We have a location finder which drills down into a page per location which then has cross links to the products lines which that location provide.

The page title for each location is something like<name of="" company=""><city town=""><geographical area=""></geographical></city></name>

<main service="" product="">if not too long!

If in your database you could have a description section for a unique piece of content per branch better still, perhaps location information or specialties for the location.

I would however echo the message about one website for the company and only split off into a second site for specialist products or brands. Even then I would use one website if I could get away with it as content is king and lots of good content will get noticed more.

</main>

One thing you could try is answering questions which your customers are asking and have pages with the questions being the sole content of the page.

e.g. What can get traffic to my page?

Customers ask how we can get traffic to your pages. One idea would be to have page with answers to the most popular searched questions (Found by looking in Google Adwords Keyword Finder) or by starting to type a question about your product in Google and seeing what it suggests.

Then write an amazing page which gives the visitor his perfect answer, what has this achieved? They have seen your brand and they relate it back to the correct answer for their problem. (Ensuring it is the best answer!)

All of this is SEO Structured of course and therefore gets a high rank on Google and more traffic comes your way which Google will notice and also perhaps deter-main your a guru in your field.

This then has a knock on effect to your product pages and get them high ranking too. Of course inter linking between the pages is good too!

One other thing I would say is we have a managed server which was getting a little long in the tooth (old) so we upgraded to a new server. The Speed of delivery went up 10 fold and so did the Google rankings.

canonical links is what you need, so that duplicate pages link to the most relevant page.

I'm afraid I'm no Woocommerce expert, but if it's worth it's weight in salt it will have canonical link capability.

A less important duplicate page should have the following in the header of the page to promote the more relevant page.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.website.com/most-relevant-product" />

What this will do is promote your one page in Google and the like above the others which may not even get listed.

What it does mean is you will be seen above other sites. I dare say that the number of canonical links will add to your importance saying to google not only do I have this great page but lots of others which point to it, but I only want to take up your resource listing one.

Long complex URL will kill your site if they aren't relevant. Try to keep them as small and relevant to the content as possible.

For instance:

http://www.website.com/This-is-a-story-all-about-dragons-written-in-english-by-dave-nash/1sdfg/34  is terrible

http://www.website.com/Stories-About-Dragons would be much better. Dave Nash isn't known as an author and because your search would more than likely be localised English would be the default, and some systems add codes onto the end or middle of the url, middle is the worst!

As for Title this is what appears in the code as <title>Stories About Dragons</title> most good CMS systems will allow a different Meta Page Title than a Page Title which is usually encapsulated within a H1 tag.

Therefore the URL

http://www.website.com/Stories-About-Dragons (Note Google doesn't like spaces in URLS)

could have a meta title of <title>Stories About Dragons</title>

and a page title of

This is a story all about Dragons

Hi We went from WYKO to ERIKS in 2008.

I created a new site with the new company name and had a banner pointing to the new company name on the homepage of the website for months before the big switch over.

I then began the task of re-pointing all of my pages to the new website using 301 redirect, the content was identical to start off with so that the task was easy http://www.wyko.co.uk/bearings was the same as http://www.eriks.co.uk/bearings

Then marketing made any changes to the new website pages only. (never changing the URL!) This could have been a re-direct to a relevant page. Any content which was no longer relevant also had a redirect setup to the homepage to ensure no old links where broken.

Something else I did which may or may not be a possibility, I created a History Page which contains names of all of our acquisitions and old company names, this way Google picks these up and when people still type in "WYKO" of "WYKO Industrial Services" they still find ERIKS. Old habits die hard we still get allot of traffic from the old company name.

Something else I would consider is getting websites to change the domain listing they may have. We still have allot of sites linking to www.wyko.co.uk today, whilst they 301 Permanent Re-Direct it's much better to get the Google Juice with a direct link, so get those emails sent out.

