Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Marisa, glad you were able to get the redirect set back up. Hopefully someone can help you with this secondary issue. htaccess can be pretty complex!

Sorry I couldn't be of more help in that area.

Geoff - have you tried another tool which uses a different index. It could be that OSE does not have your links indexed. Try Google webmaster tools, Bing webmaster tools, or another tool which tracks inbound lnks.

Erin, it does take some time for these changes to happen. That amount of time varies per site and it can depend on your authority. Your site is less than a year old and according to OSE has little to no inbound links to it. Keep working on the content and drum up some excitement about the site.

What are you doing to drive interest in your website?

Hi Marisa,

I had to dig, but is the site you are speaking about the one in your profile? When I check the header status of the https page I get a 200, meaning the 301 isn't being recognized. If you are referring to a different site please disregard.

I don't see why not, if the SERP display is the same, then it should have the same chance of increasing your click through.

I would say that would be a great test. Try a few videos using embedded youtube - so you can get more views (as you stated is desired) and a few self hosted. See if you can get them both to get an enhanced SERP display and watch the traffic.

One of the things you'll hear Rand stressing lately is how enhanced your SERP result is for your site. I believe that by self hosting and properly optimizing (video sitemap and related content) you could see higher click through for pages which get a video snippet in the SERP. You take up more real estate in the results and draw the users eye in. This could get you higher CTR and in the end more video views.

From what I've seen, Google is sophisticated enough to look at the bigger picture of your content - prior to handing out penalties. It is likely they will compare the two pages, identify the duplicate content, hit the 301, and proceed with that directive. If you've set it all up properly you should be alright once they get through all of that crawling.

I'm also not completely sure, but you mention 13 pages returned... meaning 13 pages of results, or 13 pages from your site indexed?

Using the site; operator I get 10 pages of results meaning many pages indexed from your site - not just your homepage.

What do you mean by, only your homepage is indexed?

If you are trying to get a feel for indexed pages, I'd use the info provided in Bing webmaster data.

The other thing I find useful is to do an exact phrase match (putting quotes around a phrase from a page) for content to verify that a page is in fact indexed. If you choose a unique phrase, and it does not show up after an exact phrase match, it might not be indexed.

The search engines often show a representation of results when using that advanced operator.

Not 100% positive if google will remove these from the webmaster tool report. I suggest doing an exact phrase match query, using quotes, around content from the duplicate pages. If only your desired page shows up, the canonical tags are probably functioning.

Do you need to keep both versions of the pages?

How long ago did you add the canonical tags?

When you have this type of situation you can either 301 or Canonical the duplicate pages - 301 adds the value of perhaps better user tracking as all the traffic organic or not will funnel to the desired page.

Google will have to cycle through all of these pages, hit the canonical tag, make the association, and update your webmaster tools report. Depending on the authority and crawl rate of your site this could take a matter of days, to a number of weeks for this entire process to run through. If you have the tags set up already its unlikely that you'll see much of a negative impact, but once complete you may notice better indexing of your desired pages and hopefully better traction on conversion.

You can tell that the code is working if you go to the live code of the undesired page, check the source and make sure the canonical points to the desired page. After that it's up to Google to do its thing.