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Basically, you are asking 2 questions. Is it important to redirect, and what do we redirect to?

1. It is important to redirect old URL's, but only if those URL's are indexed. You see, people may still click on them, as they will still be in the search engines for a while. Of course, if the URL's are not indexed, you don't have to redirect anything. You are correct to use 301 redirects, and you will lose some link juice but it's better than nothing!

2. The best URL is an URL with relevant keywords. Relevant, so 'catalog' does not need to be in the URL. Your example of http://www.k9electronics.com/designer-dog-beds/ is the best URL. It's good because people will understand what your page is about, and search engines like that.

Good luck!

I guess that is the only solution then. I don't quite understand why Google picks that information to show in the SERP text (as well as the 170+ items) but we'll try disabling the Smarty debugging when we're not actively using it. I hope it helps!

Ah thanks Alan! It looks like there is a problem in the code that generates the breadcrumb URLs. We will get that fixed asap, whicih should lower the number of duplicate content warnings considerably.

But if the ads are unique (just not unique enough) why would you want to use a canonical tag? You'd use that to show Google which is the prefered page but in this case, is there such a thing?

Making the pages unique will be difficult, your best bet is to try and add and/or emphasize the information that is unique.

Maybe you could change the way people place ads. Not just have the same kind of information such as make, model etc., but ask people to write a little something about how they got the car, what kind of maintenance they've had done, why they are selling it. If they write all this in their own words, you will have more unique content. Plus you can tell people that adding this information helps sell their car quicker.

We have an international webshop with languages in the URLs. Our URLs are now set up as follows:

http://thermalunderwear.eu/eng/category/product

Now, we know that there's some kind of strange redirect problem causing problems with our indexation, this is a technical issue that should be fixed soon. But whether this is the cause of some other strange problems, I do not know. I'd be happy with any help/advice/tips.

1. The SEOmoz site crawler starts at http://thermalunderwear.eu. This currently does not yet redirect to http://thermalunderwear.eu/eng like we want it to, but all the links on the page do include the default language code. So all links on the page are http://thermalunderwear.eu/eng/category etc. However, apart from those URLs, the site crawler finds many URLs in the form http://thermalunderwear.eu/category/product etc., so not including the language variable. Where it gets these I do not know, and since these URLs dont exist and the webshop simply shows the homepage, these URLs all have 50+ duplicate titles/content. Why oh why?

2. If I do a Google search for indexed URL's with English as language, I get many results formatted like this:

Coldpruf Enthusiast mens thermal shirt - Thermal wear for men ...
thermalunderwear.eu/eng/men/coldpruf-enthusiast-mens-thermal-shirt 170+ items – Fine-ribbed longsleeve thermal shirt men from Enthusiast ... {$SCRIPT_NAME} eng/men/coldpruf-enthusiast-mens-the {$ajax_url} http://thermalunderwear.eu/ajax

What are those variables doing there? It looks like it's taking something from our Smarty debug console, which is hidden but still active in the source code, but also the ajax URL which is in a completely different location. What is Google trying to show here?