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Perfect! Thanks for your help Kristen

Thanks for the tip. I've never spotted that before!

I've tried to find the answer to this question myself, but I've found differing opinions. The conclusion I've come to is that Stackoverflow allows follow links when the user that posts the link has sufficient reputation or if the link receives user validation.

Has anyone else here used Stackoverflow.com that knows the answer to this question?

Thanks for answering my question Dirk! I found the deeper follow up conversation interesting as well.

Could someone help me with a 'what if ' scenario please?

What happens if I publish a piece of content on an external website, but then later decide to also put this content on my website. I want my website to rank first for this content, even though the original location for the content was the external website.

Would it be okay for me to put a rel=canonical tag on the external website's content pointing to the copy on my website? Or would this be seen as manipulative?

Thank you both - and sorry for not replying earlier. It sounds like we have some work to do

A lot of pages on our website are currently indexed on both their http:// and https:// URLs. I realise that this is a duplicate content problem, but how major an issue is this in practice?

Also, am I right in saying that the best solution would be to use rel canonical tags to highlight the https pages as the canonical versions?

Thanks for your reply Monica. The blog is a landing page where the separate blog posts were listed, which is what I think you are suggesting so I'll go ahead and recommend that we do the re-directs to the corresponding page.

Thank you all for your replies - it's helped to get my thinking right

I’ve come across numerous blogs recently that suggest that SEOs should NOT do bulk re-directs to a category page. This has come as something of a surprise (doh!!) and I feel like I should already know this. It does seem like there is lots disagreement here so I thought that I’d ask what people’s opinions were to make sure that I get my thinking straight. I've read all the main Moz blog posts on this topic and, although really useful, they've left me none the wiser around a few specific questions.

Here’s some more detail about the situation. We’re currently consolidating a lot of content into a main blog, which will be the focal point of new blogs posts that are created. This is different to the past, where we tended to create separate blogs for different products on separate domains. I’m currently considering how we move content across from one the older blogs to this new blog (which will soon sit on a subfolder of our main domain).

I have three (!) questions:

1)      Could you confirm that doing bulk re-directs a category page is bad? I already know that doing them all to the homepage is an error.

2)      Should I re-direct the home page of the old blog on a separate domain to the relevant category page on the new site? The category page is related, but does not cover the EXACT topic. The category page covers our replacement product offering. It I shouldn't do this, where should I re-direct the old blog domain to?

3)      I’ve recommended that we set up 301 redirects on a one-to-one basis, redirecting each piece of content to its new location on the old site. What about content that has been earmarked for removal and for which there is no obvious alternative? My previous recommendation has been to re-direct these pages to the most relevant category page on the new blog. Would it be better to let this 404 or, as an alternative, create a custom 404 for the users on the new blog highlighting the new content that we offer?

Any help would be appreciated

Thanks for your thoughts Linda - much appreciated

We've recently moved to using YouTube for embedded videos on our site. We have a number of videos that are embedded and then a larger number of videos which are part of our YouTube channel.

I've been reading recently that it's possible to get Google to list embedded video links pointing to your site rather than to YouTube itself. I am interesting in driving traffic directly from the search results to our pages rather than via YouTube. Could somebody provide a basic step by step guide on how to do this please? Or is this something that is not possible? I've been doing a lot of research online but, sadly, can't work out how to do this.

Thanks for your reply Everett, that definitely answers the main part of my question,

I'd be interested if anyone has any experience in using the Confluence add-ons for SEO?

I’m currently trying to implement Matt Cutt’s advice from a recent YouTube video, in which he said that it was better to have no meta descriptions at all than duplicates.

I know that there are better alternatives, but, if forced to make a choice, would it be better to remove all duplicate meta descriptions from a site than to have duplicates (leaving a lone meta tag description on the home page perhaps?). This would be a short term fix prior to making changes to our CMS to allow us to add unique meta descriptions to the most important pages.

I’ve seen various blogs across the internet which recommend removing all the tags in these circumstances, but I’m interested in what people on Moz think of this.

The site currently has a meta description which is duplicated across every page on the site.

Thank you all - basic stuff I know. All three of your answers put together answer my question so excellent stuff.

It's interesting that even when I've moved onto more complicated SEO concepts a simple issue coming out of the blue is the one that throws me. Maybe this shows that sometimes it's best to keep things simple?

Thanks Marc for answering what is in many ways an unfair question.

I definitely agree that the long term objective should be different and relevant meta descriptions as you say. It's also good to know that each of the approaches I suggested were ultimately bad practice, even if one of them is less bad than the other.

They are a society that is linked to an academic institution. I don't know if there are any other factors pushing them from ac.uk to co.uk I'm afraid. It sounds like this is something that I should clarify with them when I talk to them.

Thanks for the advice!

Thanks for the clarification Don - much appreciated

Excellent - thanks for your responses guys, that's a great help!

Could someone help me with a 'what if ' scenario please?

What happens if I publish a piece of content on an external website, but then later decide to also put this content on my website. I want my website to rank first for this content, even though the original location for the content was the external website.

Would it be okay for me to put a rel=canonical tag on the external website's content pointing to the copy on my website? Or would this be seen as manipulative?

Thanks for answering my question Dirk! I found the deeper follow up conversation interesting as well.