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The "force" to https could be handled in many ways so I can't say if it is a 301 redirect or not. But you can check: http://httpstatus.io/ .

http and https indicate two different URLs. That I know of, Google doesn't just automatically assume a one-to-one relationship between them and choose a canonical version for you if both are available to index. In other words, if users end up at https just go ahead and redirect straight to https. Really, if you're site is https you should just forget http even exists as an option. Even an internal text link with the wrong protocol can throw up errors in some browsers.

For what it's worth, I just switched one of my sites over and got burned by listening to Google once again. All went well from a technical perspective, except that revenue dropped by about 30% because Adsense is no longer showing certain types of ads (probably re targeting).

Hello Inevo,

Most of the time when this happens it's just because Google hasn't gotten around to recrawling the pages and updating their index after seeing the new robots meta tag. It can take several months for this to happen on a large site. Submit an XML sitemap and/or create an HTML sitemap that makes it easy for them to get to these pages if you need it to go faster.

I had a look and see some conflicting instructions that Google could possibly be having a problem with.

The paginated version ( e.g. http://www.vita.no/duft?p=2 ) of the page has a rel canonical tag pointing to the first page (e.g. http://www.vita.no/duft/ ). Yet it also has a noindex tag while the canonical page has an index tag. And each page has its own unique title (Side 2  ... Side 3 | ...) . I would remove the rel canonical tag on the paginated pages since they probably don't have any pagerank worth giving to the canonical page. This way it is even more clear to Google that the canonical page is to be indexed, and the others are not to be - instead of saying they are the same page. The same is true of filter pages: http://www.vita.no/gavesett/herre/filter/price-400-/ .

I don't know if that has anything to do with your issue of index bloat, but it's worth a try. I did find some paginated pages in the index.

There also appears to be about 520 blog tag pages indexed. I typically set those to be noindex,follow.

Also remove all paginated pages and any other page that you don't want indexed from your XML sitemaps if you haven't already.

At least for the filter pages, since /filter/ is its own directory, you can use the URL removal tool in GWT. It does have a directory-level removal feature. Of course there are only 75 of these indexed at this moment.

I have a question for you. Which would you rather click on...

Buy Cheap Used Car Parts for Toyota, Dodge, Nissan, Jeep, Cadillac and Other Cars, Trucks and Vans at Used Car Part Outlet!

OR

Used Car Part Outlet: Deeply Discounting Auto Parts Since 1976

Google says they treat domain-wide redirects like that as 404 errors instead of 301s. How likely they are to do this depends on several factors, I think, such as:

• Are the two domains topically related?

• With respect to the domain names

• With respect to the topic of last known content

• Are the redirects all going to one landing page (i.e. home) or does each page redirect to a specific landing page?

• Is the content on the new URL the same content as the old URL?

I remember asking about this exact tactic circa 2008 and it was considered "busted" (as in Google knows and it's not worth it) even back then. I wouldn't do it.

Send me the URL if someone else hasn't already gotten back to you via PM. I can have a look for you. Either way, please let us know the current status of this question.

That sounds like a reasonable approach. If you wanted to be extra careful you could also ad a robots follow,noindex tag to the header of the paginated pages since they all have very little unique content to add.

A third option, which I would only use if people are linking into those paginated pages (very rare), is to rel canonical the paginated pages to the first page.

I would always nofollow any affiliate links. You can send them through an internal redirect first, which can be blocked in the robots.txt file. That's mainly if you just don't want them to know it's an affilaite link at all, and helps with internal tracking.

Either way, don't give Amazon.com followable affiliate links.

I think Google is looking for more extreme situations than the one you have. The content is well-written, useful and isn't so far down the page that someone isn't going to see it. However, I don't have to tell you that it's going to take a LOT to compete in that niche.

Good luck.

By DW do you mean DreamWeaver or DemandWare?

I wouldn't build an XML sitemap in Dreamweaver, and I'm sure DemandWare would have a built-in tool for this.

You can go to Google and search for "Free XML Sitemap Generator" or something similar and find a few good options. I use the one from Audit My PC from time to time still, but there are many others. The one below does include images and video, but I don't know if they segment them. Worth a try: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ .

