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HI,

So this is a different site and I don't think a rel canonical in the index.php is what you want, especially for a www/non www duplicate issue which is best solved with an htaccess 301 redirect. I am not familiar with that forum software but I would be very careful about putting canonical tags in if you are unsure what a particular file is or where it will be displayed - you might end up with the same tag for the entire site which would not be good at all!

Its best to try to take it one thing at a time, do a correction you are sure will fix one of your duplicate issues and then maybe wait for the next moz crawl which will have less issues and make it easier to focus on the remaining ones and investigate on the best way to solve them.

For the www or non www redirects you would usually put a couple of lines in your .htaccess file in your root directory, you can check out this link for the exact code and how to do it through cpanel. I would suggest taking a backup of the existing file in case you need to restore it quickly (typos can take a site down easily). If you have a developer who is familiar with this kind of thing it might be worth asking them to assist.

HI,

For the category pages that is more an issue of thin content - there is so little unique content on the pages that they are being flagged as duplicate. I would think your best bet in this case would be to get some more text in there describing the advantages/qualities etc of the relevant manufacturer - make the pages more unique in other words.

For the cart page, that is indeed a duplicate content issue due to url parameters. Is that a custom coded site or a CMS? I dont know what if anything those parameters do in real life (the refurl is for internal tracking?) but in this case a 301 is not what you want. A canonical to 'cart.php' is a possibilty, or maybe just meta tag NOINDEX the entire cart page if it has no seo value anyway.

There are quite a few variables to take into consideration, I would recommend reading up a bit on it, particularly this post on thin/duplicate content and this video on common ecommerce seo pitfalls (it is a great video, watch it all!).

Hi,

What you should do depends on what the issue is. 301's are useful if your duplicate issues are due to both www and non www urls being available to the search engines. The canonical tag is useful if you have url parameters that are causing duplicate content or if you have a multi capitalisation issue with your urls. There are  other possibilities for the root cause, so first thing to do is properly identify what is causing the duplicate content issue for each case (there might be various reasons). What kind of duplicates they are will then guide you as to the best way to approach the solution. You can check out this moz guide for a good rundown on potential issues and solutions.

Without knowing your site it is tough to tell the exact issue, but:

Duplicate content is related to the page content itself, not the url - so if you are seeing different pages all flagged as duplicate it likely means the actual content on them is very similar. If you 301 redirect these pages then only the final page the 301 redirects to will still be available to users and search engines - so be sure this is what you intend to do. If for example these are pages for different (but similar) products then you would likely not want to do this.

The login page - depending on the issue (perhaps url parameters?) this is likely a good candidate for a rel canonical - in this case you put the canonical tag in each page version - most CMS's will do this automatically for all versions of the page if you set it up properly.

Hope that helps a bit!

Hi,

Phil Nottingham did an excellent post a couple of years back on video seo, worth having a look especially the bit on what types of searches are likely to result in video results (not local for example!). He has done some other more recent articles on various sites, all worth having a look at.

Hi - Just to throw in my two cents - the canonicals should do it as Moosa says but if you really want to de-index then a dynamic meta robots tag is the best way to get them out of the index in my experience.

That being said, having a quick look at your site it doesn't look like those url parameters are the issue, a quick look at something like this: site:charged.fm inurl:date= only shows a few thousand results and the location= and time= show even less - so looks like the rel canonicals are doing the job and will continue to with a bit of patience. If you look at urls with /event/ in them however you see a lot (300,000+) and I am guessing many of those are for past events. Google webmaster tools should help you id what the bulk of those 600 thousand urls are so worth verifying where the exact issue is before attempting to fix something that isn't a problem...

Hi,

You could try fetching the page (homepage I guess unless these pages were all part of a sub section of the site) in webmaster tools which should help speed the process, see this page for details. And of course if not already done make sure you have a valid sitemap in GWT which has all the relevant urls in it. A bit of patience and they should come back.

Hi Sika,

Your redirects from the .net to the .com site are 302 (temporary) and not 301 (permanent) and is likely the reason your .net urls are staying in the serps.

If you get those switched over to 301 then with a little patience all your .net urls should be replaced by the correct .com ones.

You can check what kind of redirects you have with various online tools like this one: http://www.redirect-checker.org/

The quickest and most future proof is probably to noindex it through meta tags. Check out more details here.

HI Andy,

It really depends on the sector and the competition but I have seen quite a few examples of strong rankings in both the US and the UK for travel sites. This is a competitive sector although granted the rankings I was looking at were within niche and destination specific segments. If the site already has strong general metrics then a few decent incoming local links (and if needed adding some country specific hreflang content) is sometimes enough to give you a good boost. If on the other hand the sector is quite competitive with different market leaders in the two countries then it can be pretty tough.

It depends a bit on your setup and how easy/difficult it is to implement the tags but a couple of things to have in mind:

NOINDEX, FOLLOW should still mean the hreflang tags on the page are seen and followed even though the page in question is not indexed, the page needs to be parsed for the crawler to read the meta tag.

