Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi,

First off, even with a canonical, I'd suggest you have a unique title tag if for no other reason than users. Changing the title, even slightly, can help. For my clients, I usually suggest something simple like adding ", Page #2" after the main title. Google may or may not index the page, but that way if a user bookmarks the page (or shares it), the title is different.

Second, you need more than a canonical link to correct this problem. You are dealing with a sequence, which means you need to use rel prev/next as well as the canonical. (For example: on page 2 of your jobs, the canonical would be /jobs/2, the rel prev would be /jobs, and rel next would be /jobs/3.) Treating these pages like a sequence will help explain this group of pages more effectively. And, that means...

Finally, the rel prev/next would also help those second, third, fourth, etc. pages  from falling out of Google's index and allow Google to find those jobs listed on those subsequent pages. Instead of telling Google that the subsequent pages are duplications (which is what you are saying by having a canonical referencing the main page on each subsequent page), you instead would be saying that these pages are grouped together as a sequence making it acceptable for Google to crawl through those pages.

I hope that helps. Also, I'm not sure how SEOmoz handles the canonical in regards to duplicate content.

Thanks.

Hey,

This is definitely a complicated issue, and there is some risk in making a move in the wrong direction.

Here are my thoughts which might help you out. Feel free to private message me or shoot me an email (see my profile) and I'd be happy to talk more.

On the hash solution, would that require JavaScript be enabled in order to access those pages or would you have a fallback solution for those without JavaScript?

If you don't have a fallback solution for those without JavaScript, you might negatively affect visitors with disabilities. For instance, some types of Ajax are challenging for people with disabilities to access (see here to start digging into that: http://webaim.org/techniques/javascript/).

Thing is, if you have a fallback solution, Google could still access those. However, Google may still be able to access those pages with JavaScript as Google can execute some forms of JavaScript. Given that, the more appropriate solution would be to use the robots.txt file. You mentioned, though, that the command you put in didn't seem to work since Google kept indexing those pages. Couple questions:

First, did Google index those pages after the change or had those pages been indexed prior to the robots.txt change? Things take time, so I'm wondering if you didn't give them enough time to adjust.

The other question would be whether or not you tested the robots.txt file in Google Webmaster Tools? That just gives you an extra verification that it should work.

Also, you mentioned something interesting about the Vehicle Detail pages: "these pages are not meant for visitors to navigate to directly!" Given that is the case, is it possible for your developers to add some sort of server-side check to see if people are accessing the detail pages from the listing pages?

For instance, on some sites I've worked a cookie is set when you've reached the listing page that says "this person is okay to reach the detail page" and then the visitor can only reach the detail page if that cookie is set. Without that cookie, the visitor is redirected back to a listing page. Not sure how exactly that would work on your site, but it might be a way to keep visitors who find those pages in a Google search result from seeing the incorrectly styled page.

I hope that helps. Like I said, feel free to email me or private message me if you'd like me to take a look at your site or chat with you about more particulars.

Thanks!

Hi, 1. Your redirect to www should work. If that isn't working, that might be a sign that mod_rewrite is disabled and in that case, I'd check with your hosting company to verify the server config.

2. As for the index.php, I wasn't able to get your code working. Here is a code snippet that should remove index.php from all your URLs. It is similar to what you are using, but matches in a different way.

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.index.php\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(.)index.php$ /$1 [R=301,L]

Hope that helps. Thanks,
Matthew

Without looking at the site or this one page, but based on what you are describing, I would suspect the bounce rate is high because of an expectation gap. The people coming to this article sound like they are in the early stages of the buying cycle--they want information about the types of products available and how to use this product. Maybe many of these people aren't quite ready to look at category pages or product pages because it is simply too early in the buying cycle for that to happen. Your links expect one thing (products/shop/buy) but visitors expect another (more info).

In these cases to lower the bounce rate, you need some kind of in-between content. Something that moves people to the next step of the buying cycle. Basically, you need to solve for X in this equation: early pre-purchase research -> X -> product page. To start solving for X, I want to know what questions people have after reading this article. There are several ways to get that, but user testing with targeted customers can usually be a good place to start.

Another place to look is in regards to trust factors. Do the people coming to that informational article trust your brand? It seems like they are because of how long they spend on the page. However, it could be people trust the company enough for information and insight, but maybe not enough to purchase. Again, user testing this page to gauge trust factors could be helpful to clarify what more you can do here to get people to stick around.

Final thought - it may simply be that this page will always have a high bounce rate. This is where re-targeting ads can be helpful. You know people are interested in your proudct but aren't quite ready to look at products just yet. So, after they visit this page you should re-target an ad to them as they continue their research building up to purchasing the product.

Hey. I agree with what Martijn said that generally, you want to request links from more active sites. Those sites tend to have better overall quality, search performance, and a more active audience. The one thing I'll add is that sometimes you can find blogs that have great evergreen content (good rankings, good links, seem to have decent traffic, etc.) even though they don't have a lot of recent content. In these cases, a link to a relevant page on your site could enhance that evergreen content and sometimes site runners are willing to update old articles (even if they aren't adding anything new). For example, maybe an old blog post on a currently inactive site has a great recap of the best ways to do X (where X is a subject that hasn't changed much in years). You have a page that offers another way to do X or is somehow tightly connected, so including it in that older blog post could be of use to the people who find that old article.