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Agree with Andie, probably a slight miscommunication.

They also might saying that you will get more 'seo value' out of local domains which might be true to a point but depends on a number of factors both technical and procedural. There is evidence that stand alone country specific domains give more local 'value' in terms of rankings, but you need to weigh this against the need to build links and gain domain authority for all these separate domains individually rather than leveraging the existing domain authority of the main site which you would be doing if you used sub folders. Gianluca has written a good roundup of the considerations to take into account when looking at this kind of scenario and also includes details on geo-targetting in webmaster tools setup and using the hreflang attribute well worth a look: http://moz.com/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust

Alan is right, have a look at your htaccess file in the first instance to see if there are any added redirects that are conflicting with the magento system redirects. If not then I think you have managed to get magento confused switching between the tralling slash and the .html endings.

I agree with Alan that personally I prefer no slash and no .html. It might be worth taking both off and seeing if the system starts redirecting as you expect (on a test server!). If not then you might want to look at emptying your url redirect table in the db and then doing a manual url index update again (again, on a test environment). It seems that the root of your problem is a redirect loop on the trailing slash version of the url (it redirects to itself in other words) and the non trailing slash also redirects to this page.  I suspect this is in the magento url db and not through htaccess, but you need to confirm that before messing with the db needlessly.

Hi Paul,

If they are unlikely to have external links to them (or at least no good ones) and they are not internally linked then I think your best bet is just to let them 404. You should anyway fix up your 404 page to let users know there has been a site redesign or similar and give links to homepage and other important pages etc.

You could 410 them also which is said to remove these pages more quickly from the index and to be a final word that these pages no longer exist and will never come back but that might create more overhead than it is worth in regards setting up different 4xx header responses for different types of pages. The differences between 404 and 410 headers in practice seems to be very little according to most things I have read. Since there will be no links to them anyway, 404ing them is an easy solution and should not create any problems.

Well that is a bit odd, a couple of things to consider:

1. Those look like some pretty volatile rankings based on the fluctuations all the sites are showing. Is it possible that the serps are changing so much that literally depending on the day you rank check a page is there or not? If you cross check these dates with analytics data for specific queries do visits stay the same or are they showing some swings also?

2. The rankings for example 1 are indeed wrong now (I see you top of page 2 in google uk), the rankings for example 2 from where I am look right,  247 on page 5, your site is not in first 5 pages.

3. Is it possible that google is flipping between 2 different pages of your site to show in the serps for specific queries? This also might account for the fluctuations and can be investigated further by looking at analytics landing page data.

Basically I guess I am saying to keep an open mind in regards the rankings and try to cross check with analytics to see if you can find any data to prove/disprove the theory that the moz ranking data is wrong. I would be surprised if the moz software simply didn't check a particular phrase, although I guess you can never rule it out completely without raising a ticket.

Just to clarify, the rankings you are seeing are wrong? Not just the movement in rankings?

If the second it might be that the movement from new keywords added is shown in comparison to the previous crawl where the position was nowhere if you see what I mean. I can't remember off hand if this is how it is shown but I seem to remember it might be...

If the first, care to give an example or two for a second check? If the rankings are 100% wrong then a mail to support is likely in order.

Hi Richard,

Are you sure the results you are seeing yourself are not modified through personalisation/localisation etc? Have you tried checking the results in another browser which you dont use to login to google accounts? This is usually the root cause for rankings confusion, I have always found the moz rankings to be accurate once this is taken into account.

Hi Diego,

I feel your pain, this is a common problem with multi language magento sites.

I think the main thing to do is to make sure the language codes are included in the url (so like http://footdistrict.com/en/). This way you will avoid all the problems associated with the url variables ?___store=es and language cookies which is a difficult situation to manage. You can set this up in the magento admin at configuration -> general -> web -> url options. That way there is never any doubt which language any url is displaying in. As it is now, you have a rel canonical to the same page from both languages that the server is serving up in two different languages versions and from what I can see with a site:footdistrict.com search has resulted in your english version is not being indexed (or at least not being indexed well).

Getting it setup right has a number of challenges: you will need to check redirects from old urls are working properly, the language switcher needs coding adjustments to work properly, make sure you test it well in other words! Once setup like this you can use just one redirect from footdistrict.com/es to footdistrict.com and the rest of the product/category urls should take care of themselves.

Hope that makes sense!

Hi Ryan,

Have you manually forced a refresh of the catalog url rewrites index and cleared all you caches? Basic I know, but sometimes gets overlooked.

HI,

There is a thread here which at the bottom details a temporary fix until  the issue is solved: http://moz.com/community/q/moz-email-is-freezing-microsoft-outlook

It is annoying! I find that if I leave outlook to itself after about 25 seconds or so the mail appears (then is a good time to delete it so that you don't get the freeze again by accidentally clicking on the mail later on).

Hmm, the cache issue is strange, I really have no idea why it is behaving like that.

