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You can set up Canonical tags in your template. Usually the default is to canonical the page's URL, but if you create the canonical tag to the main page, you should be ok. It will help reduce duplicate content and tell google that you want them to pay attention to the content and structure of your main page.

I would also set parameters in GWT, this will help reduce errors, like 404 errors if product options change in the future. When you are using dynamic URL structure like this, it also helps Google understand and read them better. I would implement both of these changes. Depending on what platform you are in, you should be able to export the URLs to easily import the canonical tags.

It was an error in the product URL field in the global settings. I believe they are in maintenance. We moved to big commerce a little while ago so I can't go back to the Volusion store. I know it was in the global settings field, I just don't remember how to get there.

No you should be fine

Parameters are good for pages that are a result of a search or sort. I guess it isn't necessary really, I am just a little ocd about that kind of stuff. The parameters in WMT basically tell google that these things might appear in the URL, and then you can the bot to ignore it or let GoogleBot decide how to read the URL.

The mobile site is not the same as a responsive design and on of the main reasons I left Volusion. The mobile site will get you through the update on 4/21, but if possible you should ask them for a responsive site. Just call the support number, or your account manager and ask.

Do you have the ability to have both results on one page? That is what I would do to fix this issue. If that isn't an option use canonical tags. You will have to pick one URL that you would prefer to rank for, but it will help solve some of these issues.

You could also no follow/ no index this section of your website. If you aren't ranking for these pages, and don't plan to, just exclude them from the rest of your site in the robots.txt file.

I did that in my Volusion store. I also added ReviewNew.asp?ProductCode= as a parameter in Google Webmaster Tools. Do you have an enabled mobile site as well? If you do there are several 404 errors that you will start to see from there. Make sure you are adding parameters accordingly. I am not sure if Volusion has started offering their responsive templates yet, but if they have I would see if you can implement that over the mobile site.

I totally agree. The conversion on my campaign is sick! Mainly because we always appear cheaper next to the big box stores, they have to charge sales tax and shipping, we don't. It definitely is worth every penny and every minute of time it takes to manage it.

Lol, thanks!

No problem. I love the Moz Community. It rocks for sure.

I mean small as in very few pages and content. I consider a site to be authoritative based on the information I can find on it. So if you have 12 pages with a ton of uniquely valuable content, then your site is authoritative in my opinion.

That being said, it is better to have a site with 12 pages of great content than 100 pages of lame, duplicate, uninformative content. You can get the same authoritative stance in the SERPs with few pages of outstanding content, or many pages of outstanding content. Does that make sense?

Yes, ideally your URLs would build as you go through them.

abcinc.com

abcinc.com/online-mixing

abcinc.com/online-mixing/studio

abcinc.com/online-mixing/software

abcinc.com/online-mixing/software/download

Something like that

Hi Dusan,

I have a couple of suggestions for you. The first, to answer your question, is that copyscape.com will let you compare two pieces of content for free, and then it will tell you the percentage of uniqueness. This will be a good way to tell if your rewrites are adequate.

My second suggestion is to implement a review system that will stream user generated content onto your pages. The duplicate content "penalty" you are referring to is really not a penalty in the empirical sense. When it comes to ranking, Google will look at two sites with the same content and pick one to display. Usually the branded site would win in a branded search. There are many other factors, like page rank and domain authority that can influence which page is displayed, and the user query can influence that as well.

Having uniquely valuable content on your site, like user generated comments and reviews, can be the offset for your duplicate content issue. Rewriting the manufacturer's descriptions isn't really going to accomplish the goal of offering the searcher something they can't find anywhere else. In my opinion, just rewriting the content isn't enough of an advantage to beat out other sites. You have to offer something valuable, that can only be found on your site. User generated content is (in my opinion) the best content you can have. Every consumer reads reviews when they are available. They want to find out what regular people have to say about a product. Is is the right size, is the color consistent, how long did it last, is this a fair price? These are all questions that can be answered in a review system.

I added reviews to my Ecommerce site about 6 months ago and have seen great success. 80% of my content is the same as 4 other sites, except my category pages. I write extremely unique content for those pages, which helps me target long tail and branded key terms. Then my product pages have the manufacturer's descriptions, tech specs and warranty info plus the user generated content. It has been very successful whenever I have implemented it.

I think you are right in your assumption. Duplicate content is never a good thing. However, if it isn't the same content on the site that is outranking them, then Google must be seeing the site you are auditing as more authoritative than the site they copied the content from. So, while it is an issue, the links might prove to show you where the actual optimization needs to be. If things are neck in neck, like I am understanding, then then link profile is going to be extremely important.

The content, no doubt, should be rewritten. Without a look at the link profile though, you can't say it is the reason they aren't outranking the guys in the number one spot.

Moz has a great section called Learn. I started with blogs like that, and then used Google to look up other forums or topics related to what they had in this section. So, if I read the section on URL formats, I would go to Google and search "best url format for SEO" and read whatever else came up. There are a lot of places that are like Moz, and I think I learned the most from the sites that disagreed with what I found here. It gave me the opportunity to see two sides of the argument and then make an educated decision as to which practice actually was the best practice. 99.9% of the time, what I found in the Learn section of Moz was completely accurate.

I became interested in SEO when I was working for a company that completely got hosed by a firm. Taking what they told us, I just started looking to verify what they were doing because we couldn't see any results.

Take things one step at a time. Start at the beginning with on page optimization and content. Once you feel like you are comfortable with the basics look into off page optimization and social media. Keeping an open mind is essential, this industry is fluid. You will always be able to find more than one way to do something. Learn to trust your gut and always ask yourself if what you are doing is natural and organic. If you are keeping things natural and organic more often than not you are using best practices.

