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According to Matt Cutts and various other blogs etc there is no duplicate content penalty. However if it is spammy then you could incur a potential penalty.

Oop hi Ikkie, thanks for responding and sorry I didn't. Been one of those weeks! When I tried this I got the following error: 'www.midlandnetworks.co.uk redirected you too many times.' Do I need to replace the first bit of my htaccess with that or just stick it on the end? Sticking on the end didn't seem too successful for me.

I think it could be this code right here in the head section: name="robots" content="index,nofollow"/>

If you've got that path anywhere in your navigation or other internal linking, you'd want to remove that or update it to /shop/necklaces/. The next step would be to 301 redirect /shop/necklaces/necklace/ to /shop/necklaces/ just in case you've got any links pointing to it - this will get your users where they want to go and also let search engines know you've relocated the page.

HDPHNS, it's quite possible that Google is doing that on purpose--that they see the product is out of stock so they don't rank it as high. Google wants to provide a good user experience, and it would be frustrating if someone went to Google, did a search, went to your site, and found that the product is out of stock.

1. Can I use the same content for the internal pages and 301 from the old internal pages to the new? Absolutely. There's no issue with re-using the content, so long as it isn't live in two places simultaneously. I suppose in theory there may be a brief window where it could be considered duplicate before the old site is removed from their index but aside from that, it's fine. **2. Should I 301 from the old to the new domain for the HP, or not? ** Yes. If you're looking to replicate the same structure on the new site and want to use a redirect, your best option is to 301 each page to its new-domain counterpart. This way, if anyone has a link saved anywhere like their favorites, an email etc they'll still hit the right page rather than what appears to be a random website. Some bad news to be weary of: At a quick glance it seems the link profile on that domain is still quite bad. When you use a 301 to point this domain to the new one, you're also pointing ~80-90% of that "value" to the new domain as well. Choose wisely 3. If I do a 301 from an internal page to a new internal page, does that have the same effect of doing a 301 from the old HP to the new HP? Also yes, in every way.

It is _possible _that a subdomain-based landing page could be cannibalizing rankings for specific terms from another page on your site. But if that landing page is actually that good for the term, its not necessarily a bad thing to have it ranking. If its ranking better than the pages you optimized for organic then maybe you should look at why that is (i.e. is it getting good/better links, are people sharing it around, is it better targeted than the organic page, is it more intuitive or has a better call to action, etc. etc.). Now, if you really don't want thoe pages to rank in organic in place of optimized pages you created then you can very easily add a NoIndex tag to the page or exclude it from being crawled in Robots.txt

Thanks Mike. I do get an occasional 404 on those phone numbers, but not a lot. Was more concerned about having links that were really not links and passing equity to nowhere. Appreciate the response!

that by doing as much, they will increase their opportunities to rank for related KW terms This is, in fact, a misconception and a false assumption. Simply redirecting domain names will not increase rankings. In fact, if you redirect too many domain names it could hurt rankings and give the main site a penalty (we've seen it happen before). What I do recommend, however, is that you do your due diligence on all of the domain names that you're redirecting, as you could be redirecting a domain that has a penalty or low quality backlinks.

Hi Benjamin, Although there is a possibility that your WordPress redirect plugin is causing this issue, it would be hard to tell without having access to the CMS. Often times a plugin will have a box that's checked somewhere that might cause something weird to occur. However, I doubt this is the case. To answer your question, I would do this in the htaccess file although I would be cautious and test it first. Here is a write-up with someone who had a similar issues (he goes into details about his solution). Hope that helps!

Google does, in fact, know that lawyers are attorneys and attorneys are lawyers. However, you'll notice that Google's search results don't reflect this. You'll see different results for lawyer phrases versus attorney keywords. When optimizing, you'll want to make sure you've done your keyword research and mention those keywords appropriately on the site.

I would check to see if you've uploaded the file to the right folder on the server. Some servers have a public_html folder and that's where you'd want to upload it to. If you are able to access other pages on the site but not this page in particular, then it might be a caching issue. Oftentimes ISPs will cache pages and you won't be able to see the latest version. You might try accessing it from another browser, or use something like Rex Swain's HTTP viewer (http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html) to see if it loads there.

Have you considered using Medium? I am looking at it for an old site that I want to keep going but can't be bothered with the hassle of WP upkeep. I know you can import page by page but not sure if you could wholesale import an old WP. In the same vein, Tumblr is also an option. For both you could set up or transfer your own domain and play with the styling so it is not obviously a Medium/Tumblr site. Whilst you would lose some flexibility of total control, you'll also kiss goodbye to regular updates and more

You really should be using Google's parameter tool if you do NOT want those pages crawled. If they are crawled, and you use the canonical tag in order to tell Google to pass any "juice" to the page you're setting the canonical tag to, then you won't lose any traffic. Both of those URLs (the one with the parameters and one without) essentially will be crawled, but won't be indexed.

Just want to echo Patrick's answer. He's pretty much got the right idea. Most rankings not on page #1 will jump all around. I would only be really concerned if it dropped from page #1, down to page 4-5 etc. Also, I would also agree that you don't need to focus too much on rankings week to week - and in addition - I wouldn't focus on rankings for a single keyword too much. To see if you have some sort of site-wide issue, I would check your Impressions in Google Console Search Analytics. See if your Impressions have dropped in the same timeframe. I would also look to queries where you already rank page #1 - and be sure those are optimized for CTR with titles and descriptions, and then see if you can find out if users are happy with those pages - maybe with goal tracking or some sort of measurement to see if they are converting etc. Then - really focus on "local SEO", here's some resources: https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/ http://www.evolvingseo.com/2016/03/29/005-local-seo-phil-rozek/ (disclaimer: that is my Podcast) https://moz.com/blog/category/local-seo http://blumenthals.com/blog/

Hello, The source code on those pages have a Robots Index,Follow tag. This should be noindex, follow. They also have two rel = canonical tags, which point to different URLs, thus conflicting with each other. Really I would have to log into the back-end to see what's going on, but I'm guessing one of the rel canonical tags is being added by Mageworks or Yoast and the other is default from Wordpress. You may require some custom coding to the blog template, and I recommend working with a developer if you can't figure it out on your own. There are lots of Wordpress developers on sites like Upwork and Guru who could probably get this done for you for a minimal investment.

Hi, I would like to know have you updated your sitemap? If not Kindly update it on the website as well as add the sitemap in Google Webmaster tool. You can block old urls which you do not want to get indexed. Yes it will affect the traffic as there are two different pages of same services which will distributes the customers.