Welcome to the Q&A Forum

It is pretty interesting how often the same question is asked.  Its good to ask, better than just chose the easiest way - both are right - in that point the folder would be the right decision. Give Horvath a thumb up

Hi Sheena, sorry I didn't respond sooner, I wasn't receiving any notifications. Thank you very much for your answer though, this was extremely helpful and helped verify that what I was thinking was correct, with some added help from you. I didn't think taking away the 301 was the best approach, but from a bosses standpoint he sees it as them getting clicks that shouldn't be theirs, I just have to do my best job of explaining why it's better for long term. The hreflang is in place and I think the best approach would be to consolidate international domains to the .com ccTLD's Thanks again, very helpful. -Reed

Thanks for your help Travis, that was a really solid answer.

My view is a little bit different, but to be 100% I would have to look at the site. If the application / module is using style="display:none" to hide the tag, I would not use it. The reason being is that multiple h1 tags on a page dilute or in some peoples opinion cancel out other h1 tags. There are valid reasons to hide h1 tags, like when you are doing fade ins or have a slider with it in there. So I am of the opinion that even if it is hidden Google will pick up on it. So you do run the chance of being caught for keyword stuff or it could cancel out your h1 tag that is displaying. (As far as I know there is no clear 100% information on how Google handles multiple h1 tags. I have heard all sorts of things including it registers the first one seen in code, it registers the last one seen in code, it combines the weight given to all of the h1 tags, and even that they don't matter it is text size above the fold that matters) If it were me this is what I would do. I would remove the text from the banners and use the built in functionality for the text. Depending on the location of them on the page really depends on how I would tag them, they could be h2, h3, span, ect. But I would opt for on page visible text over using a graphic with text. I realize that you do not like the style that it uses, but it is just a style that can usually be mimic'd with a style sheet. The reason I usually opt not to use text on banners is twofold. It cannot be translated and it cannot be searched.

Thanks Marcus, Your Answer is really helpful. I have read a few of the pagination articles and agree they all say you don't need it 100%, but I needed some extra help understanding the issue. I think in this case no following secondary pages would be best because the content might look duplicated. When I do a inurl:dir site search I get back searchers indexing "high/low price" "most/least reviewed" etc. for products so that could be the issue there. Again thanks for your in depth response to help clear up my issue. -Reed

Hey Doug, had another question for you. A big majority (90% of 18,000+ errors) of our 404 errors are coming from .jsp files from our old website. Of course, it's not ideal to manually update or redirect these, but possibly write a script to automatically change them. Would it be beneficial to add this .jsp to our robots.txt file?

I am not positive, but I think you are confused about GWT and url parameters. GWT lets you specify parameters to ignore, is that where you put them in? Google Analytics on the other hand allows you to put parameters in to monitor click through rate and all of the other things it does.

Yeah that's definitely an issue we've had in the past (php execution time). It times out so quick for loading anything. Hopefully it's just a server switch issue that we can upload directly as our robots.txt and sitemap.html aren't showing up either. Thanks for leading me in the right direction. Very helpful.

Thanks for your help.

Actually don't bother with this one, I figured out what I needed to know. Thanks!

Thanks Chris, that article was very helpful! Cleared a lot of things up.

The robots.txt would allow the OP to go back into GWT and request removal of the dev site from the index. Password protecting a dev site is usually a pretty good idea, too.

You're welcome Reed. I am into my 14th year now, although got my first taste of UX & Design back in 1997. So much has changed! -Andy

This would be a good place to utilize a canonical.  You can specify which one you want to be as the main source, and which is the duplicate.

You're most welcome, glad you found it useful!

Awesome Reed. Thanks for the hat-tip on Twitter too. I appreciate that. Cheers!

Hey Paul, that makes complete sense. Thanks for your help.

Thanks Gianluca, very helpful.