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When "noindex" is added to a page, does this ensure Google does not count page as part of their analysis of unique vs duplicate content ratio on a website? Yes, that will tell Google that you understand the pages don't belong in the index.  They will not penalize your site for duplicate content if you're explicitly telling Google to noindex them.

Is there a chance that even though Google does not index these pages, Google will still see those pages and think "ah, these are duplicate MLS pages, we are going to let those pages drag down value of entire site and lower ranking of even the unique pages". No, there's no chance these will hurt you if they're set to noindex.  That is exactly what the noindex tag is for.  You're doing what Google wants you to do.

I like to just use "noindex, follow" on those MLS pages, but would it be safer to add pages to robots.txt as well and that should - in theory - increase likelihood Google will not see such MLS pages as duplicate content on my website? You could add them to your robots.txt but that won't increase your likelihood of Google not penalizing you because there is already no worry about being penalized for pages not being indexed.

On another note: I had these MLS pages indexed and 3-4 weeks ago added "noindex, follow". However, still all indexed and no signs Google is noindexing yet.....
Donna's advice is perfect here. Use the Remove URLs tool.  Every time I've used the tool, Google has removed the URLs from the index in less than 12-24 hours.  I of course made sure to have a noindex tag in place first.  Just make sure you enter everything AFTER the TLD (.com, .net, etc) and nothing before it.  Example: You'd want to ask Google to remove /mls/listing122 but not example.com/mls/listing122.  The ladder will not work properly because Google automatically adds "example.com" to it (they just don't make this very clear).

Here's the Google documentation on multilingual and multi-regional websites: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

You will also want to read up on hreflang here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

I would personally go with example.com/mx

I don't understand the question... I looked at the city page and I see the proper canonical tag, but I'm not quite sure what your issue is.  What do you mean by "still getting canonical is crawling." -- Can you elaborate a bit?

Hey there, Brant!

First off, I would recommend that you change the color of the links in your paragraphs so they stand out.  I like to also make them underline when they're hovered over.

As for having "too many links" -- Matt Cutts recently came out and said that the previous '100 link per page' limit has been lifted.  Here's the video from Nov 2013: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHG6BkmzDEM

It is very unlikely that the current # of links on your homepage is hurting your rankings.

I considered that but didn't really see any reason this site would add links to our site and then quickly remove them.  I've seen crazier things though....

I actually just finally figured it out, though.  They are displaying our site through a damn iframe.  There's a link hidden in the jumbled mess on their site that says "View Website" -- I missed that before.  Since it doesn't actually link to us, crawlers weren't finding it and my source code search for our URL didn't find it either.  However, Google is reporting it as a link, which is strange.  The "View Website" link really just links to another page on their own site that shows our homepage in an iframe.

I've noticed that there is a domain in WMT that Google says is linking to our domain from 173 different pages, but it actually isn't linking to us at all on ANY of those pages.  The site is a business directory that seems to be automatically scraping business listings and adding them to hundreds of different categories.  Low quality crap that I've disavowed just in case.

I have hand checked a bunch of the pages that WMT is reporting with links to us by viewing source, but there's no links to us.  I've also used crawlers to check for links, but they turn up nothing.  The pages do, however, mention our brand name.  I find this very odd that Google would report links to our site when there isn't actually links to our site.  Has anyone else ever noticed something like this?

Canonical will pass link juice almost exactly like 301s will, so there's no harm in going that route.  Matt Cutts explains that in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA

You sound like you're good to go.  You've got duplicate content worked out, and you've got a plan to retain link juice (canonical).

Ah!  I misunderstood the bit about reverse proxying.  In that case... to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure.

When you setup a reverse proxy, what happens to the sub-domain?  Does it go away or does it still exist live?  If it remains live, you'd end up with a duplicate content issue.

EDIT >> I found this at the source you linked to (which answers my question) -->

"The next thing you can do is add a robots.txt file to the sub-domain that stops robots from indexing it. As Reverse Proxying keeps the requested URL the /blog/ URLs will use the robots.txt from the main domain rather than the sub-domain.

The final (and most extreme) thing you can do is to register Google Webmaster Tools for the sub-domain and remove it from the index. If you are doing this, you need to do it in conjunction with robots.txt."

You need to setup 301 redirects for ALL of the pages and posts on the blog sub-domain to their new locations in the sub-folder.  This is very important.  Without the proper redirects in place, you will lose all value from links pointing to the blog sub-domain, plus all the history, authority, and rankings that the pages have earned.

As for your reasoning to move it from a sub-domain to a sub-folder, I'm not sure you'll receive any sort of link juice boost on your root domain from doing this.  Maybe someone else can prove me wrong/correct me...

I'm not sure I will ultimately be able to help answer your question... but I wanted to let you know that your question isn't currently giving enough information for someone to be able to help.

1. What duplicate page content are you referring to exactly?  Title tags?  Content on the pages?  Product descriptions?  Something else?
2. What is the "Magento robots" file?  Probably a robots.txt, but what's it say in the file?
3. You're getting 3616 errors where?  Webmaster Tools?

Happy to help

And I took a quick look at the backlink profile for subconsciouschange.com... definitely spammy.  A nice cleanse will get you on the right track!

It's a good idea to include your main keyword in the meta description because when Google does show your custom meta description, the keyword will be bold if it matches the search query.