3 months later the traffic on the new site was greater than the old site and that's when the old domain was redirected and is still in place today,

Good Luck

Dave

I have never had a site with 100% crawled pages, sometimes Google will drop a page off for being too similar to another, not informative enough, canonical links set, redirects.

As Ryan says, don't just rely on Moz use Screaming Frog to get a good view of your site too, see if there are any errors. Also you can run the frog whenever you like, it's just a little more technical to understand.

Xenu oooh never heard of that one Ryan thanks!

Just looked into Xenu, Screaming frog does it all and some.

Hi Erin,

I have a similar problem with HubSpot they have Page Titles all the same which we an only set once for Blog Topics. So all the Blog Topics are "Know-How Makes the Difference" (Marketing!).

Hubspot then set each Topic page's canonical link to point to the main blog page, however Moz picks up that all of the topic pages have duplicate titles.

Does this effect ranking in any way? and is it right that Moz points this out since the canonical link is set?

Any clarity here would be much appreciated.

Dave

Use Rel="no index, no follow" on the link and roger will ignore the link. Job done

You wouldn't get any advantage of seeing the added items in someones wishlist as it would be duplicate content I'm presuming.

I only use canolonical links on the same domain as your telling google which is a master page. If you use them accross domains I don't think it would pan out very well for the site giving away it's content google juice.

I'd like to know the colution to this if anyone has got anything to add, as I also have a site in Ireland which sells the same as the site in the UK. Luckily for me the majority of the contnent isn't duplicate.

Ctrl + Alt + ?

Yes, I'd definatley do that. You are just cross-linking form other domains onto your own site. If the domains are registered in different IP Ranges even better.

Duplicate content is evil, in Google eyes.

Imagine your Google, What Google would like to do is index as fewer pages as possible and end up with the fewest possible number of results. Meaning that the results are specific to the users requirements.

OK, so when you add duplicate content onto your site or sub-domain you are making Google's job harder and therefore they will penalise you for that. Using Canonical links will work to a certain degree. But not as well as unique relevant content.

We have a range of product which is the best in the world made by a company called SKF. It's the humble bearing. However every man and their web developer add content direct from the SKF website (including my company!! DOH) this means that we will never be anywhere for the word bearing as it gets hidden in all of the duplicate content and if they haven't already Google may even drop our page.

It's a constant battle for me, and should also be for you. Unique content is the way to go.

I had this once, I checked a paragraph from our site and found an American firm using our content. Our intellectual Property Management company Demys got involved and it was quickly resolved.

Other issues I have had is duplicate content on four site, check for duplicate urls which resolve to the same page using Screaming frog.

301 Redirect, so that the old URL disappears from existence.

Google will still love you as you have fixed a duplication error, the URL on Pinterest will still be valid because it resolves to 301 not 404 and everyone will start seeing the new page instead of the old and so are less likely to Pinterest the old page.

The best way is to not link back!

The company you are working for probably has no relevance to your SEO/Web development company. Whilst links to them will help them and you did do work for them. Your better off getting links from internet companies and forums and not taking juice from your customers. By taking their juice you will harm their site as visitors will navigate away from their site regardless how you do this. By helping their site they will advertise you via word of mouth or possibly web forums.

Submit XML Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools for the new domain.

All old URL's need to be setup as 301 Permanent Redirects not just a re-direct.

Do a search for the old URL on other sites on Google and ask the owners of the sites to change links.

WOW that's allot of external CSS files and allot of External JS files.I would suggest you try to reduce the CSS to just one file on any one page and also see if there's any JavaScript which isn't required for the page.

Some of the images seem to take a while to load on a slower connection too, try to keep the physical size small.

Good Luck

Dave

I have a few hundred which are all now set as 404, it's been a few months and they are still being listed and of course cached. Any help here would also be great.

Use a spidering tool to check out all of the links from your site, such as Screaming Frog.

Also check your XML & HTML Site Maps doesn't have old links.

Hope this helps