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In addition to what Bill said (excellent advice) I'd also try to
After that, you should be in a good position to re-evaluate.
Hi Kurt,
Multiple canonicals won't work. I believe our own Dr. Pete did some testing on this a couple years ago, and the results didn't pan out.
It there isn't original content on the page, you have a couple of options. First of all you could de-index the page by adding a meta NOINDEX tag. A second option would be use the cross-domain canoncical to the most prominent choice (page A or page B) typically whatever is closer to the top of the page.
If you have the opportunity to add unique content to the page, this might solve your problem. A couple hundred words could make the content unique and the page might have a chance of ranking on it's own and you wouldn't need to worry about canonicalization.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
Depends on the type of penalty. Manual spam penalties almost always target the entire site. Algorithmic filters like Penguin can target groups of specific keywords. Though to an outside observer, it's often hard to tell them apart.
Moz data scientists are working on spam scores that will help in analysis, but it's not ready for public consumption yet.
One often used tool for detecting penalties is Searchmetrics Visibility charts. It's not hugely accurate, but can often give you a rough guess: http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research/domains/visibility
I don't have any real world experience with these terms, but if I understand correctly, your asking if Google is treating the intent of "lawyer" and "attorney" as the same.
The only way I know to investigate is to search Google for similar terms, like Seattle Lawyer and Seattle Attorney. If we do this for a dozen searches there seems to be some overlap of intent, but it's certainly not 100%.
That said, I think Google would interpret "dog bite lawyer" and "dog bite attorney" as pretty darn close semantic matches, which if overdone could lead to a Panda, duplicate content like situation. I'd probably try to target these terms on the same page, and consolidate my unique content as much as possible.
Hope this helps! Best of luck.
Looks like you found the solution below. Nice work!
Hi Kimberly,
The rel="canonical" is a good option when you can't 301 a page. If you can 301 a page, such as /index.html or some other duplicate version, it's usually a better way to go. As you said, it removes all doubt about where to send visitors and link equity.
Both rel canonicals and 301s pass about the same amount of link equity (thought to be around 85%) so it's safe to use either.
Canonical tags are usually best when you have lots of parameters needed to render the page, like homepage?color=red&length=long&manu=apple. In this case it wouldn't make much sense to 301, and the rel canonical is easier to implement.
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO.
Hi Chris,
First thing is I'd look at the Wayback machine and make sure you followed the same URL structure of the old site and look for any oddities.
Does the site have an old Google Webmaster Tools account? You might want to poke around in there and make sure there aren't any old URL removal requests or anything else that could potentially cause problems with the relaunch. if you don't have a GWT account, be sure to set one up.
Quite honestly, if these articles existed before, I don't see any advantage to releasing them slowly vs all at once. In fact I'd prefer all at once especially if articles linked to one another.
Finally, I'd make sure there were no penalty issues on the old site, and address them if there were. You don't want to bring any of those back to life in the process 
You're right. I get the same error! Looping in the Help Team to see if perhaps this is a known bug.
Hey Jason,
First I would try Moz's SERP analysis tool. Run a report on the page that is ranking, then add the URL of the page that is not ranking, and compare the metrics between the two. Be sure to run a full report.
Oftentimes in these cases, it's not on-page optimization that makes the difference, but backlinks, anchor-text, and site architecture that influence a keyword position in search results.
So things I would look for in comparing these pages:
Also, on the other end of the scale you may want to see if any of your pages are actually over-optimized. Too much exact match anchor text? Keyword stuffing?
Regardless, hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
Hey Lawrence,
Thanks for the heads up - I read the question too fast and missed the root domain. I've edited my answer to reflect this.
Cheers.
Possibly, but as Keri says, it comes with substantial risks as well. I did a video post about this awhile back that may be worth watching:
http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects
I'd make sure your supplemental pages link appropriately to the landing page, and make any necessary on-page improvements before considering a redirect.
On the other hand, if the supplemental pages don't offer unique content or mostly consist of duplicate content, it may be appropriate to redirect.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
Hi,
I'm going to answer with 2 separate and very excellent blog posts that can answer the question much better than I can:
There are also a number of automated tools out there link Link Detox, but a manual review is always necessary before disavowing links.
Also keep in mind that although Panda might have some backlink elements baked in as part of the algorithm, most people consider Panda to be mostly caused by on-site issues, such as duplicate content. You may want to do a bit of digging into recovering from Panda penalties, including removing thin and duplicate content, and improving on site experiences, before removing links.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
Hi Sophie,
I actually had to look this one up myself. The Free Trial covers 5 campaigns and up to 50,000 crawled pages. In your case, looks like your first campaign crawled up to the 50,000 URL max, so there's no more room to start a new campaign.
The good news is you should be able to edit this. If you go into your campaign settings, one of the first modal boxes (Site Basics) let's you set a crawl limit for the campaign. If you dial this number down below 50,000, you should open room to create additional campaigns (I've never actually done this, but I believe that's how it's suppose to work)
Another option is to delete the campaign, but that's very drastic so I don't recommend doing that
Hope that helps.
Cyrus
Hi Sophie,
You can cancel at anytime. If you need to cancel twice in a year, that's fine - and you can reactivate later. You'll still receive access to the tools for any amount of time you paid for. So for example, if you cancel 5 days after your last billing cycle, because you already paid for the month, you'll still have full access to the tools for the full month.
Hope this clears things up. (let me know if it doesn't)
Cyrus
The best way to handle this, for all crawlers including Google, Yahoo and Moz, is to make sure you have proper canonical tags on those URLs that point to the non-parameterized URL.
So http://www.example.com/example-product.htm?ref=navside will have a canonical that points to http://www.example.com/example-product.htm
My understanding is that the Moz crawlers should be checking the canonical, in which case it will ignore duplicate content and title tag issues. If you find this is not the case with your crawl, please let our help team know at help @ moz.com
Hi Keith,
Instead of answering this question, I suspect what you're looking for is a basic introduction to Google's Algorythm, and how everything fits together.
And although nobody but Google can really answer that, perhaps I can point you in the right direction. For example, it's important to remember Google uses over 200 signals in it's algorithm that all work together in a very complex fashion. A few of these we try to examine in our Search Engine Ranking Factors study.
You can never quite tell what factor pushes a website to the top, but often we have hints. One of my favorite tools is Moz's Keyword Analysis tool (run a full SERP analysis after the initial analysis) which will show you multiple data points and analysis to help you figure out why one result ranks higher than the next.
And not to dodge the question about Panda and the other updates, but they tend to work together. You can find more information about each here: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
Hi there,
Improving your on-page optimization can help with your search rankings, although it's only one step in the process. Off page factors like links and anchor text play a significant role.
One thing, I'm not sure what you mean by "Moz rating"? Could this be Domain Authority? If so, on-page performance likely won't effect any of your Moz metrics, which are mostly link based features.
Regardless, the on-page report will tell you which elements are most important. Using the keyword in the Title and Body are likely the most important. I highly recommend this article from Rand on keyword targeting and on-page optimization:
http://moz.com/blog/visual-guide-to-keyword-targeting-onpage-optimization