Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
That would be considered a paid links and not one you have earned because the article is written by yourself.
If you nofollow the link then that would be OK.
Google is clamping down everywhere they do not want people to do this sort of thing and acquire a dofollow link as a result.
They want you to go to the editor and tell them you have a wonderful business and if they like you business they may want to include it in some way in an article/blog to their customers.
I have a question: what is the difference between a local version of Google vs. the default Google in regards to search results?
Many factors, the results in google.com can be a real mix of international listings as well as local. The location of backlinks to a website can force Google to rank a site in that region.
Lets say you have a .mx site but have lots of links from UK websites because it is about holidays in mexico then you could rank well in the google.co.uk it would be more likely however if the domain was a .com as Google gives more universal power to those types of TLD's
The domain is a .mx site, so wouldn't it make more sense that this page would rank higher on google.com.mx instead of the default Google site
Not if the above is true, also if you have a less of a local feel to your content you might rank better among a group of similar sites that are more broad in nature.
Also, what determines whether a user gets automatically directed to a local Google version vs. staying on the default one?
There are a lot of factors involved, IP address and Google's ability to determine where you are.
The language you use and even the spelling of words, for instance in the UK vs US it could be color vs colour
There are lots of answers to your questions but those are just a few to give you an idea of the 200+ algorithm factors for ranking in such circumstances.
Ahh I sent you a link to a site that explores those links and creates a list, I thought you needed it to build a list.
The tool I use for my browser is SearchStatus by Quirk, its for firefox and it does some amazing stuff
Has anyone experienced this before? YES
Why would Google not honor a canonical tag if it is set correctly?
The canonical tag is a recommendation, Google will make its on decisions on whether to use it or not. If you do not want it to be indexed why not put a noindex meta tag there as well. This will make sure that you get the desired result.
Google is seeing enough difference between the pages that it thinks those pages offer more value for the term searched.
Does that make sense?
its not that it is impossible but the results you see may not reflect what others see.
With cookies set on your computer and with IP and language playing such a strong role it will difficult to see accurate results without forcing it with things like gl=US or something like that.
Do you have a local listing for your address? That will help a lot as well as marking your site up with rich snippets like schema.org
If your description tag is only 10 characters, then Google algo will not find it useful and will replace it with what it thinks is best. It can do this for your Title tags too. Sometimes using Dmoz.
OK here are the issues, stop using hyphens (-) and stop using pipes (|) these is seen as an attempt to stuff words in just for search engines. Google thinks that this will not be a good read for its users and will rename them.
Also please keep in mid that Google does change title tags based on the search query sometimes to give you a better click through rate. They are testing things all the time.
Also make sure your meta tags are the correct lengths for best results, some you have are very short and just one word not great for SEO and others are too long.
1. You could simply use it as a Vanity URL
2. You could look at using it to expand in other geographical locations and apply the hreflang attribute to it which will use the power of the original domain to rank it almost immediately
the only issue I see would be on the category page if the brand is repeated a lot of times, this will not look good from the Panda Algo.
Feel free to send me an link here or in private and I can take a look.
Very common.
There are a bunch of simple solutions.
First you can look at putting some php at the top of the page that looks to see if "cat" has a value. if so then put an if clause in the meta section. if cat not empty show meta noindex etc...
Another option is for you to go into webmaster tools and change the "URL Parameters" in the "Crawl" menu. Select the option that best fits.
I have had to do this for many sites and seen great results once sorted out.
You can also use the "Remove URLs" tool under the "Google Index" menu to remove large sections quickly if they all fall under a specific pattern or path.
Send me a private message so I can take a look.
I have run into this same problem in multiple industries.
John Mueller at Google has answered my question multiple times on this subject saying that internal duplicate content is NOT an issue and especially if you can justify it being there a manual review of sorts would not identify a problem. Google will make a judgement call on what the best page to serve is by the users query.
In your case you are doing what should be done, the least helpful page is the actual product page and in many cases in the past I have no indexed them.
