specifically on Panda though, yes Google could definetly be removing pages if they are really bad content, after all thats what panda was made for. Hope this helps Craig

This question has been raised here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/title-tag-on-sitemap-xml You don't want a link to an XML sitemap - rather a HTML sitemap (as Ryan states) You can use a tool like http://www.xml-sitemaps.com to generates sitemaps in both xml and html formats. HTML being the one to display on your website and the XML installed into the root directory www.skycandle.co.uk/sitemap.xml I have generated one for you here for you to see - of course generate another if you want to change the parameters. http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/details-www.skycandle.co.uk.html Don't worry about the XML sitemap too much as these aren't essential on smaller sites if all the pages of your site are indexing OK - as they should be picked up without the need to direct Search Engines them if the site has a clearly navigable structure. Take a look at these articles for additional info http://www.seomoz.org/blog/xml-sitemaps-guidelines-on-their-use and http://www.seomoz.org/blog/expert-advice-on-google-sitemaps-verify-but-dont-submit Of course the HTML sitemap is a useful tool for quick naviagation of your site and will improve your visitors experience on your site.

Congratulations on publishing, and the good response so far. Always a nice way to start a Monday! You might still send something to the radio station. They could hardly complain about you wanting to make their lives easier with some written (email) information that they don't have to create, and you could get in your links that way.

Thanks again Ryan, you have been very helpful answering al lot of my questions.