Reading the Q&A forum here is really beneficial as well. I have been working in SEO and PPC for 6 years, and I still learn something new from community members everyday. There is always a new method or GA or GWT update that can change how you use your data, or restricts your data. The people in the community are very much on top of changes in the industry and can give you insight to methodology and best practices.

There are many other community forums, like searchengineland.com. Use every resource you can. I think of Moz as my ground. If I find something out there in cyber space that I find interesting or new, I validate it here.

Welcome to the community and good luck to you!

No. I wouldn't worry about it. Google calls them errors, the same as a 404 error. To them an error is anything that returns a code other than 200. I have hundreds of noindex pages on my site and it doesn't hurt. I believe it helps because it removes duplicate content and eliminates bad user experiences.

I have always thought that it is Google's way of double checking to make sure that the Webmaster is aware those pages are blocked. There have been times that I found URLs in there that weren't supposed to be, and contrarily found missing URLs as well. Its checks and balances in my opinion.

I can't think of a study off of the top of my head that could help you. What I can tell you is that if you are directing traffic to a page on your site, the content should be relevant to the search term. For example, you don't want to have a page for blue widgets attracting traffic for pink teddy bears. This will create an awful user experience, high bounce rate and decrease in traffic over time. As the engines see your page as less and less relevant and that it provides a bad user experience you will start to lose rankings.

However, there are exceptions to that logic. For example, I have a page on my site that is the landing page for a very popular product. The manufacturer discontinued the product and I didn't want to give up the value of the page, so I left the relevant content, added the discontinued text and then offered replacement models closer to the top of the page. If anyone happened to land on that page, I wouldn't lose the traffic, but instead give them relevant options. If I had changed the status to 404 or 410, then there would be no possibility of capturing or converting the traffic. Here is a page: http://www.apelectric.com/6241-Generac-Guardian-Series-14kW-p/6241.htm

I have also talked to lots of people who have websites with pages for events, community activities, concert pages and things of that nature. After the shows or events, the page doesn't necessarily have "purpose". The page can be used to aggregate reviews of bands or performers, community fairs. It can be used as a community forum, or it can simply be updated to offer upcoming schedules.

As far as out of stock products go, I wouldn't 404 or take down a page with an "out of stock" product. I don't know what platform you use, but Big Commerce gives me the option to add a "Pre-Order" button to a product when it goes out of stock. It would be optimal if your customers could still order a product if it is coming back into stock in the future. I would add a message near the add to cart button saying the item is temporarily out of stock, but you can order for shipment in the next 2-3 weeks, or however long the window of time is. The more information you give your searcher the more opportunity you are creating for engagement and conversions. 404ing the pages is not the answer to a short term inventory shortage. When you 404 or 410 a page you are running the risk of losing your ranking on that page, so when you enable the page again you will have to start ranking again. It could take time depending on the competition of the product.

I would add user generated reviews and comments. Even a product q&a option is helpful. If you can get enough unique content on those pages to outweigh the duplicate content then you shouldn't have any troubles. I would recommend the user generated reviews in this instance over canonical tags because it will prevent the pages from ranking. You are basically telling Google that one of those pages is the authoritative one, which will prevent he others from ranking. The duplicate content is the same way however, unless there is something uniquely valuable on those pages. In this case, customer reviews would solve both problems. There is nothing more valuable to a searcher than hearing what other people have to say about a product.

There seems to be a lot to your question. I am going to try to start at the bottom and work my way up.

• If another domain is copying your text and embedding it in your site without consent I would contact the copyright department where your server is hosted. The solution might take some time but they should be able to get your content off of another site. I know that GoDaddy helped us with this problem a few months ago. One of our competitors IFramed our website and used it as their own for a couple of days.

• The content on the site seems to be be pretty solid. There are a few pages that are lacking content and seem to be pretty thin. I suggest beefing up the landing pages a little bit and working on your title tags. It seems unclear which keyterms you are targeting from looking at the source code. There seems to be a lack of consistency on page with repetition of keyterms and using them in the URL, title tags and content. I would suggest a little bit more research on the keyterms to make sure the ones that are being targeted get a good amount of search traffic. I would maybe try to target some not so competitive terms just to get something from your sight to the front page to help your impression share increase.

• When you say you disavowed links, was that because of a penalty? If so you might not start to see improvement if those changes weren't good enough for Google to remove the effects of that penalty. If it were a result of a Penguin update you could have been suffering the effects of a negative penalty. Now that another update in process you might start seeing better results. If not, that means more work on the link profile needs to be done.

• When you say you no followed all outbound links, does that mean that any link on your website is a no follow? I am not 100% sure here, but I don't believe that is really best practice. I might reconsider that strategy. Too many no follow links don't look good to Google.

These are just some things that I can suggest briefly looking through the site. I hope that helps.

I disagree. I think that if there is any short term value it will be exactly that, short term. There is not enough value for the short term. It will eventually make it harder to rank and then you will have to start over. EMD (exact match domains) have lost significant ranking value. It is what comes after the .com that is important, what products are in your URL, what key terms you use, not what your domain is. It is too easy to manipulate, which is why it has lost its value.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQZY7EmjbMA - Here is a video on how duplicate content is handled by Google.

Here are my thoughts, it would be better for you because the searcher who types in the specific make and model in your inventory will be able to find it quickly, as opposed to having to click through a site. Theoretically, that is the benefit. It could also be that pages don't rank because all of the content is viewed as duplicate.

I would make the decision based on what is best for the searcher, which would be to have an organic SERP with exactly what they are looking for.

Take a look at this article about domains. It is very high level, and it breaks down the importance of brand vs. key term. Hopefully it can explain it a little better than I am doing right now, lol.