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I think your problem of duplicated content is also due the pagination your categories (or no categories search result) have. Checking the second url you gave http://www.frenchentree.com/activity-holidays-france/home.asp?order=Sort1&option=&CategoryFilter=&webname=activity-holidays-france&webname=activity-holidays-france&pagenumber=1 and it "second" page http://www.frenchentree.com/activity-holidays-france/home.asp?order=Sort1&option=&CategoryFilter=&webname=activity-holidays-france&pagenumber=2 I noticed that you have the meta robots in the head... therefore the bots see and index all these paginated content, that is a substantial duplicate of page 1. I suggest you to start adding the noindex,follow meta robots in these pages. About other duplication issues... give me time, as your site is not so easy

Hi,

duplicate content per se is not cause of penalizations, but it penalizes the performance of your eCommerce in the rankings.

Infact:

1. Search Engines would rank one of the duplicate pages and not the one you would like your site would rank for (domain.com/categories)
2. People could link to a duplicate page and not the the main one, so wasting link juice
3. All the duplicated pages consume you crawl budget, therefore you could have your site indexed for duplicates but not for more important pages.

I suggest you to read this "Learn SEO" article http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content and this post by Ben Jarriola that can give you solutions to this problem: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical

Hope this help you.

Ciao

Beware with LSI, which is mostly a myth.

As Bill Slawski wrote in Inbound.org back in 2014:

_Latent Semantic indexing was invented and patented in 1990 before there was the web. _

_It was developed to help index small (less than 10,000 documents) databases of documents that didn't change much (like the Web does). _

_There have been a number of companies that started selling LSI Keyword generation tools that promised that they could help identify synonyms and words with the same or similar meaning. _

Where those fail is that the LSI process requires access to the database (of documents) in question to calculate which words are synonyms - and the only people with access to Google's database to do that kind of analysis (which isn't possible anyway since Google's index is much too big and changes much too frequently) is Google.

A much better metric is TF-IDF, albeit always being conscient that it is still a metric... not the bibie.

Never ever rely only on GTranslate for International SEO. Simply don't.

Hi Peter,

right now I see only Six Pack both (see image for example) in google.com/.it/.es

But I swear I saw also a classic 1 sitelink yesterday, even though with the six pack format (no image, sorry)

g8D5m

Hi!

My suggestion is to never eliminate the canonical tag, as it could also prevent scrapers' stealing content without attribution.

Alex is right... cannibalization is one the worst thing a site can commit.

Personally, the KWs I focus on in the homepage are (or is) the query that most define the subject of the site itself. In your case, designer glasses is surely a good choice, as you are not focusing on any brand in particular. Eventually, but I am sure you know it, I would use a semantically related second query in the title to reinforce the main KW.

I have to follow the line of David and Sai: turn that site into an UGC driven one.

Brainstorming here:

Put professionals and potential clients in contact inside your site, using a meritocratic chart list, were the the highest evaluation is from the clients the highest is the ranking. Evaluation based over tips and tricks and actionable help to answers made by the "clients"

In your case you first must have clear what are your objectives.

In fact, if you are aiming to target all the french speaking persons independently of where they are (as in your hipothesis), then you should not geotarget your subfolders at all, but rely on the hreflang mark up:

Hi Osanda,

Gareth is right and you, sorry to tell it, are wrong.

1. You can geo target specific sub folders on Google Webmaster Tools, as it can be done for generic domain names (.com, .net...) and subdomains (sk.domain.com...)
2. In order to avoid duplicate content, you can use the rel alternate hreflang tag or in the header section of the pages of your site or directly in the sitemap xml. In case of exact duplicates, then, you can also use the rel=canonical in order to say to Google what of the exact duplicated pages it should present in the index.

Said that, in order to geotarget a site, you should also think about getting links from the targeted country. If you are received a lot of links from not Sri Lanka sites, then other local sites (maybe with country level domain name) will rank better than you because they have important links from other local sites.

Personally I would not do a 301, as Donnie have said. With the 301, also the backlinks will be redirected. Actually one of the problems Wil Reynolds had with SeerInteractive was because of old backlinks to his previous domain name, then 301 to the actual one.

If you are thinking of creating a new site as a solution in order to avoid the penalization for unnatural links, then - during the migration - contact the "not-crappy" sites which linked to your old one, and inform them that you're changinge domain name and, therefore, you are asking them if they may update your link. 99% the link will be updated.

