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Infinite scroll is fine for SEO, as long as you include code that forces a unique URL at a certain point in the scroll, to emulate a new page.

Now - if you have that on category pages, and thus provide a crawlable, indexable group of pages with proper pagination best practices, you don't need that on the home page. The key though is you need at least one proper way for search bots to get to all your content through HTML links.

If you don't have separate categories, and if the home page links are the only way to get to that content, then having page 2, page 3 is critical - and should not be blocked from search bots for crawling or indexing.

When you say "direct mail" do you mean email? Or print? If you mean "email", then you need to be aware that quite often links embedded in email end up discoverable via search engines. Just one example is where there's a "can't view this, click here to read in your browser" links - the email then showing up on the email distributor's web site.

In that scenario and for other reasons, it's always advisable to use 301 redirects - you don't want to cause search engines confusion - 302 says "this link is valid, so don't keep it out of the search index".

Even if it's print mail, there's a very slim chance someone who receives it could post it online, link included. Very slim indeed, yet always possible.  So again, safe best is 301 redirects.

As for implementation method, whichever you prefer based on server bandwidth needs, ease of implementation. (If you have tens or hundreds of thousands of redirects, an .htaccess file can get out of control).

Penguin is a penalty that was created to flag unnatural, artificial linking where that linking was implemented purely to game the Google system.

If both site A and site B are legitimate, trustworthy sites, where the company brand is clearly consistent across both sites, and as long as the links are a "buy" link that takes the visitor to a purchase page, and where those links have anchor text that is not stuffed with keywords, then there is no reason to believe Penguin would flag either site for artificial manipulative links.

And yes, putting a nofollow on those links will ensure this is an absolute certainty.

Prestashop asks valid questions here.

The issue for me is why three separate sites? That seriously dilutes brand identify, and makes it infinitely more difficult to get any one of the sites to rank with the most strength in a sustainable manner.

If you're going to even consider one blog that all three sites link to, unless there's some extraordinary other factor, the proper solution is to have one site for all locations, and a location page devoted to each location.  Then have the blog within the site as well.  One site - serves all needs.  Every task done to improve any one location or any other aspect of the site would benefit all others.

There are many reasons this can be happening.

One cause is where more URLs exist than your sitemap might even include.  So the question then is whether the sitemap file is accurate and includes all the pages you want indexed.

Sometimes it's a coding or Information Architecture flaw. where content is found multiple ways.

Doing a random check, I found you have listings showing up in three different ways

• http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/38-broad-street-between-beaver--manhattan-new-york
• http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/113-133-west-18th-street
• http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/inquire-about-the-ladders-137-varick-street-to-rent-office-space-in-ny

See those? One has the address as a sub-page beneath "/listings/" the 2nd version does not, and the 3rd URL is entirely different altogether.  There should only be one URL structure for all property listings so this would cause me to wonder whether you have properties showing up with two different URLs.

I didn't find duplication, yet it's a flawed URL issue that leaves me wondering if it's a contributing factor.

This is just a scratching on the surface of possibilities.  I did check about blog tags and blog date archives, however none of those are indexed, so they're not a cause based on my preliminary evaluation.

Cyrus,

Add another voice to the list of "still want"!

Google cannot read ALL JavaScript in every situation. Yet **they most definitely can read at least some of it in some situations. **

The article quoted was from 2012. A LOT has changed since then.

A May 2014 post up in the Google Webmaster Central blog mentioned how they can read it / execute it sometimes, while others they can't, though they do not go into specifics.

A direct quote from Matt Cutts:

“Once that JavaScript has all been loaded, which is the important reason why you should always let Google crawl the JavaScript and the CSS – all those sorts of resources – so that we can execute the page,” he continues. “Once we’ve fetched all those resources, we try to render or execute that JavaScript, and then we extract the tokens – the words that we think should be indexed – and we put that into our index.” source: Webmaster Video April 7, 2014

Oh - and if you block that JS in your robots.txt file, Google MAY respect that, and Google MAY ignore that. While Robots.txt files USED to be a firm "directive", nowadays they're "just one more signal / hint".

Do not assume that in your unique situation Google will or will not find that content, they will or will not see it as duplicate content just because they "may" or "may not" be able to figure out your JavaScript.

Want to avoid that insanity?  Yeah - generate the content you contain in those pop-ups on actual unique URLs that get loaded in those pop-ups.  Then, on those specific URLs, do a noindex,nofollow meta robots tag, AND a canonical tag pointing to the main product description page where that content appears in its primary form.

Or write entirely unique content for those pop-ups.

Be very careful about making assumptions regarding competitors.

Just because you see one thing, does not mean either that one thing is helping or hurting a site. SEO is a vast, complex environment. If a site has enough very strong signals across many areas, one or even a few very poorly executed things may not hurt the site. Or it may not hurt the site "until Google catches up with it".

Duplicate content, regardless of method (within a single site, across multiple domains, across a mix of domains and subdomains" is never a true best practice.  Ever.  it's artificial, and Google most definitely takes the position that if you are attempting to "artificially" (in their view) manipulate rankings in a non-best-practices manner, that's a violation of their guidelines, policies or TOS.

Without digging further into it, I need to ask - is that all original content?  I copied the 1st sentence from the "Big Bear Marina" description and searched it at Google. That's not original at all.

So if none of the descriptions are custom written to be truly original, it's not necessarily "great" content.  IF that's the case across most or all of your 200 listings, you may not have as much "opportunity" as you think.

If, however, it's mostly unique content, or you can convert it to mostly unique, high quality content, then by all means, transfer it over, and set up those 301 redirects.

Definitely as ForForce has suggested - don't let that "one star" under his avatar pic fool you. He knows of what he speaks in this matter.

ForForce is spot on.

