Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Many thanks for your help Laura.

That's what I was thinking so will do as you suggest.

thanks

Peter

I am basically wondering , If these duplicate content pages are affecting my local rankings for pages that I do have unique content for or not ?

Yes , I understand that changing the NAP won't create a unique content page.

What I was getting at , is say for example. I have 30 location specific pages for a given category each with their own specific location friendly url.

10 location pages will have totally unique content on them with minimum 500 words of goodcontent.

20 Remaining location pages, will have the same content apart from the NAP and the main keyword phrases bought in. I know this doesn't make the content unique.

I therefore have 33% unique content, 66% duplicate content against this category for the 30 locations.  Given that I am probably getting some form of duplicate penalty , would it be better for me to 301 my pages with duplicate content back to the main category page , therefore the category will only show 10 locations ALL with unique content ?.. or can I get away with say only doing 301's on say 10 location pages, so I end up with 10 locations of unique content , 10 locations of duplicate (but with unique nap) and the last 10 locations 301 to main cateory page , therefore the ratio is 50% unique content for the category.

I am wondering if I should be getting rid of all of the pages with duplicate content in there or whether I can get away with a small percentage..And whether this is affecting my rankings on my pages which I do have unique content written for?

thanks

Peter

Hello All,

I have an Ecommerce Site specializing in Hire and we have individual location pages on each of our categories for each of our depots. All these pages show the NAP of the specific branch

Given the size of our website (10K approx pages) , it's physically impossible for us to write unique content for each location against each category so what we are doing is writing unique content for our top 10 locations in a category for example , and the remaining 20 odd locations against the same category has the same content but it will bring in the location name and the individual NAP of that branch so in effect I think this thin content.

My question is , I am quite sure I we are getting some form of algorithmic penalty with regards the thin/duplicate content.  Using the example above , should we 301 redirect the 20 odd locations with the thin content , or should be say only 301 redirect 10 of them , so we in effect end up with a more 50/50 split on a category with regards to unique content on pages verses thin content for the same category. Alternatively, should we can 301 all the thin content pages so we only have 10 locations against the category and therefore 100% unique content.

I am trying to work out which would help most with regards to local rankings for my location pages.

Also , does anyone know if a thin/duplicate content penalty is site wide or can it just affect specific parts of a website.

Any advice greatly appreciated

thanks

Pete

Hello All,

We want to split up our Sitemap , currently it's almost 10K pages in one xml sitemap but we want to make it in smaller chunks splitting it by category or location or both. Ideally into 100 per sitemap is what I read is the best number to help improve indexation and seo ranking. Any thoughts on this ?

Does anyone know or any good tools out there which can assist us in doing this ?

Also  another question I have is that should we put all of our products (1250) in one site map or should this also be split up in to say products for category etc etc ?

thanks

Pete

Many thanks both

I previously had locations in these places but now we don't hence the 404's.

thanks

Peter

Hi All,

We have been streaming our site and got rid of thousands of pages for redundant locations (Basically these used to be virtual locations where we didn't have a depot although we did deliver there and most of them was duplicate/thin content etc ). Most of them have little if any link value and I didn't want to 301 all of them as we already have quite a few 301's already

We currently display a 404 page but I want to improve on this. Current 404 page is -  http://goo.gl/rFRNMt

I can get my developer to change it, so it will still be a 404 page but the user will see the relevant category page instead ?

So it will look like this -  http://goo.gl/Rc8YP8   . We could also use Java script to show the location name etc...

Would be be okay ? or would google see this as cheating.

basically I want to lower our bounce rates from these pages but still be attractive enough for the user to continue in the site and not go away.  If this is not a good idea, then any recommendations on improving our current 404 would be greatly appreciated.

thanks

Pete

Many Thanks Jeff

Much Appreciated.

Pete

Hi All,

I recently relaunched a new design on my tool hire eCommerce website and now display my products in grid form on my category landing pages as opposed to just a list view which we previously had on the old design.

My bounce rates are alot higher than they use to be and my gut instinct is telling me maybe this is wrong . I want to do some a/b testing using a list view.

My question is , previously in our list views we  just showed the images and pricing and had on page content on the bottom of the page. The user would click on the product image and they would then we taken to the product page which has the product description , t&c, etc etc..

1. If I was to do this in my a/b testing but change it so we also displayed the product descriptions as well on the category landing pages . Is there a special way to do this as in effect, we would have duplicate content as the product descriptions are also on the product page?. Does anyone have any thoughts on this as to whether its a No No from an SEO point of view ?...

Heres a short url link to one of my category pages - http://goo.gl/QJv5gw

Historically we use to rank well for the category landing pages and not for the product pages.Our Rankings are down , bounce rates are higher so I am trying to sort both. We have good content on pages etc.

