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Ocassionally the URL for a product on our website will change. The shopping cart does NOT automatically create a 301 for the old URL to the new one. So in WMT the old URL's will appear as Not Found errors (even though all links in the cart automatically update, so there are no broken links within the cart).

These issues always sort themselves out with some time, but still disconcerting. Is this a major issue? Thanks!

Thank you, that was what I thought.

On my site "example.com" I have set up the following in the header:

The problem is that the tags are universal across the site, so every page has these tags, leading obviously to no return tag errors. I.e. the page www.example.ca/testing.html still has the tags:

Not tags with "testing.html" in them. How bad is this? Does it matter?

Hi Ryan,

Thanks! Unfortunately with our cart platform it is very difficult to add snippets, if there any meta information we could add to the header to accomplish the same thing?

This site - http://www.niagarafaucets.com/KRAUS-KBU10-p/kbu10.htm - is using the same platform as us, and has accomplished this. But I cannot not figure out how, I don't them reference currency or use "CAD" anywhere in their code to show currency.

I.e. This product - http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/fgd400-sensaphone400-p/fgd400.htm - shows up as USD in the SERP. (In the US it just won't show a currency, if Canada it will show USD on the SERP).

My pricing is all in CAD, how can I tell Google this? (It knows pricing is CAD in my Google Product Listings/Merchant Center).

Thanks!

Hi I did, this URL - https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#safe=off&q=absoluteautomation.ca%2C fgd400 - hows what I mean.

Because I'm Canada and browsing it shows US in the SERP listings

Hi, I'm having a problem with Google SERP results showing my currency as USD, when it should be CAD. An example of a page with this problem is - http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/fgd400-sensaphone400-p/fgd400.htm - can anyone see where Google is getting USD from on there? I don't see it anywhere in the coding. Thanks in advance!

I believe I've properly targeted, and told Google that our website absoluteautomation.com is aimed at US residents, while the .ca domain targets Canadian. However our .com domain routinely appears above our .ca when searching in Canada (actually on a physical computer in Canada) on google.ca. I'm hoping I can fix this both to improve Canadian search results, and I'm assuming that whatever is making .com appear so well in Canada is hurting it on the US side.

Any ideas?

Awesome thanks Linda, any thoughts than as to why WMT is listing these pages as being considered "duplicates"?

Hey everyone,

We've got an issue where our current shopping cart provider (Volusion) allows us to use canonical and rel="alternate" links, however the canonical links are forced on our Desktop as well as mobile pages. When they should only be on the mobile pages. You can view what I mean at the below two pages:

http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/fgd400-sensaphone400-p/fgd400.htm

https://www.absoluteautomation.ca/mobile/Product.aspx?ProductCode=FGD400

Does anyone have any ideas in terms of working around this?

Hey everyone,

For the URL - http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/dakota-alert-dcpa-p/dkdcpa2500.htm - I have the following tags in the header:

rel="canonical" href="http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/dakota-alert-dcpa-p/dkdcpa2500.htm" />

rel="alternate" media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)" href="http://www.absoluteautomation.ca/mobile/Product.aspx?id=37564" />

Yes Google WMT is reading these as duplicate pages with duplicate titles, meta descriptions etc.

How can I fix this? Thanks!

Hi, we've recently changed shopping cart platforms. In doing so a lot of our URL's changed, but I 301'ed all of the significant landing pages (as determined by G Analytics) prior to the switch.

However, WMT is warning me about this spike in server errors now with all the pages that no longer exist. However they are only crawling them because they used to exist/are linked from pages that used to exist. and no longer actually exist.

Is this something I should worry about? Or let it run its course?

Thanks Irving. When you say stuffing the blog and knowledgebase tags. Do you mean stuffing on specific blog or knowledgebase article pages? Thanks!

Hi Oleg, yes it's - http://www.absoluteautomation.com/sensaphone-400-fgd0400/ - with the keyphrase being "Sensaphone 400"

For example, having a link on many pages (so dozens of links in total) using a product name, all pointing to that product page. Could Google see that as "spammy" and penalize that product page in the SERP's?

Note: My product page has been penalized for the search term "Product Name" and there are no external links pointing that page using the product name as a term. This is new with the latest Panda Updates.

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the response, the old structure was pretty flexible it's just "/productname.aspx " or really whatever keywords we wanted, but ending in .aspx.

The new structure is not as flexible, it is - "/productname-p/keyword.htm" and categories are "/categoryname/categoryIDnumber.htm"

So I don't think there's going to be anyway to automate this and we're looking at a few hundred products and a few dozen categories. Is there a downside to having that many 301 redirects?

This applies to our product and category pages. What is the best way to limit the impact of this?

I.e. I switch shopping carts and every page has the same path/name but now ends in .php instead of .htm.

Our E-Commerce company has an abundance of surplus items, refurbished items etc. from returns. It isn't worth spending any time making the product listings, but it would be nice to sell them from our site. I'm worried that in creating these almost "empty" product listings Google will view these pages all as duplicate pages, or pages without unique content because they will really just be an empty, standardized page on the cart with limited text. Even though in reality for customers looking for deals they are very useful pages to get deals, any tips on how to do this?

(We can't justify creating unique pages because most of the offers are "one offs" where once we sell one product we are done with that listing.)

Using some rules to block all pages which start with "copy-of" on my website because people have a bad habit of duplicating new product listings to create our refurbished, surplus etc. listings for those products. To avoid Google seeing these as duplicate pages I've blocked them in the robot file, but of course they are still automatically generated in our sitemap. How bad is this?