However, keep in mind that meta descriptions do not help your rankings at all.  Google announced this a while ago.  Despite not helping rankings, meta descriptions are still useful because they may help increase click thru rates on the SERPs

Matt Cutts did a good video on meta descriptions back in November 2013: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4gr88oHb-k

The site just launched?  It sounds like I am right, you just need to give Google some time to drop the page from the index.

When you find the homepage in the index, and you click the link, do you get redirected?  If so, Google will eventually drop it.

AJ,

I took a look at your backlink profile and it's pretty clear what the problem is.  You basically have nothing but spam backlinks (I will PM you examples).  It looks like there was a big influx of links around September 2013.  Did you pay someone to do SEO about 6 months ago?

Your site doesn't look bad, but it's got some instances of over-optimization (again, I'll PM you examples).

You should definitely verify Google Webmaster Tools, if you haven't already, and check to see if you have a manual action against you from Google.  After looking at your backlink profile, I would be surprised if you don't have one.  However, if you don't, it may be coming soon.  If you don't know how to do the backlink cleanup and reconsideration request yourself, it would be a good idea to hire someone with experience.

Imran,

I looked at semrush.com and it looks like you had a spike of traffic in August 2013 and then it quickly died back down.  I also looked at your backlink profile and I see that the overwhelming majority of your links are from blog comments.  It's okay to have some blog comments but you don't want that to dominate your backlinks.  You also want to be sure that you're using your actual name for the anchor text of the link (and you are, so that's good).  I also noticed that you have some links from other sites linking to you, like androidcentral.us.  Since you also own that website, you're effectively creating your own little link network, which could become an issue, if it's not already.

The quality of the content is also lacking.  There are a lot of grammatical issues and that may be because English isn't your first language.  Your English isn't terrible, but Google wants high quality and unfortunately the level of English on your site won't be considered high quality.

What you should do is work on getting more high quality backlinks and diversifying your backlink profile.   I checked a few of your pages on copyscape and they didn't turn up any duplicates found.  Assuming this content is actually 100% unique and not just spun/rewritten from another source, you should also have someone fix up the grammatical issues.  If the content is spun/rewritten from another source, start adding new content that is completely unique and original.  You also need to remove the "Example Widget" text in your sidebar ASAP.  That makes your site look incomplete.

If you haven't already done so, please check Google Webmaster Tools to make sure you didn't receive a manual penalty from Google.

I have not heard of any websites receiving a penalty from Google due to the Hummingbird update.  In my opinion, there is something else going on that affected your rankings.  I would not recommend you delete your domain and redirect posts to another domain.  That isn't solving the problem.  That's just a way to try and avoid the issue.  Like I said, a penalty can follow you to your new domain.

Are you referring to the androidrootcental.com website in your tagline?  Or is this a problem with another website?

Dillon,

Thanks for the additional explanation.  I do see the canonical tag in your code and see that it is being placed by Yoast's WordPress SEO plugin.

Honestly, you should not worry about the trailing slash.  Google and Bing are intelligent enough to understand that .com and .com/ are the same website.  You are receiving credit for your backlinks regardless of whether or not the trailing slash exists on the link.

Having said that, here's how you can remove the trailing slash if you still really want to.....

Login to your WordPress backend as an administrator and look for "Plugins" on the left menu and go to "Editor" within the plugins menu.  From there, find the dropdown menu near the top right and go to "WordPress SEO".  On the list of files that display on the right side, find "wordpress-seo/frontend/class-frontend.php".

In that file, use CTRL + F to find this line of code: $canonical = home_url( '/' );

Remove the / within the ' '

Click on "Update File".  Refresh your homepage and you will see that the trailing slash is gone from the canonical tag.  Keep in mind, this is a hack.  When you update WordPress SEO, this will most likely be overwritten and you'll have to do it again.

I would steer clear of removing 250 blog posts from the other web properties.  They may be driving traffic to those websites.

The client is requesting 250 particular blog posts to be rewritten.  This isn't the best content strategy in the world, but that's what you're being asked to do, so the BEST way to handle it is to completely rewrite every post so they are 100% unique.

If you were to remove the blog posts from the other websites and simply post them on the new website, you're running the risk of taking traffic away from the already established websites.

"Would google pick up on the fact that these blogs are already appearing elsewhere on the web and thereby penalise the new site for posting material that is already indexed by Google?" -- Yes, you run the risk of being penalized by Panda with such a large amount of duplicate content.  Google wants to rank websites that provide value to visitors.  If a website is entirely made up of content that already exists on another website, you're providing no added value to visitors.  Again, you could remove the content from the other websites and 301 redirect to the new one.... but you're taking a lot of value away from those websites if you do that.

First of all, I assume that by "using the keyword" you just simply mean an instance of it on the page somewhere.  If you happen to be referring to the meta keywords tag, that's a whole other topic, but you shouldn't be using that meta tag.

Anyways, there is nothing wrong with using the keyword "gear oil" on multiple pages.  Since there are different types of gear oils available, it's simply unavoidable, and Google understands this.  Imagine you have a site about food, and on that site you have a lot of pages about pizzas.  Pepperoni pizza, sausage pizza, sardine pizza, Hawaiian pizza, etc.  In this scenario, it would be as if you're posting the same question as you did, but asking if it's okay that you used the keyword "pizza" on multiple pages.  Of course that's okay

The whiteboard Friday from a couple days ago actually discussed almost exactly what you're asking.  You should definitely check it out: http://moz.com/blog/keyword-targeting-density-and-cannibalization-whiteboard-friday

3 competitors is the maximum that you can add for the rank tracking.