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Check your crawl report. Every link will be listed along with the error (404 in this case). After locating each link check the referrer field. That field shows the URL of the page for the broken link.

Alex,

I would highly recommend crawling your website and examining the crawl report. If Google is indexing these pages, then they got to them on your site at some point. I would proceed with the idea in mind this is a web design issue, not someone trying to ruin your rankings, as you suggested.

The crawl report will show the referrer page which can help troubleshoot the issue. When you have pages generated by a CMS or other software, there can easily be issues like the one you are experiencing. In my experience this is the most likely cause of your issue.

You mentioned there are 100s of these pages in the index. If you can determine a pattern they match, it is possible you can 301 all of them with a single rule, sending the user to your main category page or where ever you feel is best.

You can also set up a parameter specific instructions in Google WMT. I would avoid doing this until after you have reviewed your crawl report. From your Google WMT dashboard > Site Configuration > Settings > Parameter handling tab > find or add your parameter and adjust the setting as you deem fit.

Adding hundreds of pages at a time is not a concern. There is not any reason to throttle the release of the pages.

The bigger concern is the quality of the content. The highest quality content often takes multiple days of a full-time person performing research, locating images, etc.

A helpful video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JByPymBtXFY

Why am I getting this [duplicate content] error?

Because the pages are almost exact duplications of each other. I compared the black and camel colors and there was only one sentence on the page which was altered, along with 3 images and the selected color option. 95% of the pages are identical.

Is there any best way to address?

Yes, the canonical meta tag is designed for this type of situation. A search engine will presently crawl all three pages and then pick one page to index. Rather then the search engine make the choice, you should. I would recommend adding the canonical tag to the headers of your HTML code. Pick whichever color is the most popular and present it in search engines.

If you feel it is really important to have all three pages indexed, you could take another approach. Add additional content to each page which is unique. For the black shoes, you can add images of someone wearing them with matching outfits and add content about famous people who were seen wearing those shoes. Also you can allow users to add comments to each shoe. The comments would add additional uniqueness to each page.

If you choose the latter approach, it is very important you write for readers, not for the search engines. I know your end goal may be to have the page indexed, but if you add junk content, or simply re-arrange words and replace synonyms search engines will likely detect it and downgrade the page's ranking.

how much link juice might we lose? I've seen the figure of 10% bandied around. Is it accurate?

I am not aware of any solid measuring tool which can offer an exact analysis of how much link juice is lost. All the information I have ever encountered offers the 10% figure as the maximum amount of link juice lost. The actual figure is 1 - 10%, not a flat 10%.

might we see a temporary dip in results? If so, how log would it last.

The loss of link juice is permanent as long as the re-directed links are used. Once your migration is complete, Google and other search engines will update their links as they crawl the site. This can take several weeks depending on the size and depth of the site. Once complete, then all of your search traffic will go straight to your site.

You can further help by cleaning up your site. Often you may have articles with anchor links using the old URL. If you update these links to the new URL, then they wont require the re-directs. This change is important because readers often copy your content and paste it to other sites. Use your crawl report for this process.

The last thing you can do is try to update anyone who links to your site with your new URL. In many cases this may not be feasible. Sometimes you have a strong relation with a site who links to you, and can request for your link to be updated. This also works with any directory links to your site.

In summary, you may see a dip but that is not likely. Links are just one of 200+ factors involved in calculating your placement in search results, and the re-direct juice loss is very small. You should gain a boost by the .com name along with the keyword added to your URL. Your benefits should outweigh the cost.

My head is swimming with Matt Cutts videos which is not healthy. If someone asks "is it better to have keywords in the path or page name" my instant thoughts are "Alex Black"..."Green polo shirt"...not bald.

If you don't get the joke, don't worry. You are probably better off for it!

There are a couple factors which stand out:

• your site is a .br ccTLD. A .com can do just as well if it targets brazil but most .com domains are targeting other countries. Your site would receive a significant boost in .br searches.

• you are searching a very long tail keyword phrase. There are 4 words. Your page title and URL both contain all four words. A check of AdWords shows no search data at all for this phrase.

It is very easy to rank #1 for a search term with no competition. Just create a web page, optimize for a longtail phrase and you will likely be in the #1 spot for the phrase.

Hi Felicity.

I'm sorry to hear your moving experience hasn't been as pleasant as you hoped. It sounds like your issues are not with the move itself, but the merging of two sites. Please let me know if I am mistaken.

Issue #1 - Page A outranking Page B. You want to evaluate your entire site and determine which pages you wish to rank for each relevant search term. If you have a page from the blog ranking for "Garden Art" but you also have a page on your main site ranking for the same term, you NEED to make a decision, or else Google will make it for you.

It sounds like you prefer the page on your main site to rank for garden art. That's great. The 301 you added works, but it is far from an ideal solution. First of all, your users now have to be 301'd from your old Garden Art blog page to your site, then another from the blog page to your main page. You are leaking link juice on the double hop. IF you were to keep this solution, then go back to your old blog site and 301 the category directly to your main Garden Art page.

