Welcome to the Q&A Forum

OSE is working now. Thanks Moz.

Let's Say I come in searching for reviews for ABC Web Hosting. Why would I leave a review ? What's my reason to post a review on a random website ? Is there an incentive of doing that ? I would suggest you brainstorm as if you are the user. What attracts you the most ? Maybe building a community ? Giving them a value. Something.

Does that make sense ? Post or PM me your URL and I'd love to take a look.

Savio

It's always a good call to remove unwanted links, links that user's don't use. Sometimes these pages are thin content pages, lead to within the site duplicate content issues as well. I would strongly recommend removing the links, but then just with this change, expecting a major change, I guess not, but then it depends upon all the other metrics of your website.

It might also make sense to consider doing a no-index on them. Is this a wordpress blog ? If yes, you can use All-In-One SEO ro Yoast SEO Plugin to  noindex on you tag pages.

Then look at your website and see if you see any SERP movements and continue to audit the site and refine the structure, add new content, build links and repeat. It's a continuous process you know I am sure

I hope this helps.

Try this in the .htaccess file. It should work fine for sure. You don't need to manually add your website name.

<code class="htaccess" title="in your .htaccess file">RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]</code>

Yes, I would not worry about it. Google understands these issues specially on large scale websites. I have worked in scenarios where there's a weekly rebuild or deployment which essentially means the site is down for 2-6 hrs. Nothing happens. In a rare occasion, if your page with the maintenance message gets cached, you can always request a re-crawl of upto 50 pages from your Google Webmaster Console. I have never had to do that.

I agree with Bail and Keri. The takeaway is that the phrase is always important but so is surrounding text. Mix and match and do it what makes sense for a user, not for a Search Engine. It will always work out better in the long-run and you won't have to worry about over optimization kind of penalties.

Design your website for the user as well as the Search Engines, not just the Search Engines. Search Engines like what the user's like. As it leads to more users engaging with your content, website, therefore improving your site-score, helping you not only in SEO but PPC if at all you do PPC.

Wendy, if SEOMOZ can see it, I am sure Google can see it as well. I would login to your webmaster console and check the index status. Do you have an XML sitemap submitted for your website ? Once you do, you'll have a more accurate read on the number of pages you submitted and how many of them are indexed. The new index status Google introduced last month also lets you see pages Google ignored for multiple reasons.

I hope this helps.

I would not worry about it that much if it's just a short number. However, if it's a larger string of numbers, I'd recommend moving it towards the end of the URL if possible or completely getting rid of it.

If it's something like:

www.example.com/red-widgets-c1.php or www.example.com/c1-red-widgets.php both are fine, but I'd prefer the 1st one. I hope this helps.

I see you have canonical tags in place. Considering that, I would suggest you are good. No need to setup any of those redirects. Canonical tags are in essence sort of 301's anyways, so you are all set.

This is fine. Nothing to worry about. The link juice does get passed onto the canonical URL. There's a slight loss, but it's sort of like a 301.

This tag helps you avoid any duplicate content issues.

Have you tried using SEMRush.com ? Dig into that and you might be able to dig in your keyword data. Feel free to buzz me in a PM and I might be able to dig into it for you a little bit at no cost.

If you are looking for a full scale keyword analysis, I am sure there would be somebody here willing to take on freelance work :).

The question remains open for answers anyways...but you may want to post it as an ongoing discussion instead of a question. I don't think there's anything that can be done except to post it again.

Yes, by using rel=prev,next, you are telling Google that these are paginated. I wouldn't worry about the fact that they have pagerank. It's flow of link juice internally and that's totally fine.

The question I have is whether you have a View-All page ? The reason I am asking is to understand if that could be causing you any duplicate content issues because if you do not have a canonical and you have a View All page, then all your paginated pages are subsets of your View-All page and you might want to think how you are handling that.

See:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

Is your site brand new or relatively old/established ? If it's relatively old/established, do you really care about the extra 30 uniques a day from 30 domains ? If it's a brand new site, relatively new(ish), and it does not have a link profile of it's own, I'd probably not do it. It just sounds scary.

However, going back to if you are established and have have  strong domain authority, link profile, redirecting domains is not an issue. EG, Apple.com has tons of domains that redirect. Some of them have lots of history in the SERPS. Think of all kinds of mis-spell domains, trademark domains and so on. So whatever makes sense from a usability perspective, definitely do it.

In my opinion, it's a very clear, think line.

Edward

I think you are setup 100% correctly. You only have the canonical tag on the listing page and not on any of the other pages. Those listings are essentially duplicate content amongst multiple sites and that's a perfect use scenario of the canonical tag which support cross domain.

I think you are setup 100% right and this is how it should be.

When targeting for SEO, always look at both the exact match and broad match. Here's why: Exact match tells you how many exact match searches are there for let's say "Cheap Widgets". When you look at Broad match, it will show other keywords like Cheap Blue Widgets. So it's important to look at exact match to figure out your primary keywords and broad match to identify any secondary / variant keywords that might have been missed. I hope that helps.

How new is your website ? Do you have any sites linking to you currently ? You might want to check under Google Webmaster Console or Majestic SEO to see if they are reporting any backlinks (if at all they exist). If not, I would just concentrate on building links and eventually OSE will find you.

Daniel

I am guessing you have around 200 products exposed in approximately 18 categories, however there may be some overlap in the products within the categories, but the product URLs themselves are unique, so there is no content duplication between the product URLs themselves. You are just checking to make sure if a Red Widget Listed under Category A as well as Category B is okay. With your ratio being 3-4 out of 10, I won't be concerned.

If however this increases to over 50%, I'd be concerned in having 20 category pages being duplicate of each other by over 50%. The closer to 100%, the higher the risk. The closer to 0%, the lower the risk.

And it's just the product name you display on the category level page, not the product description right ? If yes, I'd say you are good to go. Don't worry about it too much at this point.

I hope this helps.

Hi Ben

I understand the panic in such a situation. I truly do. I checked your website and the fact that you do not have a robots.txt. You also do not have any kind of noindex or anything like that in your code and you look like a strong established website.

Do you have an XML sitemap in your webmaster console ? I would suggest you build one and submit it if you don't already have it.

Other then that, I would also suggest to have a robots.txt even if it's blank. Rather then a 404 redirecting to your homepage. Give me 24-48hrs and in my opinion, you should be back.

I hope this helps.

Nopes. The way it sounds like it's setup correctly. The message you are seeing from SEOMoz is more of a warning then an issue. I would ignore it.