Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Joe,

Your NOT being overly cautious, but I do think your not thinking outside the box. The box being your 1 Meta Description you are trying to use.

Think about it this way, you cant control your customer, and you cant control their mind, you cant control what they search for. So your perceived problem is actually an opportunity to have 20 ways to describe your 1 Meta description. If the meta description your going after is "Pet Products" the chance that 100% of you audience is going to be searching for that exact term is pretty slim. One customer may search for "Pet Shampoo" yet you want them a customer or at least the opportunity to sell them "Pet Products" as long as they are a vertical, you might sell them something else.

So in my opinion you actually have 20 opportunities to optimize those pages for different keywords and cast a wider net at capturing a customer for your website.

Rachel,

Wow the upper limit! That depends on the browser. Opera can take 190,000 characters before it chokes. Probably a better question would be, help me find a product/path structure that makes sense to me, and my customer.

Also remember SEO points are awarded by the search engines if the product your trying to optimize for is used in the URL. So if your selling brown paper bags, the using the URL www.mydomaine.com\bags\brown-paper-bags is a better choice than 190,000 hard to read letters or symbols.

Hey guys,

Yes make perfect sense. Not sure that this is the best place to ask the question though. A web server IT site would probably be the best place.

What your asking is easily possible if you are the Administrator for your web server. All you will need to do is create another binding in the IIS Administrator panel. Just like you created the domain name example.com and the binding www.example.com you can create a third binding example2.com

Iskender.

Our experience has been YES. Google does follow your Robots.txt file and will ignore indexing those pages. If they have a problem, the problem will disappear.

My concern is, what is causing the "Low-quality" error message? In the long run, wouldn't it be better to correct the page to improve the quality? I look at each page as a way to qualify for a greater number of keywords, hence attracting more attention for your website.

We have had several pages flagged as duplicate content, when we never wanted the duplicate page indexed anyway. Once we included the page in the Robots.txt file the flagged error disappeared.

KempRugeLawGroup.

I'm not the expert, but we have seen the same issue, and the best answer we have discovered is that patience is a virtue.

We have seen SEO results all over the board over the past 11 years we have been working SEO. The best thing to do is NOT chase results. After all the information gathered by a spider and then later reported on is automation at its worst. We are subject to automated spiders doing their thing un monitored, left to their means and not 100% supervised.

Its not until after lots of results or non results a supervisor will reset things and set automation back in motion again. By chasing a single bad result or two will throw your SEO efforts into a tail spin.

My advise? Go get a cup of coffee and wait for the next round to happen.

Hoping for the extra points here, so here goes how we handled the problem.

The solution is a lot simpler than all the thought needed, or used by us to rationalize the answer, and it has been working beautifully. Our Google webmaster tools show constant improvement weekly without us doing any additional work.

We Canonicalized the first paginated results. ".com/productcategory.aspx" not ".com/productcategory.aspx?page=1" so now all pages link their juice back to the main page ".com/productcategory.aspx". GWT doesn't even care about setting the parameter "Page=" And we didn't include the Canonical tag for the product pages, because each product has its own link juice that we want to preserve, so that each product may "Star" as its own as a google result.

So all we did was to include a single canonical tag for the paginated category page and wala the hole solution works in GWT.

Marcy,

I would be Leary of the answer if anyone chose one domain over the other. Perhaps they have something to gain by doing so. I believe the best answer to be "Do your homework". You might start by using SeoMoz to find information about each of the domains you chose.

First go to http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ and check out each of the options you chose. Which has the highest domaine authority? Where are these competing domains going to place your blog? If it is on a "No Follow" page then what good is the blog doing you? Or if your blog is located on a high Domain authority website say 80, but your blog ends up on a page authority of 3 verses on a Domain authority website of 65 but a page authority of 45

Each of the parameters listed on SeoMoz have a high degree of importance to your SE results. Check out each of your blog hosting choices to help you estimate how highly ranked your blog might be.

Si,

Your concern about sending search engines back to the "Root" page is unfounded. Simply the search engines WILL index not only your category page but also your individual product pages.

So if you had a category, lets say "batteries" and that category had 100 different batteries, each category page having 10 of the different batteries. All 10 of the category pages should be Canonicalized to point to the first battery category page. That page is now receiving link juice from the lower 9 pages. But your 100 individual battery product page has its own link juice and they should NOT be directed back to the category page.

Andrew,

Log into your account, now go to >Campaigns.     then >View this Campaign. Scroll down to "Keyword Rankings", then click on >See all Keyword Rankings. Hover over the keyword you would like information for, then 2 icons will appear. Click on the rightmost icon that looks like an EKG chart.

Scroll down to the "Ranking Analysis on" portion of the report. There you will find 34 parameters your keyword and URL are graded on. You will find a button just below and to the left of "Ranking Analysis on" that says "Run Full Report" you get 50 free report per month. So knock yourself out.

Seems that your putting all sorts of work into an issue, and trying to solve it a way that is the most difficult, and still not getting the results you want, which leads you to do even more work.

Try breaking the issue down into several categories: "Do not index", "Please index", and "Group these together"

Now in you Robots.TXT file use the syntax "DISALLOW:  \high-level-path"  which tells the google bot not to index ALL the pages in you site that have "\high-level-path" an any other additional lower domain structure  in their url. So if you were to use DISALLOW: \mydomaine.com, Google will ignore your entire domain.

second issue instead of trying to include all the "Rules" in GWT it would probably be simpler to include all  the URL you definitely want indexed in your "Sitemap.xml" file.  The free program " Soft Plus Gsite crawler" will automatically build this file for you.

Lastly: The Canonical tag is an easy way to tell Google which pages are similar, like your "Page" parameter

404 errors are definitely not what you want.

You loose any link juice that may have been established for that URL. I believe you should look into a free plug-in available for Magento. It can be found with the search term "Canonical". It is easy to use, and is designed specifically for this issue.

Bing, Yahoo, Google, all follow the Canonical directive, and will solve the link juice issue automatically.

We use a different shopping cart, but have implemented the "Canonical" tag in a slightly different way, with the same result.

If you have multiple pages, each with the complaint from a search engine that they have duplicate content, then you should try and look at the page and think why does the search engine consider this duplicate content. Perhaps you have the same template being used for each of the paginated results. This page then is a great candidate to be "Canonicalized".

Canonicalization does not hurt you search engine rankings, think of it like a downtown metro area. Will your business stand out more if you have two small downtown locations, or will it draw more attention if it is a single building that is twice as tall? When you Canonicalize a url the link juice flows from the duplicate page to the single page specified in the Canonical url.

Andrew,

We have seen this issue as well. Turns out its not an issue at all, just an operator error.

The on page results file is a fixed page, and wont change no matter how many times you look at it. The on page results are a snap shot of the results of the time of capture, so you really dont want that page to change so you may referance it at a later date.

So what rour experiencing is a Chaced record report.

To view new results for any changes you have made you have two choices. First and my favorite option is to use the "Ranking Analysis" report page, and click on the "Run A Full Report" button. You have 50 credits, or reports each month on the PRO level. Depending on activity level you will recieve an email message that your report is finished. Second option on the same page is to generate a "Real Time Report" this option is in the drop down menu area. No where near as much information