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donford

WordPress is good at creating duplicate content. I would check at the official site to see if there is way to disable the archiving "tag" feature as it appears to be redundant.

Andreas recommendation would work as well, simply check if you're at an archive tag page, if so then display the meta tag noindex.

You also could do this inside of a robots.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow: /tag/*

This would effectively stop any pages from being crawled when the crawler sees the "tag" directory.

Hope that helps,

Don

donford

Hi Ishwar,

If you have done so yet it would be best to create your own post. Many people pop in here to help others and when they see this topic as answered they may not look at it. Creating your own post will get the most attention.

donford

Hi Nicole,

Okay so the reason I stated that it appears something is improperly installed is due to the fact a page should in general have 1 head tag, 1 title tag, 1 body tag and 1 document type declaration. Your page has the normal ones you'd expect to see plus another set.

In the code I posted above you have an Iframe, which is basically a tag that says display information from a different source. In this case it is Google, which is fine but it should not contain another set of head, title, and body tags along with a document declaration. Google would never do that. This along with my years of experience looking at and installing ad-ons leads me to believe that something was installed incorrectly or at the very least not coded correctly.

As to the misconfiguration issue, I would look first at how my url rewrites are being done as there is no viable reason the first link you posted should rewrite to a url and serve different content than what is suppose to be there. That tells me that the re-writes are being incorrectly handled.

I hope that helps a little,

Don

donford

It looks like something is installed and configured improperly.

You have 2 head tags on the page that shows up from the redirect.

This is actually inside the first head tag complete with a body tag and another doc declaration.

<iframe id="oauth2relay579972146" name="oauth2relay579972146" src="https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/postmessageRelay?parent=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.incipio.com#rpctoken=728288212&forcesecure=1" style="width: 1px; height: 1px; position: absolute; top: -100px;" tabindex="-1">

<html><head><title>title><meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="content-type"><meta content="IE=edge" http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible"><meta content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, minimum-scale=1, maximum-scale=1, user-scalable=0" name="viewport"><script src="https://apis.google.com/js/api.js" type="text/javascript" gapi_processed="true"><script src="https://oauth.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/js/core:rpc:shindig.random:shindig.sha1.js?c=2" type="text/javascript"><script src="https://ssl.gstatic.com/accounts/o/3417060037-postmessagerelay.js">head><body>html>iframe>

That looks like an installation issue.

Now the misconfiguration issue would have to be why the URL re-writes to page but serves up different content.
And lastly I think even if you fix those issues you're still going to get duplicate content warnings because you have very thin content on pages.
Example: Page 1 http://www.incipio.com/cases/tablet-cases/amazon-kindle-cases-sleeves/amazon-kindle-fire-hd-6-cases.html
Example: Page 2 http://www.incipio.com/cases/tablet-cases/amazon-kindle-cases-sleeves/amazon-kindle-fire-hd-7-cases.html
On those 2 pages there is a 1 character difference 6 instead of 7. All the other content (header & footer) and 1 letter difference. Than if you go to the actual product page you have the exact same issue same description to the letter except the one number. Yep, you're going to have a duplicate content problem.
This is something that all e-commerce stores face. You honestly need to write unique content for each and every product you sell. Don't copy & paste stuff from another site like Amazon or the manufacturers site, write your own content.
In summation, I would recheck any modules/ad-ons/plug-ins you installed as one appears to be incorrect. if that doesn't' fix the re-write issue have a developer that is familiar with your ecommerce platform look at this issue. Lastly, you got to have unique content.
Maybe not the best news but I hope it helps
Don

Edit in bullet points to try and make the post a look a little better. These forums don't take kindly to adding code blocks

donford

Hi David,

Rand covered this very topic in a white board friday. Perhaps you may find it helpful and provide insight on what can happen and why he thinks the way he does.

Here is a link for you.

Hope it helps,

Don

donford

There would not be a direct SEO benefit for doing this. There maybe however a benefit in tracking. If you only used that sub-domain for X ad campaign than you would know all traffic from referral sub-domain would be coming from that ad campaign.

There may be some slight non-optimization for doing it this way. Sub-domains are treated as their own domains to a degree, so you are in affect giving the ad-campaign's link to juice to a new domain entirely. Then forwarding that to a specific page. Opposed to just directly giving the link juice an ad campaign can generate to the actual page.

A couple things here depending on the type of ad campaign there may not be any link juice to worry about, like Google's ad words don't pass link juice. However, if you purchased direct advertisement on certain sites you may get some link juice from those ads running.

The second thing is actually a question. What is the purpose of creating a sub-domain to point to a sub directory? Is it just for tracking? Or were you wondering if you could benefit from a sub-domain being treated as a new domain linking to you? If for tracking; I would think there are other tracking methods that could handle referring traffic. If it were in hopes of gaining a new backlink from a different domain than I would say it isn't helpful this way. First because it is simply forwarding to the sub-directory and secondly even it weren't forwarding the link would be considered from the same server and not very helpful anyway.