The better solution is to optimize your blog for another keyword phrase. For this example I will use Garden Decoration as the new phrase. Replace all of the "Garden Art" phrases in the title, description and page with "Garden Decoration", except for maybe 1 or 2 instances. In those cases, use anchor text on "Garden Art" to direct users from your blog to your website page.

This process allows you to keep all of your existing content and sends a clear message to Google that your main website page should rank for Garden Art, not your blog page.

Issue #2 - You are missing meta tags on 500 pages. Which meta tags? Description? Title? Every page should have unique meta title tags and meta description tags. If it is another meta tag please let me know which one.

Issue #3 - Is it ok to leave the long URLs? You could do so, but I would fix them. I run into these situations all the time. Do I leave something alone, or do I commit time and effort to fixing a problem to the way things should be. I usually vote for the latter unless I know there will be a better opportunity within the next year (i.e. site redesign) in which case I will plan to make the change then.

The bottom line, you merged two sites and made some mistakes. Fix all the mistakes. Make the changes using the best known practices, and then most of your traffic should be restored. IF the change was a good one for users, then you can even see an increase in traffic.

**How big a factor is no follow in ranking?**No follow links do not impact rankings. The links are treated by Google as if they don't exist for ranking purposes. With that understood, Google can still follow the nofollow links so they can help with having your site's pages crawled more frequently. Additionally Google may use nofollow links in certain computations to detect spam. **What is the major factor in the seomoz "trust rating"?**Links from "trusted" sites. When you earn a (follow) link from Harvard.edu, WhiteHouse.org, Time.com or other "trusted" sites, your mT rating will improve. The closer a site is to a "trusted" source, the higher the amount of trust which will be passed. MozTrust is helpful to consider in combination with a site's other metrics. To learn more about moztrust visit this link: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/moztrust**Does high no follow rate impact trust factor?**My best guess is nofollow links are ignored, but I would love to hear an official answer on this question.

Hyphens should be avoided in domain names. If your site is "California-Realty.com" you will definitely lose a percentage of your site's visitors to CaliforniaRealty.com. If you do use a hyphen, do not use more then one or it would be considered spammy.

I have also seen where a weak site in an easy market  will quickly top the list because the hyphenated domain name matches the search term

Ranking for non-competitive phrases does not require any skill. If you have a site "xyzpdq.com" you can create a web page "Humpty Dumpty ranks well in Google". You can make a ton of SEO errors but as long as your page title and header tag matches the above phrase, you are likely to rank as #1 for it.

The entire point of SEO is competition. If you want to rank for something that no one else wants, it's all yours. The challenge is to rank for a phrase for which others want to rank. I checked "fort meyers auto air" and you do indeed rank as #1 for that term. A check of Google AdWords Keyword Tool shows this phrase to be non-competitive with no monthly searches. I would much prefer to rank #5 for a phrase which receives search traffic then #1 for a phrase which receives none. One way in which "bad" SEOs promote themselves is by sharing how many non-competitive keywords for which they were able to rank well.

Additionally, many searchers will look at the site URL before clicking on it. The problem with spammy URLs is even if you manage to rank well, your CTR is reduced which devalues your ranking.

I agree with Alan 100% on the re-direct.

My initial reply was lengthy and perhaps my point wasn't clear. I am still struggling on balancing my desire to offer good advice versus directly responding to the original poster's question.

My advice to Felicity is to keep both the blog page and the website page discussing Garden Art IF the pages are not duplicates and each offers unique content. In that case, each page should be optimized for different key words and the current 301 from the old blog site should be maintained.

My direct response to Felicity's question about her action of how the blog page was effectively removed by 301'ing the URL to her website page is...if you are going to take that approach, then re-direct the old blog page directly to the website page. Don't use a 301 from old blog page to new blog page, then another from the new blog page to the web page.

If I could jump into a time machine, I would re-organize the way I responded to this Q&A to focus simply on the best methods which should be used, and not talk the methods which were used. Live and learn.

I have always been able to overcome client objections on this topic. If you can work with clients to produce a single, high quality article and then demonstrate the traffic it generates, that would help them to understand the value of content.

If the above suggestion is not workable, the next step is to find sources who would sincerely be interested in the site's existing content.

Another possibility, the client may not be willing to add content to their site but might consider guest blogging on another site which could raise the level of awareness about their site.

In the end, there are two sides to this coin. On the one side, people are free to choose what is best for them. On the other side, as a professional it is your job to help clients understand the benefit on adding quality content to their site. If you fail to do such, you have not done your job well. It's the same idea as a sick patient who visits a doctor but wont take their medicine. It's the doctor's role to present options and the patient to make the choice. On the other hand, a better doctor (think Dr. House) is able to push the patient into doing the right thing.