This same problem arises for many industries, real estate, office space, used cars etc...
Don't worry about nofollow links.
The only time to be concerned is if there is a possibility they could be changed to dofollow in the future or that they exists as dofollow links elsewhere on the site.
There is no problem listing them in your disavow file, sometimes its safer to do this for a poor quality domain. Removing them is not necessary, it may speed the recovery process up by removing them if they were dofollow but as they are nofollow I would not bother.
Yes, actually John Muller at Google said this is a wise thing to do.
First ask yourself is there really any benefit in your users going to any of those pages?
Duplicate content is not a major issue and can be wildly ignored but many blogs go over the top with tags etc.. Making Google's life harder when trying to make a decision on what content to show for results.
I personally went as far as removing the front end of wordpress completely and coded a very quick and simple version of the front end myself, so it still gets managed using the wordpress interface like a content management system.
Works a treat and the response from Google SERPS was great. Also reduces the amount of pages Google needs to crawl over and over to look for changes. This will see Google returning more frequently to the key pages looking for updates.
This is a Panda issue.
Google has said many times with affiliate sites that use the same content that if they do a better job than the original site it will rank them. So its not all bad when you look at it from that point of view.
However, Google loves unique content and will do its best to rank sites first that have the unique content. I have a business in the office space industry and a few years back we used to aggregate office apace listings which were shared amongst 30+ sites. The display of these listings would be different for many searches but the content was the same as all the other sites. This slowly put us in a PANDA DEVALUATION (there is no panda penalty).
After re-writing them with our clients we saw a significant change once the content had be re-crawled.
So it can have a great effect. If Google starts to see that large parts of your site are duplicate content it will start to question the authority you have in your industry.
Could you offer and incentive to your customers to write something unique? And also maybe inform your users not to copy and paste their own content on your site as this could affect them negatively in Google?
If you are an authority could you tell users that if you want to be listed it must be unique? Or if its a paid service have an ad on service for a few bucks where you write a professional description? Might become a nice additional income?
Just a few ideas 
OK, so as I expected there would be nobody able to answer this question
So I asked John Mueller at Google!
I got a very precise answer.
widget
A div with an onclick is nofollow. so this would be a bad idea if you want internal pagerank to flow.
Currently the only way to make your clickable areas functional and Google friendly is this way below:
You can edit you htacess file and do something like this
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.yourdomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301]
RewriteRule ^index.php$ / [R=301]
This will make sure that no url loads without www if it does it will 301 redirect it to www also you want to make sure that your homepage / index page is not duplicated so, have that one 301 redirect to the root as well.
We decided that it was worth a large investment as we would own the content ourselves and not worry in the future about anyone claiming ownership to the content as google gets stricter. So we re wrote half a million words!
You run into a number of issues by having these pages indexed.
1. Lots of internal duplicate content, Google has said this is not a problem and the they will serve up the best result. But it can trigger Panda issues.
2. The content always changes so you will confuse Googlebot and have issues ranking for specific terms for any period of time. (your SERPS would fluctuate like crazy or trigger a quality algorithm)
Some ideas:
One thing you could try is loading all the matches on to a page and only show the top 3 matches with an option to reveal more and mark all the code up with a schema. This way the content will always be on the page and able to be crawled by Googlebot.
Another option is to not index these pages at all and create static pages for each item. But this defeats the object of what you are trying to rank for.
Serving up random content is always going to be an issue for Googlebot, but more and more webmasters have responsive designs that hide and show content based on clickable actions on pages. Googlebot indexes all the content but is smart at working out what is also visible to the user and giving preference to it.
Another option is to host the same content on the main site and use the canonical tag on them. But the I would do as Devanur Rafi suggests, replicate the content on the new site and 301 redirect to the old pages. All the links gained will follow the 301 so the power will transfer over. I would leave the old site up permanently otherwise any links pointing to the old domain will be lost when the 301 redirect no longer exists. Another option is to go to webmaster or some other tool get a list of those links and contact the webmaster to let them know of the site move and to change the links to the new domain.