Kyle,

It sounds like you've put a lot of thought into this and have come to the same conclusion that I would recommend, which is to prune those pages out of the index using a robots noindex,follow meta tag.

I think you're good to go with that strategy.

Hello Khi5,

I can't say with 100% certainty, but I feel confident that Google looks at both. I'm not sure about other search engines. Specifically, "page layout" algorithm needs to render the html/CSS - and increasingly javascript - in order to determine if there are too many ads "above the fold". Google also used to render the page to provide "instant previews" of each website in the SERPs.

In other words, the all-seeing eye of Google knows if your "unique content" shows up above or below the fold, or even 6,000 pixels off-screen to the left.

Is there a redirect in the .htaccess file? Sometimes this file is hidden.

I certainly know the feeling.

Hello RoxBrock,

I have verified markup on https sites/urls with that tool so I'm not sure that's the issue. If the code you put above is the entirety of your markup, it looks to me like you've left out a few things, such as:

The full URL to the Schema itemtype. You have //schema.org/organization but I would put http://schema.org/Organization.

YOUR CLIENT ORGANIZATION

Perhaps this could be the cause for your markup not validating with Google? Please try and let us know how it goes.

I would simply block the /filters/ folder for this client since those URLs aren't indexed (due to the canonical tag) and probably have zero links to contribute to the pagerank of the canonical page. All they're doing from a search engine's perspective is eating up crawl budget.

I understand about the color filter, however. There are several options:

1. Don't worry about it. Right now it's not helping anyway since the color filter URLs rel canonical to the main category URL. If you are seeing traffic from search engines going directly into a color filter URL as a landing page from the SERPs then the canonical tag probably isn't working. If you're not seeing them as organic search landing pages, then what difference does it make, traffic-wise, if you block them?
2. Create sub-categories for color if the pages are that important.
3. Force the color filter to show up first in the URL and exempt it from the robots.txt block...

allow: ///filters/color/
disallow: ///filters/

I'm not sure about what Travis is trying to say. Sounds like he's having a bad Google day.

You mention they're driving traffic, but it is highly doubtful that any of that traffic will convert to leads. Have you been tracking the lead form on that page? I would be a little concerned about receiving a lot of links from web cam directories, or links about surfing, to a marketing company website. It's just too unrelated. However, as long as these only represent a small part of your overall backlink profile (think single digit percentages) you will probably be OK.

They are changing from what old format to what new format? Sometimes, if there is logic to the URL structure, you can handle thousands of redirects with only one line of code called a regular expression.

Cyto,

The Google Webmaster Tools parameter handling, in my opinion, is often best left up to Google. In other words, I rarely change it. Instead, I try to fix the issue itself. In your case, here is what I would advise:

Instead of using a parameter in the URL, use cookies or hidden divs to change the content on the page to the different size. Have a look at most major online retailers. You can select a size or color from the drop down and it never changes the URL.

If this is not possible, I recommend the following:

Ensure the rel = "canonical" tag on all of those pages references the canonical version (e.g. /product-alpha-size1) which will consolidate the link-related metrics like PageRank into the one page.

Hello ReniaEats,

Googlebot and Google's algorithms are much more sophisticated than those at Moz. If you are sure that the keywords are only used a couple of times on the page, with the exception of templated items like those in the menu, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Just write in a language that you think will be compelling to visitors and don't be too concerned with adjusting keyword density on the page.

With that said, you may also want to look at the code just to make sure there is no hidden text. Just do a CTL+F (Find) search when viewing the source code and type your keywords to see where they show up outside of the navigation/menu.

If you wanted to share the site I'm sure someone could have a look and let you know if there is anything to be concerned about.

I don't think the page has any external links. Amazon.com has different ranking signals than Google. For instance, reviews and ratings (both quantity and quality) are a huge factor. If you'd like to learn more about it, check out this great post - http://moz.com/blog/amazon-seo-organic-search-ranking-factors by  Nathan Grimm.

The best way to know what they're doing on FB is probably just to subscribe to them and pay attention to their page. See if you spot any FB ads showing up in the sidebar, or re-targeting after visiting one of their pages.