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Hi there!

What you need to do is note down which two pages are causing the duplicate META DESCRIPTION and then log into Wordpress and go and edit those posts or pages.

At the bottom of the page editor are boxes for title and meta description, so you will need to change one or both of them and then republish the page.

Let me know if you need screenshots as I have a couple of clients who we use Yoast's SEO plugin as a part of managing the on-site SEO.

Thanks,

Martin

Hi Doug,

And I did not presume you could or couldn't do those things, but I didn't word my post in a way that was condescending...explaining things step by step is not always appropriate because I would rather presume knowledge on a forum like SEOmoz than presume ignorance.

So, I hope you were not too offended by my presumption of knowledge.

That being said would you like me to explain what to do to achieve the above points? I am more than happy to do so, by the way.

• On the volume of links - if it is a large-scale issue then another solution would be to have a non-SSL version home page, but on login they are taken to a different SSL 'member welcome' or 'dashboard' sort of page. That way you can retain the link value to the non-SSL version while providing the necessary security over the logged-in functionality.
• On the question of non-SSL links to SSL page ... any extra 'diversion' required between a link and its target has, in my experience, the propensity to reduce that link's effectiveness. even the effects of 301's diminish over time because the presumption is that the page you are 301-ing to is the correct 'new' one and is therefore more relevant, which is why I initially suggested getting links 'fixed'. As your initial post did not suggest the scale of links I could not have replied in a more precise way.

So I do suggest you consider implementing the first bullet point above as a good compromise and will retain the value of your links but permits the SSL implementation as well.

Let me know if I can help further or if you need more things explaining so that you know how to go about doing some of the things suggested. Thanks.

My first question back at you is why is your hosting company deciding your canonical structure for you? a hosting company should just host and you should be using canonical tags and .htaccess to sort out your own canonical URLs. So my gut reaction is to change hosting company.

After that:

• Open Site Explorer - put both URLs in and see which ones are being linked to and which has the highest value.

If you're not a PRO member then take the 30 day trial and use OSE to sort this issue out. You'll be glad you did.

After that... seriously as a web designer & SEO, not having control of my own URLs would annoy the heck out of me, so change hosting provider. That'll be the second biggest favour you could give yourself

Slightly opinionated, I know, but at the end of the day it's your website not your host's.

I haven't looked at your site, because I don't want this post to come over in the wrong way. Here's my opinion

• Get an SEO to do a website audit and get a comprehensive list of issues that need fixing
• Get a developer on board who can deal with the platform/CMS your site is built on to fix the errors they feel qualified to do and to leave ones they don't.
• Go back to the SEO who did the audit to complete the rest, because if they're not web people, to be useful in SEO then they should know web people to help.

If you can find one company you can trust who have both web and SEO skills in-house that's even better for efficiency. But go meet with some first to give yourself some options and then make a decision. Some time and thought will help you make a good decision as to who to hire and why.

Right, one of our clients fits this bill exactly. So here goes:-

• Do a 301 redirect of all impacted URLs in the .htaccess or web.config file (depending on the type of server)
• Ensure the sitemap.xml contains the HTTPS versions only.
• Find out who's linking to your pages and using the HTTP and ask them to update the link to https
• Do a double check of all internal links (which should have relative paths anyway) and make sure none refer to HTTP

If you do it well it shouldn't negatively impact it at all. Positive? Well, depends on the competition I suppose, having a HTTPS shows care for your community and providing a secure service is a good thing, but I wouldn't expect much of a nudge based on this alone.

This is a tough one, particularly as Google Places is one of big G's most inconsistent products. The additions I would have would be

• Are other websites listing the business in precisely the same location/address?
• Have you used microformats on the address on-site?
• Have you submitted a geositemap.xml file?
• Has the business got ratings and reviews from their customers/clients?

If I think of anything else I'll edit this post

I think you need to look beyond Page Rank. Make sure you set you FB page to show info rather than timeline/news feed by default for non-fans.

Look to other stats such as visitors from your FB page and then use your FB wall well to influence your SEO in a natural way

A couple of questions for you:

• Do you link to your FB/Twitter pages anywhere?
• Have you got your FB page set to display the 'Info tab' first before people become a fan?
• Have you shared your FB/Twitter pages on the other platforms.

It takes time for both GWT and OSE to track all links. The important thing is whether you're getting human visitors to your site from FB/Twitter, not whether they appear in a database

Firstly, do you mean a HTML sitemap (i.e. a sitemap page on a website) or an XML sitemap (one that is submitted to Google/Bing for indexing)?

If both links go to the same page, then it's not duplicate content. Duplicate content is the same stuff on different URLs.

If an internal sitemap has two links redirecting to one end page then this is highly inefficient and the links should point directly to the end page.

That being the case, then only one link is really needed.

If... after all that you meant an XML sitemap, then it's not duplicate content to have it listed twice, but it should be only listed once in this case.

Can I say I admire your inventiveness?  You go to some lengths to not register and really, apart from the majority of people not knowing how to do a reverse image search, probably reflects people's attitude to those sorts of lightbox registration forms.

OK, well if it truly doesn't make sense (does sound odd, and it does seem like you've done the redirects fine) and three months is more than long enough for GWT to have caught up I'd take the above approach and periodically download the 404 list and seeing if there are any additions, as well as seeing if maybe Bing Webmaster Tools agrees with GWT.

If everything is redirecting fine, then I'd be inclined to just disregard it for the time being and focus my energies elsewhere. Good luck with it!

Maybe temporarily stop the 301 on the old site. Re-run your crawl reports and see if there were any 404s in existence on the old site that you hadn't previously thought. Plug the links and then reinstate the 301?

Either that or, if you're sure there's no problem, download the phantom 404s to CSV and then only take note of additions to that list in future?

Don't disallow: /*?

because that may well disallow everything - you will need to be more specific than that.

Read that whole article on pattern matching and then do a search for 'robots.txt pattern matching' and you will find some examples so you can follow something based on others' experiences.

I suggest then you use pattern matching in order to restrict which parameters you don't want to be crawled.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449

Heya there,

Thanks for asking your question here

My first point would be that human visitors don't like to be given forms when they first visit a site, so would suggest you don't do this.

My alternative strategy would be to provide a home page of good content talking about the data etc that is available on your site and then provide a button for people to register if they want to.

Don't detect the user agent and provide alternative content as, however good your intentions are, that could be considered cloaking. Google is against you providing Google different content to humans, so don't do it.

Do things differently

If you can't tell where the links are coming from then the next bet is as Ben said is to identify the URLs which are being linked to and 301 them to a page which is closely related (or the home page otherwise), that way you don't lose any potential visitors to your site via those links.

I'd say the first thing to say is that NOINDEX is an assertion on your part that the pages should not be indexed. Search Bots have the ability to ignore your instruction - it should be rare that they do ignore it, but it's not beyond the realms of probability.

What I would do in your position is add a disallow line to your** robots.txt** to completely disallow access to

/patio-umbrellas?canopy_fabric_search*

That should be more effective if you really don't want these URLs in the index.

You're welcome, glad I could help

Thanks for the positive feedback

If you're seeing more YouTube results then maybe it's because those things are more relevant for the search you're doing. In which case you have to look at them and see why they are more relevant, as that may be affecting your SEO campaign. If you need to get a video done to compete, then so long as it's quality and relevant (and done professionally, not rushed) then do that.

Otherwise, just treat the new videos as a normal competitor and analyse it accordingly to see why they outrank other pages.

SERPs change and algorithms change, so how you approach your SEO campaign as to change over time as well.