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Hi there,

The copy is exactly the same - bar the product name - on both pages. Although it's a pain, it's better to have completely unique copy on each product page.

Hope this helps,

Lewis

Hello,

You're correct. www.ourdomain.co.uk/products/category/subcategory/theproduct1 shouldn't have a rel=canonical pointing to /products. You can either remove the tag altogether or change the tag to point to itself:

You currently have a tag pointing towards /products, which means it's likely Google will disregard the page you want to rank. Sometimes, if Google thinks you've made an error, they'll ignore the rel=canonical. But it's better to be safe than sorry, so remove/amend it.

Cheers,

Lewis

Hello,

There was a good post on YouMoz the other day: The Power Of Basic Technical SEO.

I'm not going to check your site as the subject seems very NSFW, but your Search Metrics Visibility score seems to have taken a massive tumble (see pic).

Your score was only 10 at the start of October and had increased to 1,600 in just 4 short weeks, which looks like a very unnatural growth rate and would suggest you've been employing some black-hatted tactics...

Have you received a message from Google in Webmaster Tools regarding a penalty?

YxRVea4

Hi there,

You'll want to 301 all of the old URLs to the new ones in order to transfer any authority the pages have built up. Canonicalling will not pass any link juice, so I wouldn't do this.

Cheers,

Lewis

The Page Authority will be 1 as it'll be a brand new page. You don't create a page with an instantly high PA, it has to be earned. Take the BBC, for example; if they create a news story today the page will have a PA of 1 but a  DA of 100, but most SEOs would love a link from the BBC!

News websites are constantly adding new pages as new stories break. It's unlikely these types of pages will get huge PAs as, let's face it, yesterday's news won't continue to attract many backlinks after day one or two of the story breaking.

Keep up the good work! You should certainly see some positive results if you keep building links like that!

Cheers,

Lewis

Hi Corn,

I think you already know the answer to this one... you're going to have to go through each product manually and make sure every description is unique and informative for potential clients. You can't automate decent content. If you don't have the resource to do this, think about outsourcing the work via PeoplePerHour or Fiverr.

Ignore duplicate content at your peril. But, in my opinion, it's not worth the risk.

Cheers,

Lewis

Greetings,

Not everyone has the luxury of being able to afford subscriptions to all the top SEO and marketing tools. So if you could choose only one, not including MOZ, which would it be? Screaming Frog? Ahrefs? SEMRush?

Discuss.

Lewis

According to Open Site Explorer, you only have one external link going to your site.

Here's a step-by-step guide on how to use the disavow tool if you do have some dodgy links - http://moz.com/blog/guide-to-googles-disavow-tool

Hope this helps.

Lewis

It's fine for me on Chrome. Chrome also has a whole load of useful marketing and SEO add-ons that can make your job easier!

Not entirely related, but your site isn't mobile-friendly. So from next Tuesday, you may start seeing a drop in traffic if this is not addressed.

Hi Hamilton,

There certainly has! Check out the update page over on Mozscape.

Cheers,

Lewis

Good topic.

A few of things I've noticed after a quick look:

• The PA of the desktop version is 1, whilst the PA of the mobile version is 43
• The MozRank of the desktop version is 1, versus the mobile's 3.83 mR
• The desktop version has no backlinks
• The mobile version has 50 backlinks from 1 domain
• The desktop version has a really awful dynamic advert either side of the content
• The desktop version has the following tag - href="http://www.rottentomatoes.com/dvd/" rel="canonical" itemprop="url" /> - could this mean Google is ignoring this page? The mobile code has no such tag

I'll be interested to see how this pans out.

Cheers,

Lewis

Your page has thousands of 301 redirects - this could be slowing it down and affecting ranking.

Cutts says that social signals aren't part of the algorithm, but, after his research, a certain Mr Patel would argue the case!

However, the article you have posted has obliviously stuck a chord with so many people, so I can't see any issues. Moreover, at the end of the day, Google is all about rewarding useful content - so keep up the good work!

A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect and should only be used if you want to redirect your site visitors to another page for a short period time. Ultimately, you will remove the 302 once it has served its purpose. As this is only a temporary redirect, it will not pass its 'link juice' to the target page as Google thinks you'll be removing it after so long.

If you plan on removing these 302s in the near future, then it should be fine. However, if you're wanting customers to be redirected permanently then you should change these to 301 redirects.

Also, if you have tons of redirects it could affect your site's speed/performance.

Thousands of 302 redirects doesn't sound quite right, though, so I'd pull all of the 302s, review them and see which ones need removing or changing to 301s.

The site's pretty new, so it may take some time. According to Moz, you have no backlinks to your site and a DA/PA of 1. Just keep up with what you're doing, build some decent links and you'll soon see the fruits of your labour.

Lewis

Hi there,

You need to figure out if colour variations are competing with each other in the SERPs. If not, the best option would be to allow customers to choose a colour via a hover-over or drop-down menu that's built into the page's interface. If you choose this method, the URL will not change and there's no need to canonicalise or worry about duplicate content.

If, however, potential customers are searching for a specific colour of the product via Google, you may want to create separate pages for all variations and write unique content for each. It can be a pain for your writers, but needs must!

I hope this helps.

Lewis

Yeah, true. I guess social activity may not be part of the algo, but certainly improves your organic presence, albeit indirectly!

Sounds like you have your work cut out for you. I don't see the point in having Moz if you can't use it for all of your sites. 50 websites seems an absurd amount of SEO for one person to deal with. I'd be sitting down with the CEO and advising it's simply not possible to do a decent job with just one person.

If you want to use Moz, you're going to have to upgrade to a premium package. Get some more staff in. I'd be tempted to ask for an SEO for every two or three sites.