Any advice greatly appreciated as always

thanks

Pete

Many thanks to everyone for their comments and help on this. I will def. take all on board and will have a read of your blog post as well Andy.

I did see lots of 500, 522 errors in GWT but that could be related to my CDN (Cloudflare) so will investigate that as well.

hopefully things will sort itself out.

Many thanks

Pete

Hi ,

We used do wedding hire aswell but we disavow those links we could not get removed and tidied up our link profile where we could. We have a few directory listings which we have kept but they are for citation purposes.

Thanks

pete

Hi All,

I've just checked my rankings and everything on my eCommerce Site has pretty much tanked really badly since my new URL structure and site redesign was put in a place 2 weeks ago.

My url structure was originally long and had underscores but we have now made it clean, shorter and use hyphens. We also have location specific pages and we have incorporated these into the new url structure.Basically it now pretty much follows the breadcrumb trail on our website.

We were originally a general online hire site but now we have become niche and only concentrating on one types of products, so we got rid of all the other categories/products and pages we do not deal with anymore.

Our Rankings issue , was only bought to light in the most recent MOZ Ranking report so it's looking site google hates our new store.

Someone mentioned the other day, that Google may have been doing a Panda/Penguin refresh last weekend, but  I am surprised to have dropped like 20 to 50 places for most of my keywords.

We have set up the 301 redirects, We have also made the site alot smaller and set up a few thousand 404's to get rid of a lot of redundant pages . We have cut down massively on the thin/duplicate content and have lots of good new content on there. We did new sitemaps , set up schema.org. , increase text to code ratio . Setup our H1-H5 tags on all our pages. made site mobile responsive.. Basically , we are trying to do everything right.

Is there anything glaringly obvious , I should be checking ?.

I attach a Short url link if anyone wants to have a quick glance- http://goo.gl/7mmEx

i.e Could it be a problem with the new urls or anything else that I should be looking at ?.. I.e how can I check to make sure the link juice is being passed on to the new url ?

Or is all this expected when doing such changes ?

Any advice greatly appreciated ..

Pete

Many thanks LindaLV

Pete

Hi All,

We implement most things on our Website that is recommended and most recently we did Schema.org. However, one area which we haven't done is fix our W3 Validation Errors.

My developer thinks they are not so as such and it's more about ticking the boxes but does anymore have any experience whereby fixing all these did actually have an SEO /Ranking Benefit ?..

Most of our URL'S are indexed and google recrawls regularly so I am not sure as to it's importance.

Also we have a mobile responsive version so I wasn't sure if it more important because of this.

From what I read, I can't see to any benefit from fixing it all but just wanted some other opinions?

thanks

Pete

Hi ,

Sorry, Do you mean using Fetch or something else ?.. We have almost 10K pages so how can I re-crawl the site in Webmasters  ?..

We have submitted new maps and I can see from the stats that Google Did crawl the site last on Friday 14th .

thanks

Pete

Hi All,

We changed out url structure on our website to both reduce both the size of our category url structure (reduce the number of layers '/ ' )  and also to replace the underscores we originally had to hyphens... We did this during a new site design. Anyway we relaunched it a week ago.

We did the 301 redirects from old to new , new site maps etc, and the latest moz ranking report is showing most of them dropping 5 to 10 positions  i.e from 3rd to 10th etc...

Is this something to be expected , and then it should recover or should this be telling me alarm bells.

I would have expected not such a negative shift in all my rankings ?..

Anyone thoughts of this would be greatly appreciated...

thanks

Pete

.

Hi Both,

many thanks for you help.

Pete

Hi ,

I have it as well. Cannot log in.

Pete

Hi All,

We upgraded our framework , relaunched our site with new url structures etc and re did our site map to Google last week. However, it's now come to light that the rel=next, rel=Prev tags we had in place on many of our pages are missing.

We are putting them back in now but my worry is , as they were previously missing when we submitted the , will I have duplicate content issues or will it resolve itself , as Google re-crawls the site over time ?..

Any advice would be greatly appreciated?

thanks

Pete

Hi All,

We have just redone a site wide url migration (from old url structure to new url structure) and set up our 301's etc but have this one issue whereby I don't know if' it's a problem of not.

We have 1 url - www.Domain.co.uk**/**  which has been set up to 301 redirect back to www.domain.co.uk

However, when I check the server response code, it comes back as 200.

So although it appears to visually 301 redirect  if I put the url in the tool bar, the status code says different.

Could this be seen as a potential duplicate home page potentially and if so , any idea how I could get around it if we can't solve the root cause of it. This is on a cake php framework,

thanks

PEte

Many thanks All. I will take your advice on board

thsnks

pete