Obviously, all the link equity the "unnatural links" are passing to your site will disappear, which means that a loss in ranking in quite sure, but not at the same level a penalization could cause.

Another solution should be to try to quit all the unnatural backlinks but maintaining the same site. I don't know if this can be possible: if the domain is http://www.simplastics.com/ (taken from the email you use to register in SEOmoz) from OSE is see exact match links from comments, maybe a signature, and from blog related to politics (not quite related indeed).

Said that, and because the site has also other on page issue (i.e.: domain canonicalization), maybe to create a new site is the best decision.

The second option is surely the best one. Not just because your visitors will thank you (I mean, they find you for B and you are redirecting them to A obliging them to start an internal search), but also is what Google itself suggest here: https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=83105&hl=en

With shopping cart do you mean literally the shopping cart an user have while shopping in an eCommerce? If it is so they are not seen and crawled, therefore no duplication issues are existing.

If you mean that different eCommerce sites can have identical content one each other... yes, if they both use the same product description. In that case, if they do not have done anything to add value to that description (i.e.: ugc content like reviews, comments, testimonials), then Google with see them as substantially duplicates.

If the duplication is related to just one site (i.e.: product in different categories and bad urls'architecture), then Google will filter the product pages and show only the most relevant... but if the duplication issue is affecting the highest percentage of the site (and, also, the descriptions are thin and identical to others sites ones)... then the risk of being pandasized is quite big, as it happened with the last version of Panda, the 2.5

A still good rank checker is the free seobook one for firefox. On the other hand, I find extremely useful the keyword tool by SeoGADGET.co.uk that between it's features have one that show you the ranking of all the queries listed in Analytics and that have generated at least 1 organic visit.

The URLs must be absolute, not relative

href="http:www.domain.com/fr/" and not href="/fr/"

If yo want to use the subfolder version, it is perfectly possible and it is a good idea because all the links built for all the countries' subfolder are going to benefit all the other subfolders.

But be sure to do these things:

1. In GWT geotarget every subfolder to its corresponding country doing so: once you’ve added your main site (e.g. domain.com) and verified it in Webmaster Tools, simply register a new site in the same account – but set the new site as domain.com/pe (or whichever your root subfolder is named). You can use that account to geo-target to Peru – the option is in ‘settings’ in the left-hand panel. You can repeat the same process for as many folders as you want to geo-target.
2. About the Information Arquitecture, I don't like what you plan to do, as you are creating an uselless level. Instead do this:
   1. domain.com (your main country market)
   2. domain.com/es-mx/ (Mexico)
   3. domain.com/es-pe/ (Peru)
   4. domain.com/es-ar/ (Argentina)
3. Use the rel alternate hreflang="x". Be aware to use the canonical only if really the content is identical. I suggest you to read this post by DejanSEO about the use or not of the rel canonical in conjuntion with the rel alternate hreflang > dejanseo.com.au/canonical-vs-hreflang/
4. Remember all the classic ToDos of international SEO (currencies, phone numbers, addresses, local flavours of the language... as you know that Spanish in Argentina is not exactly the same to the one spoken in Mexico...)
5. Remember to create sub-link building campaigns for any of the countries you are targeting, in order to give to any of your country subfolders.

First question: how long ago did you do the redirect 301?

This is not a stupid question. In fact Google will show the change of urls in the serps (and therefore the new snippet) just after a certain time.

That does not mean that it is not indexing your new pages (try a search with their URL to check this), simply the old ones are still present in the index.

Irritating, yes...

In your case my suggestion is to use this kind of URL structure for product pages: www.domain.com/product This way, independently of the categories it is part of, users and search engines will see just one url and you will avoid inopportune duplication.

Hola Sara,

apart AWR, there are tons of tools in the market that let you monitor rankings for Spanish speaking countries.

Aleyda Solis just released a new über useful site all dedicated to SEO Tools, and at this link you can find a quite comprehensive list of rank tracking tool.

Of the ones Aleyda mentions, I personally used Authority Labs and PositionLy, which both are great tools, very powerful, offering a nice understandable layout and - obviously - they let you monitor rankings in every country.

If you with alternate mean rel="alternate" hreflang", then your intuition is correct.

More over, the rel="canonical" of the URLs with the hreflang implement MUST be always self-referential, in order to no create conflict with the rel="alternate" hreflang (i.e.: Snippet identical to one site, URL of another site)...