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Thanks for the great reply!  I think your assessment is correct!

Hi Rene, Thanks for the input and insight - much appreciated. So expanding on your example and my specific question what do you believe the difference would be (if any) on search results for someone looking for Birkenstock sandals when you had two URL's of the below (considering all other SEO aspects were equal) http://companyname/collection//sandals/birkenstock  V http://companyname/collection/sandals-birkenstock The restriction I've got are kind of forcing me to go with the first URL but with a fair amount of work and possibly ongoing maintenance I could go with the 2nd URL.  However if the SEO result between the two is minimal then my decision on how to structure is easy - I go with what's easier to set up and manage. Does that make sense? Thanks...

This should help out, as well: https://moz.com/learn/local/local-search-data-uk

Hi Guys, OK so we resolved this and it's a Microsoft issue!!  and a schoolboy mistake from me! We use "Web User Controls" on the website that allow us to write re-usable modules for things like headers, burger menus and footers in an ASP.NET web solution.  We then drag and drop the onto any page and if we need to change them then we just change the core web user control HTML. The rogue links were coming from these web user controls, when they were on pages in the rogue directories. Now the reason we had this fault on this website on not on any other was because we made the mistake of using standard HTML Well if the page is in the root directory then no problem.  If you want to go to the home.aspx page then the link is fine (HOME However if you put this footer on  page in a sub folder then you need to change the link to ../home.aspx, but you can;t do that or all the pages in the root folder go squeewy.  So this is why you use an ASP:Hyperlink control instead, this allows you to define a page from root with the ~/home.aspx link. This is where all of these rogue pages were coming form. TY for the help guys.

Yes I was thinking of testing this. I have just checked our images and from what I can see the devs have set the alt tag to default to the product title. Then the image title is a bit more descriptive - does the image title/legend help with anything or should we ignore these and update alt tags instead?

Hi Liam, If you have a mix of slash and no-slash URL's, just make sure that they all forward correctly. If you go to www.example.com/product/, does that forward correctly to www.example.com/product, or what does it do? If you wish to PM me your URL, I will happily do a quick crawl to make sure there is nothing else that might cause you issues. -Andy

HI Rod, That should have fixed your duplicate content problem.

Hello Adrienne, SLI is going to have some features that BigCommerce isn't going to have in their default site search. However, as you said, BigCommerce has come a long way in this area. It really comes down to features, and what is important for you. For me, I look at three main areas: Ease of use and user-experience for the consumer Relevancy of results Analytics In all three of those areas, BigCommerce has it covered. It's easy to use, provides relevant results (and search suggestions), and you get reports like Keywords Without Results and Worst Performing Keywords (among others) which help answer all kinds of questions, from which pages to optimized to which products to source. I used to send the buyers at one store these reports quarterly, and they sourced many new, top-selling products because of it. If you're missing any of the SLI "learning" features in BigCommerce's standard search, you may be able to get them with an add-on like this: https://www.bigcommerce.com/apps/searchspring-advanced-site-search/ (Note: I haven't used SearchSpring).

Hey wgilliland! Did that help?

Awesome. That's a fantastic way to check. Thank you.

Hi, It is worth remembering that a canonical just suggests to Google, which is the preferred page to index and serve. This helps stop duplication issues. What is doesn't do is place a block on a page and prevent anything else being crawled from there on in. You would need to add a nofollow and noindex for that to happen. If someone lands on a canonical page within the site, they can still browse around from there. Think of a canonical as a less drastic action than a 301. PR will flow via a canonical in the same way as a 301 as well, but doesn't just stop there. I hope this helps. -Andy

You're very welcome Brittany. I've not personally been involved in these situations, but have seen this play out in a variety of different industries. Good luck and keep at it!

Yes your support mentioned that but the trick to that would have to get 2 check-ins to the facebook page because I could use that. I need to test it out and see how it works. I know its no your fault, its Google making things a pain.

Personally, I wouldn't go back and forth. I'd pick one and push to the other depending on your goals. If you don't abuse you shouldn't have a problem IMO. You'll need to be extra careful if the sites are registered to the same people and sit on the same c-block. Link where it makes sense, link to other places, and don't be too heavy-handed and it should be valuable if the sites are disconnected enough (not in the situation I described above re-registration, etc.) and it's actually good for users. Referral traffic should help you determine that.

thanks so much!

You bet Mitch! Glad to help and let me know if there's anything else I can help answer. Hopefully maybe you'll get a few other opinions as well. As I'm sure you know, that's often valuable in search with so many nuances to the SEO game. Good luck with your search efforts!

Thanks Umar It would appear looking at the threads you provided that I cant use the Trustpilot review scores in schema mark up as they are from a 3rd party & google only allows onsite reviews to be displayed via markup................doesnt explain my competitor at Golden Charter is displaying stars in SERPs as they have no onsite reviews! Which means that i will have to set up a separate method, which will duplicate the Trustpilot work, to capture directly reviews from customers. Why is like never easy!! Ash

This is a touchy ethical question for SEOs. I think there are some questions you should ask yourself. First, are you sure the company in question placed the links? Is it possible that they were the victim of negative SEO that didn't work? Second, do you actually deserve to out rank them? Is your content truly better? Do people want your result more than theirs? If you can answer yes to both of these, then I think you can feel comfortable in moving forward with a spam complaint. If not, you risk either kicking someone while they are down, or hurting user experience overall - neither of which are particularly ethical.