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Hi Patrick, Of course - So, some of the academics within our institution are setting up a project involving numerous external partners and stakeholders. The business won't have a fixed location (that I'm aware of), and was going to be a science/research based website. This project was going to have its own URL and website but they would've liked it controlled within our domain so that: A) It's easier to update B) It'll benefit from a higher DA The H1 of the page would obviously be called what the URL would've been, but I'm not sure whether this would be viewed as underhand by search engines - although, from my research, I haven't seen anything to suggest such a thing. What do you think? Cheers, Rhys

Hi Tertiary Education, From the way you describe it your pages are being considered duplicate content becuase they are so very similiar, that is to say that they are near-duplicates if not actual duplicates. It sounds like the content on those pages is somewhat thin- is there anything else on the page apart from the map? If the answer is "no", or "not much", then consider padding them out with (quality) content that serves your audience. I think this is what Patrick is referring to with his suggestions (forgive me if I am mis-interpreting you Patrick!), and I think he is absolutely right. Other things to consider as creating unique title and descriptions for each page (I mention it in case you have over looked it). By adding valuable differentiated, content to those pages you will be differentiating one from the other as well as providing value to your users. As Moz sees these changes it should stop flagging them as duplicates, and as google re-indexes the pages it will begin to appreciate the differences between them and gradually index them as non-duplicate content. Hope that helps

You're welcome, Omer!

You need to make each product which appears to be duplicate different or choose the more relevant page to be the canonical. The other thing which can cause issues is if multiple URLs go to the same page, even tracking can cause this. The thing to ensure is all pages have a canonical which points to the most relevant content.

Thank you for this. Google Tag Manager seems to be the most effective tool, but will the Moz Tools pick up on this or will it keep flagging my pages as Duplicate Content and so on?

The best ones I have seen are capabilities decks that tie an agency's core competency into what the business needs with the proposal at the end.  It's hard enough to get the attention of a potential client, never mind rick losing it with multiple documents, decks, one sheets, proposals, whatever.

Hi Radi, It's hard to say, but with the new penguin update, there is a chance that certain parts or pages of your site might have been affected by the new penguin as a result of spam signals, but there is still a lot of uncertainty. Here is what Google said: "Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site." They said "adjusting ranking" as opposed to penalisation, which looks like your situation. More about it here: https://moz.com/blog/penguin-4-was-it-worth-the-wait I hope this helps! Thanks,

I don't believe that it "hurts" to put up a temporary site.  However, if it subtracts from your time of getting your real site up then that is a sacrifice. I would rather put up the first few pages of my real site a day or two early than get a temporary site up a week before. The only exception is that I would want something up ASAP if I knew that important people were looking for me.

You're welcome, Meier. So sorry, but I'd not be able to make a guess as to how your competitor acquired links. You might want to consider consulting privately with a good SEO consultant about that, to whom you can show the exact situation in confidence. While we're on the topic of Yelp, if you're looking for some pro tips, I really enjoyed this video. You might watch it and jot down notes: http://localu.org/blog/guest-video-top-10-yelp-tips-small-business-2016/

Glad to be of service and best of luck with the new designs! all the best, Sean

Hi Kerry, Magento handles this very well by default when you simply enable canonical tags. It canonicalizes all product URLs (no matter how many categories they are in) to the root level. Eg. for the following product URLs: www.site.com/category1/product-name/ www.site.com/category2/product-name/ www.site.com/category3/product-name/ Would all canonicalize to: www.site.com/product-name/ I've worked on many large Magento sites and this has always worked very well and I've never seen an issue with it. Cheers, David

I think what we'll do for now is use an image as a (potentially) temporary solution, but also look at our Schema options. Thanks!

Hi There, Here are some things you can try to get it working: Make sure you are not in incognito mode Un-install your MozBar plugin. Un-install and re-install Chrome. Turn off any additional plugins these could be interfering with MozBar Check to see if the address bar is hiding the extension icons: http://www.screencast.com/t/7cLHKkOP Disable any software firewall or security apps. Clear all cache and cookie data related to moz.com Re-install your MozBar plugin here. Try again to Sign-in into your Moz account here and the MozBar. Clearing your cache and cookies of all Moz related data is a very important step since we've recently required authentication for the toolbar to function properly. Sending over the below information to help@moz.com would be a huge help in efforts on diagnosing the issue, so if the above steps don't work for you, can you please perform the following steps and send over this screenshot to moz? Click on this icon in the upper right corner of Chrome -  http://www.screencast.com/t/HUj3m4DGuoqK Move the cursor over 'More Tools' and then click on 'Developer Tools' -http://www.screencast.com/t/B7SIh7qiPj Click into the 'Console' tab - http://www.screencast.com/t/itHrYuuq Make sure MozBar is running and then refresh the page if needed. Take a screenshot of the results (the entire window is recommended) and send that to us. What version of MozBar are you running? What is your OS version? I hope this helps.I look forward to hearing back from you about the above. Thanks, Vijay

Thank you Chris! Yes, I think it would make sense include the old brand name for some time. "I can't imagine that it would do any harm so long as you do not change your new title tags also. This might become confusing in terms of branding for SEO." ...Not sure how you mean here? It´s a completely redesigned site

Looking at your setup, I would have thought it should work so I'm a little confused. if you're still having trouble, you can use filters in GA to custom extract the search term from the URL and pass it through to GA. check out Lunametrics guide on how to do this: http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2015/02/24/enable-site-search-reporting-google-analytics/ regards, Sean

Thank you everyone. I've followed all the good practice suggestions etc. It's still WAY back in the rankings but is making progress!

I can't see that being an issue, not one that would affect it that badly any way. Have you checked that Google is crawling the site correctly? Site set up in Google Webmaster Tools with no error messages? Double checking that all pages can be indexed and aren't being blocked in the robots.txt file is the best place to start. How new is the site?

Ah thank you - I was looking at the Behavior link above all that! Sorted now!

Fantastic - many thanks Chris!