So in short, no benefit other than a potential way to help with tracking.

Hope that makes sense and helps,

Don

edit some grammar

donford

How are you merchant prices / info being displayed on your site? From your site or using IFrames?

donford

Hi Eslam,

I'm glad you found help while you were here. As your site continues to grow you'll find the Moz tools more and more helpful as well as other site's tools.

I have also always felt one of the best part of Moz is the community. I had questions when I first arrived here 4 years ago and found the help I need from both the members and the staff. It is only fair that I share my knowledge with new members.

Good luck to you,

Don

donford

I agree with Massimillano here.

Three things you should do for all common CMS systems (WP, Joomla, ect..)

First change the admin directory to something else. When doing this you likely have to edit configuration files to point to the new location which is pretty simple.

Second protect admin directory with .htaccess & .htpasswd. There is a nice generator I have used on some of my sites in the past here.

Third create a honeypot / auto IP ban for malicious crawlers or script kiddies. There are several plugins for this if you search the keywords honeypot + cms.

donford

That is a nice post Danny.

For a non-developer the scores seem inline and accurate. If you have an existing site and just want to integrate a shopping tool or platform the list is very much how I would rate them.

If you're a developer and want to self customize Zen or Oscommerce would be the best choices IMO. Many out of the box site software are pretty restrictive and tend to lend their selves to a cookie-cutter look and feel, I'm all for customization.

donford

Well it is April's Fool's day

donford

Fish frys = Link Bait (pun intended)

donford

Perhaps the input is particular...?

Pope's Site with w2 prefix

donford

Hi Errick,

No, pointing a page to itself will not hurt you at all. This is common practice as many pages can have parameters.

So something like

thisfluffysite.com may become

thisfluffysite.com?product=8282&sample=t

Search engines are well aware that this is why people would and do put canonical tags to itself.

In other cases you may have something like the www.thisfluffysite.com and www.thisfluffysite.com/ and no www thisfluffysite.com etc... all these would be pointing to the one in the canonical tag. In general you would want to fix this issue with 301 re-writes but in some cases that isn't possible so tag to the right version is actually how you handle it.

I have found some crawl reports tell you about it, but that is more of a curtsey than anything else.

Hope this makes sense and helps,

Don

donford

I really appreciate all of you taking the time to tell me about your experiences.

I am only sorry I could only mark 3 of you as good answers. All your input was welcomed and helpful to me in one way or another.

I hope to continue to see you on the boards, maybe just not as much.

Don

donford

I looked at Magneto many years ago and I think it was one that was kind of spun off of oscommerce. If that is true there is a plug-in called easy populate that lets you do just as Monica suggested. Even if not Magneto is so widely used now there has to be a plugin for it. Easy populate allowed you to download or upload files via CSV files which can be easily made in Excel or OpenOffice.

Hope it helps,

Don

donford

I'm curious how many of you all work at home or mostly at home either through an company or freelance. Or are most of you employed at a corporation?

My company was recently bought by a very large global company. Recently I found out that all the SEO and web design is contracted through outside sources. With the headquarters in Europe, this being my primary job function I kinda feel well you know.... down..

Websites I put my life into for the last 7 years are going to be handed over to a corporation to do with whatever they feel they should. I know they were never really mine, but when you spend so much of your life to making them the best you can, so much so to attract the attention of a global billion dollar company, you should feel great right? But I feel like my dog just died.

I don't have a bad impression of the company but the shift of moving me to the IT guy has begun. Normal web updates I would have done, are now being pushed aside. I don't hate IT I like helping others, but I really loved being able to make a difference through the web.

Now I'm left contemplating my future, big corporations have so much bs, I just don't feel comfortable. I would really appreciate you all giving me your thoughts and tell me about any similar experiences you have had in your life.

Cheers,

Don

donford

Brendan's advice is pertinent if your are specifically buying a link, but there is a huge caveat to this information. It is not uncommon for other services such as Yahoo Local, or lead generating resources to provide a service of which includes a link to your website. In these cases you're not actually buying a link but a service.

Google has indeed cracked down on directory type listing websites because they really offer no value to anybody on the web. However when services are attached, such as lead generation, technical advice, consulting etc.. often times a link to your site is part of the service and shouldn't be lumped into calling it a purchased link.. per-say.

Hope this makes sense,

Don

donford

To follow up on what Keszi has said, it is not uncommon for this value to fluctuate from update to update. The reason is because there are so many things that factor into this score. This is further complicated by the fact that the crawl will not crawl every domain every time. This means you may see less / more "linking domains", and "linking c-blocks" which are factors in DA and PA.

I know when you see a 10% fluctuation you may get a little worried. However, when DA is in the 20's the fluctuation will be more prominent than if you were up in the 40's. Reason being is it is exponentially harder to reach higher domain authorities, which means that there will be a larger swab of linking domains and less likely to change much if a few are missed on each crawl.

Hope this helps,

Don

donford

You make a very good point. It is kind of like a little reward for those like yourself who have been proactive and adaptive without being told to be. Kudos,

Don

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