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I don't know if its common practice but its not a new fix. Never heard of there being any issues with doing it that way (at least no one has ever told me this suggestion threw other errors for them if it has).

Have you tried combining them into one? e.g. name="description" property="og:description" content="My meta description copy."/>

If its relevant, done with usability in mind, and is not deceptive then it should be fine.

Here's a related Article from Search Engine Roundtable with Matt Cutts video:

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-hiding-content-17136.html

Their coder will be taking a look at it when he's freed up the time to see if there's a way to do that. Hopefully its something easy like that and doesn't require numerous workarounds to get going.

I'm working with someone to make fixes to an xcart site but I'm at a loss for some fixes. Some directory URLs had been changed around on their ecommerce site to make them more descriptive & more human friendly. The problem is that according to the team's coder, simple redirects won't work for the directories and mod rewrite and redirectmatch didn't work for some unknown reason.

I don't really know anything about xcart. I've made some basic changes and redirects before though their admin panel but I don't have any clue as to how to make directories 301 properly. Any insights? Thanks!

Just because I'm not sure if I'm reading this correctly or because its Friday & my brain is misfiring... Did you place a canonical on www.domain.com/Product123 pointing at the lowercase AND then 301 redirect it to the lowercase? Because if that's the case then it would really only pick up the 301.

They can be used together in this fashion without any problems. The 301 is redirecting duplicate content that does not need to physically exist and is better served by another page. The Canonical "redirects" the bots from a page that needs to exist for a specific purpose (tracking tag, model id, product id, etc.) but which is a duplicate or subset of another page that should be given the proper ranking signals in place of the page with the variable.

Edit: As to the second question, don't worry. They will naturally change over to the correct page(s) over time as long as Google chooses to follow the canonical tag and consider the page it is pointing to as proper/relevant. In the meantime, the 301s will bring people to the proper place and the canonicals should be passing signals/equity to the proper pages.

Here's a some info from Matt Cutts on a similar situation someone had back in December that may help to allay some of your worries about a penalty persisting from a long unregistered domain.

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-old-penalties-expired-domain-17883.html

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/H9-kbSf8r4w/discussion

I'm going to refer you back to the other two questions you asked today about the same thing with the same graphs that already have a bunch of answers in them.

http://moz.com/community/q/what-penalty-would-cause-this-traffic-drop-google-analytic-screenshot

http://moz.com/community/q/does-this-graph-look-like-a-panda-2-0-hit

I had done about half of that... I'll take a look at all of it and try again tomorrow following your suggestions and see if I can figure it out then. Thanks.

I must be missing something or skipping a step or lacking proper levels of caffeine.

Under my High Priority warnings I have a handful of 404s which are like that on purpose but I'm not sure how Moz is finding them. When I check the referrer info, the 404 is being linked to from a different 404 which is now a 301 (due to craziness of our system and what was easiest for the coders to fix a different problem ages ago). Basically, if a user decides to type in a non-existent model number into the URL there is a specific 404 that comes up. While the 404 error is "site.com/product/?model=abc123" the referrer is "site.com/product?model=abc123" (or more simply, one slash is missing). I can't see how Moz is finding the referrer so I can't figure out how to make Moz stop crawling it. I actually have the same problem in Google WMT for the same group of 404s.

What am I just not seeing that will fix this?

Being able to separate things would be nice. When we scaled back things with our consultant, we switched our Moz accounts so my company pays for my personal account to have a Pro membership. But there's always the chance that someday I will move on to other things and then need to either hand over my personal account or my company will have to start a new account and lose the easy access to historical data which is under my name.

That might explain the listing of custom_crawl_issues.crawl_error.name in crawl diagnostics under High Priority... I was wondering where that was coming from.

Its a question of relevancy and user experience. If i do a search for "blue widgets" and see your blue widget link in the SERP but get taken to orange doodads instead... well, I'll be disappointed and bounce. That page will eventually stop ranking for "blue widget". So when doing a 301 you should make it as relevant as possible. If your blue widget link redirects to red widgets... well, that's closer. I might still bounce but there's a chance I'll stay to look at the widget. If the blue widget page redirected to "Blue Widget 2.0" then that's about as relevant a 301 as you can have. It will likely continue ranking (though the old link in the SERPs will likely swap out for the new one eventually).

Instead of doing redirects, there's always the option to keep the page up with a discontinued message and offer links to similar products on the page. If you don't want people bouncing because they were redirected to something they weren't expecting but really want to enhance the link equity and rankings of a specific page, you could keep "blue widgets" up with a discontinued message to "blue widget 2.0" and add a rel=canonical tag from blue widget to blue widget 2.0 to pass equity. Eventually the new page will swap for the old one in rankings, it will likely lower bounces caused by being shunted to a page you didn't expect, it gives people time to switch any direct links to the new page, and then after a few months you 301 the old page to the new page.

When on the crawl diagnostic page there is the column that says the number of duplicate URLs. If you hover over the little i symbol then the popup will show the other URLs. Also, if you download the CSV of the report there is a column called Duplicate Page Content which lists the URLs.

Edit: Unless I completely misinterpreted what you were asking and you want to know how to find out the exact words or meta that is the same across them all. In which case, Moz usually only picks up duplication of Title Tags, Meta Description and the actually page content. So if they're flagged as duplicates its just a matter of reading the pages or giving them a quick glance to see how similar they are.

I see what you're saying but in my head I'd it feels like using the same one everywhere would set off spam flags and/or wind up keyword stuffed more readily. For example, we have an image of an accent wall used in a commercial retail space made with artificial white brick paneling which could wind up in a gallery for brick, accent walls, and for retail design as well as potentially landing pages for retail design, accent walls, brick panels, white brick and in the gallery for the specific product line of that white brick... so I'd be worried making one 'perfect' alt tag that covers all those bases like "Old Navy commercial display with faux white brick panel accent wall" that appears in so many different galleries would be spammier and feel more stuffed.

For a while now we've had an outside SEO consultant as well as having me in-house doing a variety of work. One of the things our consultant would do was writing up optimized alt & title tags for the image galleries on our ecommerce sites.

Recently what came up was what to do when a image appears in multiple galleries (e.g. an image of a bedroom could appear in both the bedrooms gallery & the accent wall gallery). We're not sure whether it would be best practices to use the same exact alt & title tags for an image in all the galleries it appears in or whether that would be too much duplication and each gallery should have different tags despite being the same image.

None of it is being done in a deceptive manner, we're just been tailoring how we explain the image based on the specific gallery, landing page, etc. Our consultant is saying that an image should always have the same tags across the entirety of the site but I'm more of the mind that varying them by specific page would help images more readily rank for multiple relevant terms.

Any advice?

Google has been planning to scale back on the frequency of rich snippets. Matt Cutts mentioned this to an extent at PubCon in October (link). Google has also recently begun going after those that have spammed and/or manipulated rich snippets in a deceptive manner (link). Your stars disappearing may just be part of the changes in the works.

As to the homepage question, make sure you have your preferred domain set in Webmaster Tools (i.e. WWW vs Non-WWW). Pick whether your homepage should have a trailing slash or not. Have all basic iterations of that redirect to your chosen variation (e.g. homepage.com, homepage.com, www.homepage.com/index.php all redirect to www.homepage.com). If those parameters shown in your image don't significantly change the look or information on the page but are necessary then consider adding canonicals from all parametered versions of the homepage to the regular version of the page.

Good point. Wasn't thinking about that when I wrote my answer.