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Hi all,

So I recently filed a Google reconsideration request - but it came back saying "No manual spam actions found" - ok, so that's that. But from what I've read, if we have been hit by Panda for duplicate or thin content, we wouldn't know - in other words, Google does not report it as it is an algorhythm penalty as opposed to a manual one.

So what are my options - do I wait until the next Panda update? when can that be? Or do I start over on a fresh domain?

Input and views appreciated.

thanks,

Thanks Takeshi.

I recently filed a Google reconsideration request, came back saying there was nothing wrong, e.g, no manual penalty - but if Panda has penalised us for thin/dupe content, we wouldnt know by the manual route...

In this scenario, is it worth just starting from scratch? Or do we wait till the next Panda update which could be who knows when?

Cheers

That´s great - but if I want to target more than just the country but anyone who speaks English or Spanish - eg., not just UK or Spain for example?

Would it still be wise to do it?

thanks!

What about using name="Language" content="en"/> ?? or es as the case may be?

Guys - both of your answers are very helpful.

Our site is translated by humans native to spanish and english - however, our market reach is not just UK or Spain, but any english speaker or spanish speaker - there are so many different countries that speak both.

Thanks again!

I have tried using them and didn´t do anything - furthermore, if you check this video out by Google themselves, you will find that using these parameters is a "hint/suggestion" as opposed to a solid directive.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiEYcBZ36po

Rel Canonical is also a hint.

But Meta Noindex,follow is a solid directive which they have to pay attention to.

Hope that helps - been there, done it got the t shirt through a lot of pain and frustration!

How does Google view this?

Our current site works like:
www.domain.com/EN - English
www.domain.com/ES - Spanish

All products are the same, just different language and different URL for them - is this good or bad?

I thought of either

1. Going with .co.uk or .com for "English" and a .es for "Spanish"
   OR
2. Subdomaining it. www.es.domain.com and www.en.domain.com

Any advice appreciated!

Hi,

Our ecommerce store - we have had some duplicate content issues and they have been corrected, but of course, Google takes time to pick up on these. Our link profile is very poor, so we wont lose a lot by going to a new domain in that sense.

My question is, in what instances is it worthwhile starting under a new domain? And in which not?

Presumably you can also 301 the whole site - when is it worth doing this or not?

Thanks,

Ben

Hi Ian,

You are right in that Yoast Meta Robots can be cranky - I installed it and had to play around with it to get it working.

However, it does offer a very nice feature that I think is worth it - you can apply various combinations of Meta Robots directives to product pages individually - so this adds more value than just being able to do NOINDEX on reviews, wishlists, etc... pages. But install it on your dev site before trying it live.

So my solution uses both Yoast and my custom code - you check the URL for any querystrings, such as ?manufacturer etc... and apply different logic according to what you wish to be indexed or not.

Feel free to PM me.

This is the robots file line:
Disallow: /index.php/

Now, Magento has custom URL rewriting - so no URL uses index.php although this is the file that is used to run the system itself.

Should I unblock it?

Thanks - I thought so, just wanted to double check . Cheers

Hi,

We run a Magento website - When i log in to Google Webmaster Tools, I am getting this message:

Severe health issues are found on your site. - <a class="GNHMM2RBFH">Check site health
   </a>Is robots.txt blocking important pages?  Some important page is blocked by robots.txt.

Now, this is the weird part - the page being blocked is the admin page of magento - under 
www.domain.com/index.php/admin/etc.....

Now, this message just wont go away -  its been there for days now - so why does Google think this is an "important page"? It doesnt normally complain if you block other parts of the site ??

Any ideas?

THanks

Hi,

I am quite familiar with Magento and struggling with the SEO of this ecommerce mammoth!

As far as I am aware, you should implement the meta tag "NOINDEX, FOLLOW" on those pages that you do not want indexed - as your pages are already in the index, this is the way to go - blocking them on robots.txt does not get pages out from the index if they are already in there.

I suggest you apply some "querystring" logic to your template - you will find the page here:
app/design/frontend/default/YOURTEMPLATE/template/page/html/head.phtml

That way, you can apply the

depending on the page content.

Hope this helps you and let's stay in touch about Magento! (PM me)

Presumably submitting an english content based site is pretty pointless?

Hi,

One of my customers asked me to get them included in major russian search engines - I am assuming that Yandex is the biggest one, and Google.ru - any others?

Any points on how to get a site included with them?

thanks,

Ben

Hi,

I am just double checking to see if these parameters are ok - I have added an attachment to this post.

We are using an e-commerce store and dealing with faceted navigation so I excluded a lot of parameters from being crawled as I didnt want them indexed. (they got indexed anyway!).

Advice and recommendations on the use of GWT would be very helpful - please check my screenshot.

thanks,

B0gSmRu

No probs.

No, Magento URL Rewrite Module will not do the 301's for a mass change like going from category paths to just product paths - so you will be left with a lot of 404's to clear up. The other thing is that your individual product URL's, have no keywords in them whatsoever, except presumably the SKU's - so I think changing it may affect you adversely.

How many products do you have? 1200 hits a day is not bad going...

Hi Thomas,

I'm familiar with Magento and familiar with SEO.

If you go to the magento admin panel, and go to System > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog > Search Engine optimization, there is an option for:

Use Categories Path for Product URLs (which you have set to YES right now) and also this: Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Products - which you may have set to yes o no. Enabling this last option tells Google that Product A is available under different URL's but it's the same page. This is how I had my setup. However, the rel canonical implementation is just a suggestion to search bots, not a directive, and from what I have read, when you have the same page appearing under 4 to 5 different categories, it is really down to Google and other bots to agree with you on the canonical.

So, I decided to set "Use Category Path for Product URL's" to NO - this means that your product will only be viewable under http://www.electromarket.co.uk/bba0051 which gets rid of duplicate content issues - you do lose the keyword rich URL's created by the category paths, but in the end I chose this option.

IMPORTANT: If you change that setting now, it will create a lot of 404's for you, as you probably have those indexed already in Google - this is a decision that in the short term creates a lot of work, but longer term I think solves a lot of problems.

Hope that helps,

Ben

Hi,

Sometime ago, a few thousand pages got into Google's index - they were "product pop up" pages, exact duplicates of the actual product page but a "quick view".

So I deleted them via GWT and also put in a Meta No Index on these pop up overlays to stop them being indexed and causing dupe content issues.

They are no longer within the index as far as I can see, i do a site:www.mydomain.com/ajax and nothing appears -

So can I block these off now with robots.txt to optimize my crawl budget?

Thanks

Hi,

In the case of a RED/GREEN/YELLOW coffeemaker for example, I have say 6 pages that are indexed in google.

Now, I can write very unique content for each and that gives me 6 pages in SERPS. Or make it a configurable product?

What is best, and how different would the description need to be - my feeling that just changing the word colour in the text would NOT be enough.

Thanks,

B