If you are not facing some serious issue with crawling and your system automatically adds the canonical and hreflang tags then I would leave them as is even on the no indexed pages (you might for example want to start indexing the french pages but not the english pages of certain cat/brand etc combinations and the hreflang tags might help speed recognition of this kind of change to the crawlers).

For the x-default my understanding is it is mainly for use in a multinational setup with default landing pages and or auto lang/region redirections and your url suggests your are aiming at Canada (and maybe USA) and only for en/fr so my understanding is it might not be really crucial in this case. Check out this page for some more details.

HI,

That is quite a few pages!

If the main issue is crawling related then robots.txt is probably the best way to go, I think the meta tags will still allow the pages to be crawled (they have to be for the tag to be read). Check out the comments in this and this post for wildcard matching in robots.txt which should do what you need. If the pages are indexed then it might be wise to leave a bit of time so that the noindex tags are picked up and then implement the crawl blocking in the robots.txt (and test in GWT to make sure you are not accidentally blocking more then you think). In this case I think you could still leave out the nofollow meta tag but this might just be personal opinion now - I'm not sure if in practice it would make much difference once you have no indexed and blocked crawling!

Hi,

I assume you mean in a meta header tag for these pages? As a general rule I would avoid using nofollow and simply noindex the pages in question. If you are implementing this with a meta tag then the pages will be reached from the layered navigation links anyway so they would then be a dead end for both PR and the crawler - with the potential to cause unexpected crawl problems rather than optimising it.

As long as you are addressing as best you can any duplicate content issues caused by the layered navigation (check out this post for a good rundown on the various solutions) then I would leave the noindex in place and let the crawler follow the links as normal.

Hi Bas,

You are 302 redirecting your initial url to your final url (www.nhad.de/?utm_source=affiliate) and that is why your are not getting your data in analytics. The redirect is kicking in before anything gets recorded and your final url only has the utm_source set so that is all you are seeing.

It seems to be an issue with your redirection script since in the url below you have a 'NEXTURL' variable that looks correct:
**www.nhad.de/affiliate.aspx?NETWORK=ZANOX&NEXTURL=**http://www.nhad.de?utm_source=affiliate&utm_medium=zanox&utm_content=banner&utm_campaign=105x139

But the final url you get to is
www.nhad.de/?utm_source=affiliate (missing the rest of the utm variables)

Maybe the script is not parsing the & sign properly?
If you get the redirects to forward to the complete nexturl variable then your data will be recorded properly in analytics:
www.nhad.de?utm_source=affiliate&utm_medium=zanox&utm_content=banner&utm_campaign=105x139

Hope I am not missing something obvious but if you are 301ing mywebsite.com then your visitors are not going to see the new homepage let alone the bots.... right?

If the phrases you are ranking for now are still relevant to the site then I would try to find a way to incorporate at least some of that content on the new homepage and then link to the full old homepage content (or a modified version of it if more suitable) from the new homepage - this new page is in effect becoming a landing page for these specific keywords (assuming that the new homepage does not manage to keep the rankings itself).

Hi,

It looks like you have done all the right things and that your 301s are working as expected. Sometimes google takes a little while to update the index. Have you seen more of your pages in the index move to the non https version in the last few days? If so, a little patience and the rest should move over also.

Hi Matt,

When you say submitting urls to google I assume you mean via a sitemap in GWT? If so there is no reason for the url changes to cause any issues/penalties - you already have a sitemap with the old urls right? So the new one would have a similar number of urls simply with different paths to the same content... no problems there.

The biggest threat to organic traffic is not having complete and proper 301 redirects in place for all (or most) pages which can potentially cause quite a bit of damage so make sure you have covered all the bases for the 301s!

Hi,

You could try the seogadget tool for excel, I also had some luck with this excel addon. Haven't used either of them in a while but they both should do what you need with a bit of fiddling.

Hi,

If the duplicated content urls are already in the google index then excluding them with the robots.txt will not remove them but just stop the google bot from crawling them again. You could do a bit of conditional logic on your head.phtml template file to check for the relevant url part and output a noindex,follow meta tag on the pages you don't want indexed. This is a more reliable way to make sure they are removed and not indexed in the future (be sure to test first!).

Happens to me all the time in Chrome. Quick tip is if you think you are going to see this problem (and I usually know that I will after being idle for more than an hour or so) then instead of clicking the 'moz analytics' button top right click the little person icon to the left of it and choose 'logout'.  You can then login again as normal without having to go through the deleting cookies hassle. Works for me.

HI,

Just in time Dr Pete has put out this post: http://moz.com/blog/googles-2014-redesign-before-and-after which details quite a few of the changes that seem to be rolling out. Title length is certainly on people's minds and with the bigger font you do seem to be losing some space for characters (check the post comments for some discussion on that). Bit too soon to be seeing much data on click through rates, but so many different things could be affecting this I am not sure you could specifically attribute it to the layout changes anyway...