Trust is a critical factor.  Instead of artificially manipulating the post date, be sure the "date last updated" is accurately working.

And if you DO make a value-add update to a post, add a sentence to the top of the post like "Update: ________"  and maybe even put "Updated" with the date right in the page Title or meta Description.

Anything else would be playing with fire.

The implications are tied to trust and authority primarily, and overall ranking weight.

Why would content in a subdomain o exist on a "site" where the root domain itself redirects?  It's not natural by any stretch of the imagination.  And if the root domain isn't itself a stand-alone trustworthy presence, any ability it might otherwise have to provide ranking signals that it can then pass to the subdomain are lost.

Even though, generally speaking, subdomains are treated as independent, that's not true across the entire spectrum of signals.

IF, however, that subdomain is very strong in its own right, and sends the highest quality signals across the spectrum within it's own environment, it may be a case where it can succeed.  Because yes, technically even "www." is a subdomain.  So like most everything else, case by case, each situation is unique.

Harald,

I need to challenge your response here.

You stated:

"Boost works not only for manual actions but also for algorithmic problems, like Penguin."

That's absolutely not possible.  Penguin is not baked into the main algorithmic process. it's a separate entity that only runs a couple times a year.  So unless the clean-up was done literally within a few days of the next Penguin update, the magic recovery you claim was NOT due to Penguin related problems.

It's not an exact science in regard to any one signal, however yes, the more you can reinforce the ability to strengthen topical focus, the less likely Panda would find category pages to be weak.

Andy,

why would you noindex/follow category pages?  Thats like saying "hey - we have X products for this category - so it's really a high value and important page we deserve ranking for.  Except hey - we don't have the willingness to boost the trust signals on the category page itself, so don't bother."

That in turn negatively impacts the site's ability to gain maximum ranking signals for any products in those categories (at least in highly competitive fields).

So I'm curious why you'd take that path.

There's no single answer here, however the general consensus is that it really depends on several factors:

• Most pages can only truly be optimized for a couple high value phrases. So if you have too many phrases you want that single page to rank for, that's a tall order.
• If you go too divergent in a single page's topical focus, that makes more of a mess due to topical dilution - weakening the primary phrase focus for that page.
• If you force users to scroll forever (not just due to HTML5 / fluid design) that can be frustrating for readers on several levels.  That's made worse by the fact that most sites that use a one-page design tend to be one-hit-wonder magic-product sales pitch type sites, and thus reputation is an issue due to association with those for some visitors.
• That's just a few of the reasons one-page design is not highly recommended, both from an SEO and a User Experience perspective.
• As far as Google being able to figure out hashtag referenced content - just like every other thing their algorithms attempt to figure out, my recommendations to clients always state "don't rely on that - algorithms are inherently flawed to one degree or another - so figuring out JavaScript, AJAX, Flash - it's a crap-shoot.  Google needs multiple signals to help it figure out topical focus.  With only one URL, you lose the page TItle, URL, H1 and other related signals that only work best when there's one of each of those for separate main topics.  Sure, with HTML5 you are "allowed" to have multiple H1 tags on a page. Yet I've seen that confuse Google's algorithms.  It's just not wise to tempt the "formulaic attempt" process.

If a category page has almost no content (other than photos and product names), then that's a potential "thin content" issue, though the way your question is worded, I'm not confident my interpretation is actually what you meant by "no content beyond".

If product names don't reference the category name, and if there's a lack of any descriptive content on the category page, that's likely even more of a problem - thin content and lack of topical reinforcement of the category itself.

A general rule (barring other issues or considerations) is to have at least a couple paragraphs of unique, descriptive paragraph based text that reinforces the topical focus of each category page.   There are numerous ways to split that content out across a category page, and in highly competitive categories, more content may be needed if not enough products exist in the category.

Other factors that can help mitigate this to a certain degree include (but aren't necessarily limited to):

• hierarchical URL structure (nested URLs so product detail pages are seen at the URL as being "beneath" their category
• Proper nested breadcrumbs to reinforce that hierarchical structure
• Strong internal linking a) within categories this would include pagination code (rel-next/rel-prev).  b) outside a category this would include links and highly refined relevant content elsewhere on the page linking to the category page.

Mike,

I specialize in on-site audits and related consulting - sent you a private message through the Moz member system just now about it...

Alan

This is definitely an issue.  While there are many ways to go about resolving it, and each one has its own limitations and its own advantages, for most sites I recommend the following to my audit clients:

Reduce the number of main categories to as few as is reasonable where the ones that remain are the "bucket" or "umbrella" topics. An ideal number of categories would be anywhere from ten to twenty, at most.  Any more than that overwhelms visitors and they become lost in the amount of time it takes to find what they want.  Also, with too many categories, you end up with not enough individual articles in several of them, making those "thin".

Keep tag implementation to a minimum as well so there's not significant cross-over there.  Each article should never have more than two, or at most three tags and tags should never be highly similar to categories or to other tags.

If any sub-categories exist, unless you can justify their value, it's best to noindex,nofollow those.  Noindex,follow is NOT needed when those same articles are linked to from a bucket level category. And it confuses, weakens page rank distribution.

When you do this, it's important to 301 redirect old category indexes to point to their new consolidated versions.

Also, be sure to use proper pagination optimization on the remaining indexable categories using rel-next / rel-prev in accordance with Google's pagination guidelines.

No Hangout video on the 1st page of results for me - I tried "United States" as my location, and "Tampa, Florida", signed in, signed out, PWS=0, etc.  results were consistently the same.

1. Forthepeople.com page
2. KempRuge page
3. Richard Mizel Youtube video
4. theinjurylawyers page
5. Burnetti page
6. Burnetti home page
7. Capazlaw page
8. Personalinjurylawyertampaflorida home page
9. kfblaw home page
10. injurylawyers page