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Hi Dan Thanks for coming back. Great, so canonicals will be taken into consideration regardless. Do you have any suggestions on how to mitigate the negative effects of duplicate content if it is unavoidable? Hypothetically. Excluding canonical tags? Thanks again.

Unfortunately there's no black and white answer to this one since there are so many variables involved when changing both domain and website. If you had just migrated the old site to a new domain the process would be simply using a page-to-page 301 so every page on the old site simply pointed to the same page on the new domain. If the structure was kept identical with the new site and the 301s were handled in this way it should be fine but if not, you may have lost some of your link equity if any backlinks are pointing to the old domain and haven't been redirected. On top of that, moving to a new site brings with it a minefield of potential pitfalls too. Some examples: Is the new site at least as fast as before, if not faster? Is it sitting on the same server or at least in the same country (very minor factor these days but the 1%s can't be ignored!) Is the new site being crawled successfully? By this I mean if you do a Fetch and Render, is Google 'seeing' your site as users do or are there blank patches that can't be indexed for some reason like a poorly managed AJAX element. Has all the same content been moved across to the new site? A reduction in quality/volume can alter your rankings quite a bit Can the content be seen by search engines? If it used to just sit on the page before but is now hidden behind accordions or fancy design elements that set the default state to hidden, the importance this content is given by Google is reduced by a large enough amount to make a difference This list could go on for a while but you get the idea. My best suggestion would be to sit down and go through every single change from old site to new including the ones above and even changes that may seem insignificant, then weigh that up against potential ranking factors - you'll typically find your culprit(s) quite quickly this way. Not sure if you're their SEO or the site owner but this step would require some SEO input to offer accurate feedback. If this were 2015 I would have suggested that perhaps the lost equity in the 301s was seeing a drop in strength from your link profile but as Cyrus Shephard recently outlined in this Moz Blog, that's no longer the case so I'd question any advice to the contrary there.

Thanks a lot for your reply Stephan! I would be super intertesting to read a little more around the subject. Do you have any studies or cases you might refer me to which describe the flow of link equity to "page C" from "Page A"? Many thanks

Hi Martjin, Yes, this is the first thing I checked.  In fact I checked it in GA > Acquisition > Search Console which enables you to filter the data quite well by regex.  What I found is that it's pretty much across the board with the homepage as well as individual product pages taking a hit of around 50% reduction.  It's definitely NOT traffic on a few higher volume keywords as the major drop that's hurt quite a lot is traffic to individual product pages.  That indicates to me that it seems to be some kind of a site-wide penalty.  I did also notice that traffic to product print pages (where the product is in a print-friendly format) effectively went from say 300 to like 30 (and probably not much can be done there), but it's the overall traffic from SERPs that's more concerning, particularly to long-tail product pages.  So I'm pretty confident it's some sort of a penalty, but no idea why it's would be applied besides what I've already flagged in my original post

Hi Miriam, Hope you're much better now! Thanks heaps for your informative response as well as Joy's article. The only reason we'd come up with a unit number 'A' and 'B' for the 2 clients was to resolve the issue of duplicate address with Google. We had to resolve an issue with ABC's GMB with the help of a Google Business consultant and that's how they noticed business ABC and XYZ shared the same address (but both GMBs managed to be verified). We tried explaining to no avail that it was possible in Australia for 2 businesses to share the same office premise (with no separate entrance, they're not on different levels, they do not occupy different rooms within the same office space). Hence, we finally thought to 'resolve' it by creating unit numbers to fix the issue of duplicate address on G+. What a 'fix'!

Zack, A change like this on a money term ranking page is always going to incur some risk. But here's what I think after your update. /gifts/birthday-gifts ---> Better user engagement metrics, higher Page Authority, closer to the root.This curated landing page is best for a user who doesn't know which gift to buy, or even which type, but knows who they are buying it for a her or a him. I would say this describes an good (though it could be better) experience for someone searching for a short-tail, generic phrase like "Birthday Gifts" on Google. /gifts/birthday-gifts/birthday-gifts This landing page is more like a typical category page with filters and facets to narrow down the search by gender, price and other features. They aren't the same page right now so I wouldn't use the Rel Canonical tag as a way to consolidate them. The View All category page is good for crawling, but the Curated Landing Page is better for users. I would come up with a layout that combines the best of both pages and test that option against a percentage of the traffic to the /gifts/birthday-gifts. Basically create a B version of that page, which includes the filtering options available on the category page. These options can affect what shows up in the first carousel for "all birthday gifts" while the curated sections remain on the page for easy self-select (i.e. For Him / For Her). Assuming that page converts at least as well as the existing A version, I would give serious thought to combining these two pages to see if you can get your highest performing landing page into the #1 spot. Given the relatively lower authority of the existing #1 spot, I think this is definitely doable. You do risk losing some traffic that would have been more inclined to click on your listing after seeing more than one in the SERPs, but you can offset that with PPC, as you're doing now. Collect your baselines first. Combine the totals from both pages to see if the consolidation results in more sales.

Thanks everyone, I'll prioritise important pages and see how we get on with rankings

Thanks Martijn and Christy!

Hi Becky, I am also faced with the same issue as you and after intensive research, I found that the best solution would be to make the server to an automatic 301 redirection for all HTTP pages to the their respective HTTPS pages. This would enable you to preserve all SEO value of the pages and at the same time, avoid having duplicates. However, since you have not yet moved all the pages in HTTPS, then a canonical would work the best, but this needs to be manually defined for each page, unless you have a CRM that can pull the respective absolute URL accordingly. Hope this helps. Tej Luchmun

Thanks Andy, at least this gives me reassurance that nothing strange is going on here. I'll wait for a bit longer and see what happens.

Hi Mirriam, Makes perfect sense, that's exactly what I wanted to know. Thanks again for your help. Justin

Dot Com! When I started my business 7.5 years ago, the dot com was unavailable so I went with dot us.  Since then I have had to repeat the phrase "that's dot us, not dot com" several thousand times.  When I don't receive a promised email, and I call to follow up, they frequently have sent it to dot com. In the SERPS it doesn't matter. I dominate, but I think I would have picked a different url if I'd realized how hard it was for the average consumer to remember. And my clients are biz people!

I see your site is running SSL - are you sure you are looking at a search console profile setup for https? Is the sitemap submitting https now after a switch or vice versa?

Hello sir, have PM you please check, & suggest me.,

Hey Gavo, Looks like ShedSafe.com is such a popular company, if you search for "www.shesafe.com.au", Google thinks that you just missed the "d" in "www.shedsafe.com.au". See the different messaging at the top? If you don't include "www", it asks, "Did you mean: shedsafe.com**.au**?" If you do include it, it says "Showing results for www.shedsafe.com.au." My guess here is that when you include "www", Google thinks you're trying to use their search engine as a browser, so they're more likely to correct you. When you're not using "www", they're showing the results as you searched for them. I think the key here is more Domain Authority, time, and branding. The more Google sees that your site is respected, they'll be less likely to recommend ShedSafe. Good luck! Kristina