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You don't absolutely have to do both, but by doing the parameter handling you are sending another signal to Google of what you want them to do (keep in mind that both canonical and parameters are only considered suggestions by Google).  It's pretty simple to setup the parameter handling, so if you are really concerned about the duplicate content issues, why not do both?

Also, technically, the canonical tag tells Google which URL they've crawled to give prominence to when they are duplicate content, whereas my understanding is that parameter handling (when Google follows your suggestions) actually prevents Google from even crawling URLs with those parameters.  In other words, canonical tags tell Google what to do with URLs they've crawled and parameter handling tells Google what URLs not to even crawl.

Have you gotten links from any private blog networks?  I heard some people saying they think a few of them got smacked by Google last week.

You do have some content and it uses your keywords.  That's good.  Perhaps a little more content might be helpful, but I've gotten pages to rank well with very little text content.  Remember, that SEO is a balance of a lot of different signals.  If you are a little light on some (like being light on text in your case), then you can make up for that with some of the others (like getting more links and social shares).

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

Hi Dan,

I mean both.  The canonical tag will help with duplicate content issues and the parameter handling will help with indexing.

Setting up the canonical tag shouldn't be an issue.  If the same page content is being displayed and the only difference is that the URL has some parameters in it, then the canonical tag should naturally be included with the rest of the page's code.  Since the canonical tag doesn't change, it should work perfectly.

For example, if you have a page, login.php, and that page always has a parameter, ?visitor=### (where ### is a random number), then you simply put the canonical tag in the head of the login.php page ().  That canonical tag will always be in the login.php page no matter whether the URL is login.php?visitor=123 or login.php?visitor=56, etc.  It will always tell the search engines that the original page login.php.

I agree with Devanur.  Just about every site get's scraped and has other poor links to it.  Google knows this.  They are looking for a pattern indicating intent to manipulate the rankings.

One other thing...

I'm assuming (hoping) that the content you will be providing the news site will be original and not reprinted on your site.  If you do reprint on your site, you should use a canonical tag to establish the originator of the content, which the news site will probably want to be them.

Also, if you have setup a Google+ authorship account, you can claim authorship of the articles that are being published on the news site as well as content on your own site.  That can help with your search rankings as well.  Right now, Google says authorship doesn't affect rankings (which i think is debatable), but I know for a fact that it does affect personalized results.

If you are paying for the site to publish your content or even if it's like a guest blog thing, you should use no-follow for the links.  Google shouldn't care if you get a huge bump in traffic (technically, they say the Google search algorithm doesn't ever look at analytics data.  So, the bump in traffic should be any concern for you, only the new links.  As long as you no-follow the links, you should be fine.  In fact, that's specifically what Google says to do if you are paying for links or guest blogging.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

You can use the parameter handling and setup canonical tags on the pages.

It could very well simply be location.  Being close the centroid is a huge factor.

These types of reports, whether it's the Moz DA, Majestic SEO link report, or even ranking reports, are tricky.  They tend to fluctuate quite a bit.  I'd recommend trying to get the client off of focusing on these types of reports and get them focused on either traffic to the site or (ideally) conversions.  These other reports are really just tools.  They are indicators to help you do your work.  After all, would the client be happy if you got them a DA increase of 30 points if at the same time their conversions dropped by 50%?

Hi Yiannis,

As far as I'm aware, there isn't really a way to "block" a link.  The link is seen on the other site.  Returning a 404 for the page being linked to doesn't change the fact that there are a 100K links from one site pointing at your site.  The only options I'm aware of are to 1.) contact the owner of the website with the links and ask them to remove the links and 2.) if that doesn't work disavow the links.

I understand your hesitancy to use the disavow tool, but quite frankly, this is exactly what it is intended for.

If you feel comfortably with the links being there and think Google has already dealt with them, then do nothing, but if you want to do something about the links, you either have to get them removed or disavow them.

