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Thanks for the response! Yes, we do want to implement the rel=canonical tag but since we are using Magento to build on we are having some issues. One of the issues is that we have the shirts page with sort features: www.mysite.com/shirts/shoby/size-m and then the tshirts page: www.mystie.com/shirts/tshirts/shoby/size-m So the problem we're running into is trying to figure out how to write a script to implement rel=canonical so that for the first URL, everything after shirts canonicalizes to the /shirts/ URL, and then for the second URL everything after tshirts canonicalizes back to the /shirts/tshirts/ URL without the /shirts/ rel=canonical overriding it.

Hi Dylan, All evidence is that if the URL is not wrapped in an <a href="">tag, then it won't be crawled.</a> <a href=""></a> <a href="">Matt Cutts has discussed this and not surprisingly suggested that it would not be a good thing if these URL's were crawlable. If that happened it would be open slather on adding your link to any user generated content such as forums, comments etc. You can view the video here</a> Will Google use non-link references? There is a post from SEOmofo that suggests in certain circumstances, google may accidentally make links crawlable if it strips out <text area="">code, but once again, the URL's in his demonstration are actually wrapped in the a href tag. You can find the post here</text> So, as far as I am aware, there is no evidence that URL's wrapped in a SPAN tag would be crawled - but as you will see, Matt emphasises that Google doesn't like to ever take anything "off the table". Hope that helps, Sha

It seems as though you're referring to sitelinks. I'm referring to one link with bullet points, all from the same page. Ic5LA

Ok, thanks! I had read that blog post and received good information from it, but I was hoping to hear some newer tactics that were floating around since the post was written in 2007.

You do lose some, but I believe most of the link juice will flow if you 301 redirect the page. I'd probably do what YouON suggests and leave the page intact with useful links to elsewhere on your site.

I would get them in the shopper mindset and transfer it to the street. Ask them, do they go into a retail outlet and ask to see the '82374 in category?' as the shop assistant looks at them with a blank expression, or do they ask for a 'womens rain jacket'. When you bring it back to real life examples, I find customers understand what you are trying to convince them. So, why should it be different on line, if you want any rank benifit from the url it needs to have your key words in it. If you are targetting 'womens rain jacket' and you get a mention in a blog etc a anchor of 'www.company.com/womens/jackets/rain' still includes the keywords where as the cookie cutter url does not. It also makes the site look more professionally created than a DIY cookie cutter version. Brent makes good points and you will see a inital wave ride in rank but it should bounce back higher. I like to also add Canonical head tags to make the new origin of the site's pages. I would also prepare a new sitemap and submit it, if there are a lot of pages, make the move in groups, with a resubmit after each group. We have had pages bounce back much quicker than 30 days too, some in as little as a week.

I usually do one of these: put the duplicate content in an iframe (ugly and not flexible). I use this for static content like ad spaces load the content async with Javascript. All googlebot will index is an empty div. The user will see the content loaded with JS after the page loaded. In most cases there is no noticeable difference in how the page renders.Very easy to do with Jquery. My favorite solution.

Dylan, Building up depth of unique quality localized content, combined with links and citations from sites that themselves are devoted to each location / area pointing to that localized content is vital.  How much you'll need depends on the competition in each local market.  Some might be easier to break into than others. It's also easier to go after regions as opposed to individual cities or towns.  So here where I live/work, it's "Bay area" and "San Francisco Bay Area", instead of just San Francisco or just Marin County.

I don't think it will hurt to do that, but there is probably no SEO value to doing it either. It could be a good idea if you want to use an easily remembered URL in offline media and advertising thought.

Everything seems to be being crawled correctly. Really puzzling actually. None of the other sites had a ton of backlinks either so that wasn't really the issue, just wanted anyone stumbling upon them to be redirected.