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It should not affect your rankings. Just make sure you take out any references to insecure (http) files so that the pages are fully encrypted.

If you focus on getting links from high quality, relevant directories, that will not hurt you.

If the directory accepts every link that is submitted to them, that's when you are going to start running into trouble.

Tough call. In general, if used excessively, Google frown's upon it.

Excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you")

However, I've seen plenty of sites rank very well with just these kinds of links.

1. Link only to relevant pages that you believe supplement the purpose of your site

2. Make sure your link quantity is not unruly - if you have 300 links just thrown on a page, users trying to find a specific link will get confused. Try to add value to your links and make sure they are are manually reviewed.

If you really want to do it right, don't make a links page for the sake of reciprocal link exchanges. Instead, try to link to helpful sites naturally and ask them to reciprocate the link.

And of course, don't link to or get links from crappy sites.

I'm pretty sure you don't need to worry about that for duplicate content.

I've never used Shopify but believe they host the website for you. In that case I would ask them to fix this issue for you. Here is .htaccess code to remove trailing slash though:

RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ $1 [R,L]

1. remove bad links (via contacting webmasters and disavow - make sure you KNOW what links are low quality before removing)

2. continue writing unique, high quality content (about relevant topics that get searched and would ideally be shared)

3. build new high quality, relevant links (reach out to other sites that link to related content and give them a reason to link to you)

Follow those 3 and you should be golden.

Could be a www v non-www issue. I'd have to know the site URL to tell you for sure.

Just add more content to the product pages then.

If you have your site layout right, a review page shouldn't conflict with a product page... if anything it should promote it and funnel in better qualified leads.

Your code should work, add it then test a dynamic url via GWT > Health > Blocked URLs

You can also set custom parameters to either be tracked or not tracked via GWT > Configuration > URL Parameters

Not sure how you are checking. I clicked through the first 10-20 links and found a few that didn't redirect.

• http://www.funeralcoverfinder.co.za/index.php/extras/definitions
• http://www.funeralcoverfinder.co.za/index.php/extras
• http://www.funeralcoverfinder.co.za/index.php/component/content/
• http://www.funeralcoverfinder.co.za/index.php/extras/blog-posts

Definitely go through every link and double check.

Check this out for joomla canonical link setup

It won't be automatic and depends on how often google crawls your website. Link to your site from some social sites to make it happen faster. In addition, noindex the old site (via robots and a tag on the page). The more direction you give G, the faster it will fix all the links.

where? In general, you should write about things that people are searching for.

Cool general tip though: Go to industry related forums > newbie section > read some of the questions being posted and write up some awesome articles answering those questions.

'training' is definitely considered to be a synonym of 'course' (search for "~training") - just a matter of to what degree.

Run some queries in google and see how different they are. If you get the same results, they are exact synonyms. If the listings change, see how many of the same domains/pages are the same. That should give you a good idea whether they are considered close synonyms or not.

Its because your new site is a duplicate of your old site (the listings that appear in SERPs). I would 301 all the pages from the old version to the new one and create canonical links on the new pages. That should fix your problem.

Is this possible that having similar content (90% the same in some pages) is something bad even when they target different countries ?

Yes, there was a Panda and EMD update around Sep 27 which could have affected your website traffic. Are they EMD? If not, it could be Panda - which focuses on low quality and duplicate content.

Does google send some kind of notification if your site gets penalized ?

No, unless there was a manual review of your website - in which case they would send you a notification via Google Webmaster Tools.

Re-written all the text, in order to show completely different texts, would it help getting back the organic traffic ?

Yup, that's how you recover from Panda (for the most part).

One thing to keep in mind is that you will probably lose your rankings for that 2-4 week period. So do it ASAP but not during a peak sales period.

Usually, you would only put links you want indexed into the sitemap.xml file. GWT is just letting you know some of those links you posted are being blocked by robots (and wont be indexed). Shouldn't hurt your rankings if you don't want to index those pages anyways.

Check out the Optimization > Sitemaps > # errors link in GWT for more details.

You all get similar links? It's a good strategy to find links that competitors have and try to get the same ones because..

1. you know they work since your competitor is ranking (strong links)

2. they are linking to sites very similar to yours so you would be a good fit (high relevance)

yes, yes, yes

I've added author to non article/blog post pages and had it appear in SERPs. Having the image in the listing usually improves CTR.

Stumbled upon some additional information and decided to update you...

According to the internationalization FAQ...

Q: <a name="q5"></a>Can I use automated translations?
A: Yes, but they must be blocked from indexing with the “noindex” robots meta tag. We consider automated translations to be auto-generated content, so allowing them to be indexed would be a violation of our Webmaster Guidelines.

So if you decide to autotranslate the text, you should use a noindex tag instead of the hreflang tag.

You can just use a canonical url and have both pages. Ideally, you would noindex the /tags/kw and link to /kw directly from everywhere but that would probably require a decent amount of work.

Yes there is but there was an update this weekend that lowered the value of exact match domains (emd) and partial match domains (pmd)