BTW - My understanding of the partial manual actions is that often times Google not only deals with the suspicious links (devaluing them), but they also penalize the pages/keywords they think you were attempting to manipulate.  So, just because it was a partial action and not a full site action doesn't mean it's not effecting some of your rankings.  It's just not going to affect all your rankings for all your pages.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

The indochino site has is a high authority site and has built up a brand.  Content on a site is only one part of the equation and, like many equations, if you increase one part of the equation, you can decrease another and get the same results.  For example, 2 x 6 = 12, but so does 1 x 12.  I've seen sites, especially decently branded sites, that had no readable content on their website but were ranking very well for competitive phrases in their niche.  It's because their site authority and brand were strong enough to over come the lack of content.  I'd say the same thing is happening in regards to your question.

When dealing with local results, there are a lot of factors that contribute to rankings beyond PR, some much more influential.  A quick look at the map indicates to me that the physical location of vipbailbonds.org is closer to the Google's centriod for Van Nuys.  That alone could cause them to out rank you.  Beyond that, there are reviews, citations, content on the Google+ Local page, categories, etc. all of which could cause them to out rank another site despite having a low PR page.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

I suppose it's possible that duplicate content could be an issue if the exact same content is on other sites.  Try changing the content on the homepage so it's no longer duplicate and see what happens.

It's hard to say what's going on without doing an investigation into the situation.  It could be a duplicate content issue, but then again Google likes to show the pages (not sites) which they think are most relevant.  Perhaps, for one reason or another, Google just thinks those sub-pages are more relevant to the search query than the homepage is.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

Good point.  If a new domain is able to rank as well as the old site before the 301 redirects are put in place, that's very compelling evidence.

Cool.  I hadn't heard of using canonical tags to move sites.  That's quite helpful.

I'm curious about the idea that the canonical tag passes link authority or PageRank.  Is it possible that these tests people have done just look like that's what's happening?  Here's what I mean.  Let's say I write an article that gets reproduced on another site and Google is ranking the other site in the top ten for some keyword.  Then I get the other site to put a canonical tag on their page and in a few days my site is ranking for that keyword.  Now, does that indicate that any link authority was passed or does it indicate that Google would have ranked either site in the top ten for that keyword, but they had to decide on one or the other because they are duplicate.  So, the canonical tag just caused Google to change it's mind about which site it would rank.  In other words, could it be that both pages are authoritative enough to rank and the canonical tag is just telling Google which of the two should rank?

Has anyone done tests where one site had content for a while that didn't rank and then another more authoritative site re-published the content and ranked for it and then the authoritative site put a canonical tag to the original site and now that original site was able to rank well for the keyword?  And when they did this, they would have to not have put a link to the original content only using the canonical.

Dave,

What you're describing is exactly what the canonical tag is for, reproducing content on pages, but giving credit to the original.  Anyway, if 301's wouldn't work, what else would you do?

Hey Dave,

I just found this tool from Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration.  Try that.

Edit: Ok, so I just tried the tool and it just took me to the manual actions section of webmaster tools.  I did a little more searching and I don't see any other way at this point to do a reconsideration request.  Unless someone else out there knows of another way, I'd have to change my previous answer and say that you don't have a manual action any more.

You said you've been removing bad links.  Perhaps when Google redesigned the manual action notification system they re-reviewed sites and yours no longer qualified for a manual action so they lifted it.

Have you noticed anything in your rankings?

My understanding is that canonical tag only establishes the original location of content.  It has nothing to do with PageRank.  I've not seen anything from Google that would indicate that adding a canonical tag to a page will pass all it's authority to the canonical URL.

It's possible that the new message system in Google Webmaster Tools may only display new messages.  Since your original message came before the Manual Action section was setup, it may not be listed.  I'd still do the reconsideration request because it will answer your question.  If there isn't any manual action, they will tell you that.  If there is, then you may get it removed.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com