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Hello, I just went through an issue like this. Are you using WordPress? Also, Do you have any SEO plug-ins installed?

Hi! Potentially you can, but it probably would be better to implement it in your current sitemap structure. As it will give you a better flow of working with this. Martijn.

I'd also choose the best page (i.e. with highest traffic) and canonicalize the other pages to show Google you know about the duplicate content. Then use noindex, follow but not for all pages - you want to get found in search somehow. Though, employees probably know about the discounts and have some other channel how to get to the page.

If the site has low authority and hundreds of backlinks, it's probably a spam site. You're wasting your time to reach the webmaster to get the links removed. They are not linking to you to help you, but to help themselves by association with a high authority site.

Hi, It is hard to advice if not having all detailed facts. Said this. What about sending those affected pages with a 301 to a new page "site.com/redirect" with a noindex.nofollow? That way, you "tell the crawlers" those spam are not important nor relevant to your website. I implemented twice already; so far so good. The websites have recovered SERPs positions almost instantly, as well as the DA has slowly improved. Some complete redirects from http to https, or to a new domain have unexpected "secondary effects". Although, I noticed that only the Moz Link Research & Back Link Checker have noticed and showed the spam links. Despite Google almost ban the website, vanished from all SERPs, the console never showed the issues at all! Please, update whenever you have news. Mª Verónica B.

The simple answer may be that users enter through organic traffic, add something to their cart, then go to some other tabs or do some comparison shopping, the session times out (after 30 minutes is standard) and so when they come page to the cart page directly they start a new session but they're still tagged as coming from organic. David Sottimano has a really good write up on this Deepcrawl post: "If a user enters a site via Google / Organic, allows the session to time out, and then navigates to a non-indexable page, that non-indexable page will be credited as Google / Organic Landing page. I had been skeptical about this for a long time, even though experts like Mike Sullivan answered me on Quora, I had to test this many times to make sure this was actually the case – I also had a former colleague double check my test results (thanks Tom Capper)." Another post on Jfet.io discusses the same idea: "My guess?  People are adding items to their cart, then doing comparison shopping or coupon hunting.  This process lasts over 30 minutes (maybe they wander off to lunch or for a coffee break), and when they return to the browser with your site’s cart open, a new session starts.  In that new session, the landing page is the cart and it’s direct traffic.  Because GA rolls with the last non-direct source, it’s attributed to search/email/whatever." I'd recommend testing out all the action items on both of those posts and see if their solutions work. My take is that it's probably people revisiting their cart after a timeout session! Let me know what you find out.

spot on Eric!

I'm gonna have to second EGOL on this. Sounds like you've got a pretty sweet thing going.

If you are sure you want to downrank the old site, you can contact the webmasters linking to it and tell them about your new site. Telling them that there is no content on the old site should also help.

Interesting - hopefully it's all fixed, but definitely let us know if it changes again.

Awesome, thank you!

I wrote this over 2 years ago http://www.flyingpointdigital.com/2013/04/16/google-thinks-your-title-tags-and-meta-descriptions-are-not-good-enough/

You can't set clientsite.com as the canonical home page, because it's not, FPD. The very definition of "canonical" means it is the actual URL that displays the page content. A URL cannot be canonical if it redirects, is no-indexed, etc. In your case, using clientsite.com as the canonical would badly damage your ranking capability, because you'd essentially be telling the search engines to rank a page that has no content and essentially doesn't even exist. Clientsite.com/store is the canonical homepage for your site, and should be set as such. The only way to change this would be to use a system that doesn't require the redirecting of the domain to the subdirectory. (And if you're sticking with the current system, make certain that the redirect being used is a 301, not a 302.) Hope that helps? Paul

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.

I would just set the rel=canonical to the main categories. It would reduce duplicate content, send more strength to the main categories and as you said, people would probably prefer to see the full product list as opposed to just new arrivals on your site (so you don't need that to appear in search).

Just to add, if you block URLs in robots.txt they wont actually get deindexed. They will be for all intents and purposes be blocked (wont cause duplicate content issues etc) but they will drop into the omitted results: _In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 13 already displayed._If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included. And will look like this in the SERPS (see attachment).If you want them removed from the SERPs you will need to use the robots NOINDEX meta tag, or use GWMT as William advised. The disallow entry you posted will block these pages, as long as they all start with that way. Although you don't actually need the trailing wild card as that gets ignored, you can just leave it open. Google robots.txt specs QqCCH1J.png

What cms are you using? I have a module that I developed that is free for Prestashop if you are using it. What it does is lets you give your search pages a static name. You have to specifically define terms, so it does not automatically make a landing page for each term. It also lets you do title's, meta descriptions, and keywords for the pages. The way the code works might prove a useful framework for adapting it to what ever platform you are using. The git is at https://github.com/Prestashop-Modules/searchterm  there is an explanation of how it works at http://blog.dh42.com/search-pages-landing-pages/