I can say that from where I am the original site seems to be ranking for keywords that I assume are some of your major ones and if you look at the cached version it shows the site as expected. It is a bit of an odd situation, might be wise to hold on for another week or so and see if rankings/traffic return and the index seems to sort itself out again.

Hi Jesse,

Depends a bit on the competition and where you are already for those phrases but if you are pretty well placed then I would be inclined to approach it as you describe. Google highlights all three words when searching so they know there is a relationship there anyway. Seems to me that the heater/burner results are very similar, the furnace ones a bit different so maybe it is worth considering a title like 'waste oil heaters & furnaces' if it makes sense. Beyond that, if there are potentially small conceptual differences between the words then those sound like good fodder for blog posts which should help.

Hi Danny,

I would think the 404 is showing because the last cache of google's was of the site when the 301 was in effect and now that site has been de-indexed (or something along these lines). As long as there are no technical issues still effecting the original site then just be patient, the next time google comes crawling then the cache will be updated and you should be fine. You are probably just about the only one actually looking at the cache anyway!

HI,

This is a good example of when to use the canonical tag. Set it up for the main landing page without any url variables and you should be good to go. Google will know which version of the page to concentrate value on and also which version of the page to index and show in the search results. It is crucial actually, I saw a case once where the url with a partner id in it got indexed and was being shown in the search results.... you can imagine what effect that had on proper tracking when half the organic visits were clicking on a url with a partner id in it!!

Hi Mike,

I have seen some good results with local business and breadcrumb markup for visibility. The jury is still out on product markup and I have not seen it used much in the search results that I track. That being said, the implementation is usually pretty quick and painless so no real reason not to implement at least the basics.

I think it depends a bit on what your plans are for the site and what kind of competition there is already.

Quite a few niches are still showing EMD or partial matched domains in their results rankings. These are often niches with either relatively little real competition in terms of real brands or else in some of the more shady areas of the search world (Matt Cutts was mentioning payday loans today I think, there is a good example).

If you are hoping for a big splash, get ranked, get rich, get out type thing then why not, an exact match domain might well help in that for the short term. If you are looking to be in business for the long term then you should probably be going the brand building route. If the latter and you can still find an available domain that does not look like what-a-lame-domain.biz that you think you can build a brand around, then.... go for it!

A couple of posts with a bit more on pros/cons and the recentish EMD google updates:
http://moz.com/blog/the-exact-match-domain-playbook-a-guide-and-best-practices-for-emds
http://moz.com/blog/googles-emd-algo-update-early-data

Well yes, I guess you could look at it like that. If you lose a strong link then that could potentially reduce your domain/page authority. If you have been hit by penguin chances are you will have many more bad links than good though.

I would be careful about using the disavow tool without doing a full analysis of your link profile. Check out this recent post that runs down on the whole disavow procedure and has links for more info on identifying low quality links and trying to remove them: http://moz.com/blog/google-disavow-tool

Hope that helps!

Hi Robert,

It must be in your htaccess file, 301 redirects don't happen by themselves (perhaps this is the default wordpress htaccess behavior now?, I cannot recall off hand).

If you want to get rid of the notices and reduce the 301 redirects on the site as much as possible (which is best practice) then yes export the list and see where the pages that 301 are referenced from. One example I see is here http://www.indigocarhire.co.uk/uk-car-hire/scotland/ where the last link to Dundee airport is without a slash. If you add the slash then you have gotten rid of one of those notices! I expect you will find that they all slipped in through a common process, but it shouldn't take long to sort them out.

HI,

If the site no longer exists and the link no longer exists then no this is not hurting you. The moz data can be a few weeks out of date depending on when it last scanned that page/domain so it is normal to sometimes see references to links that are no longer there. If you have been hit by penguin then it is the dodgy links that ARE still there that will be doing the damage!

Hi Robert,

I suspect you have checked the 'enforce a trailing slash' option in the Yoast SEO plugin (under the permalinks section) but are linking to the pages without the trailing slash somewhere on your site.  If you download the moz report in csv you can filter the results for 301 redirects = true and then the far right hand column will tell you which page linked to it. They are notices by the way not errors.

Hi,

A bit difficult to say without some more details. Some of it might be outdated information. See: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-fix-crawl-errors-in-google-webmaster-tools for a rundown on how to check it if you haven't already. What urls is it flagging from the robots.txt? Are they still valid urls? In regards the 404s, 28,000 is quite a lot. Has your system changed or been updated recently? Maybe there is a systemic fault going on that is creating these errors? Is the moz scan flagging the same errors?

It is tough to say if the errors have any connection to the drop in visits, but it is certainly something you want to get to the bottom of. I threw your site into xenu (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html) and it was timing out on quite a few of the pages. Is it possible the site is timing out on heavy loads? That might account for the drop in organic visits also...

Lots of questions, not many answers!