Regex is an expression language which is very useful for replacements. It is used for building dynamic strings whether they be for redirects, rss feeds, etc. I know Regex is used on *nix servers but I am not familiar with IIS redirects.

The bottom line, if you can verbally share a pattern of how the URLs should be redirected on your site, an expression can be created to represent that pattern. Even if that pattern only applied to 10% of the 3000 duplicate URLs, it is preferable compared to creating 300 individual redirects.

Unfortunately I don't have any good recommendations for you. I am working on building my first WP site so I can better understand how that popular software works.

I would recommend prior to merging the sites to look at your content from a SEO standpoint to avoid the issues Felicity encountered. Ensure your blog pages will not compete with your website pages for the same keywords.

The person who merges your site most likely will focus on the merger from the technical aspect of ensuring the content is physically located on the same server and redirects are in place. They would not be expected to consider SEO issues unless you specifically requested it.

When deciding if a technique is black hat, we need to specifically state which one of Google's Guidelines the presentation violates. Google's Guidelines are broken in to three areas: Design and Content Guidelines, Technical Guidelines, and Quality Guidelines. A quick review of the first two areas shows the page does not violate those guidelines. The question is whether this method violations Google's Quality Guidelines.

The only specific Quality Guidelines one would suggest this site violates is "hidden text and links". Clearly, the method used here does not violate that guideline. From the Google site:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66353

Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:

• Using white text on a white background
• Including text behind an image
• Using CSS to hide text
• Setting the font size to 0

So none of the "specific guidelines" are violated. The next question is whether the site violates any of the "basic principles". There is only one which causes concern:

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

The question is whether a Google Spam Team member would manually penalize a site solely for this particular issue. The spam team members are highly calibrated and must follow strict guidelines. In my experience they would not presently penalize such a page, but I would love to receive a definitive response. Even if the question was asked directly, we would likely receive general info rather then "yes this violates our guidelines" or "no, it does not". It does not seem to go far enough to violate the guidelines.

Either way, I would state my belief the presentation on this site (scasino.com) is not helpful for users and should not be used in its present format. If it was a rotating banner that automatically cycled through the 5 pages, then clearly it would be fine. The only reason the question arises is the user needs to take an action, clicking one of the numbers, in order for the content to display.

Google has come a long way recently. With their "Above The Fold" update and other changes, I am confident Google understands what content is immediately visible on the page, what content the user is likely to engage with (i.e. scroll down on the page) and what content users are unlikely to engage with (such as pressing these numbers).

I don't believe much in "grey hat". Something either complies with Google Guidelines, or it does not. With that said, this particular issue is subject to the interpretation of Google as to how likely a user is to interact with this setup, and whether they believe this technique was done deliberately to manipulate search rankings.

In summary, my response is NO, it would not draw a manual penalty.

A test was done a few months ago. While the test concluded a hyphen harmed the rankings, the test only involved one example (3 sites) and the content was not the same, although the content was moved between sites.

http://blog.silktide.com/2011/06/how-one-tiny-hyphen-destroyed-our-seo-efforts/

Bacon Dental Floss? That's actually a product? Wow.

I guess if Clamato juice is out there then why not Bacon Dental Floss.

I apologize but I needed to get that out of my system. As for your question, you desire readable URLs with keywords in them. So your second example is preferred.

The next step of improvement would be to use friendly URLs which strip the html extension. It would shorten your URLs by 5 characters and make them even more readable:  www.stupid.com/fun/bacon-dental-floss

I agree with Steve. One site is definitely the approach I would recommend. A few thoughts:

• The time, cost and efficiency of building and maintaining a single site is far better then trying to maintain dozens of sites. You will gain all the advantages of consolidation.

• .com addresses are very well accepted throughout the world. You can definitely rank at the top in local searches and compete with country-specific domains. If you wish to have a country specific domain, you can keep it and re-direct users to your .com. It's not what I would advise, but it would address the concern you shared about uses feeling less comfortable.

• You can also use geographical re-direction. A user from England can automatically be directed to your English page, while a user from Spain can be directed to your Spanish page. This could be a consideration.

• Your 2004 URL definitely gives you an advantage compared to newer URLs.

I could go on but, you have every advantage by moving to one domain. The only reason to take any other approach is your perception that a local URL is perceived as preferable over a .com. You might find for many people, the opposite is true. I have a lot of contact with Greek users and many of them will prefer doing business with a .com over a domain from their own country.

Hi Mike.

OSE is based upon the Linkscape crawl of the web. The crawl process takes 2-3 weeks, then another 1-2 weeks to crunch the data. OSE is updated approximately once per month with the next update happening on October 18th. Hopefully your links will be visible at that time BUT it may take another cycle depending on when those links were added.

You should also know Linkscape only crawls about 25% of the web based on page authority. This is actually effective because if a page is not crawled by Linkscape, it likely has little or no value as a link anyway.

One last note, you definitely want to request your writer to adjust their links to the correct URL format. You are correct you only lose a small amount of link juice, but that can be the difference of ranking higher on any given search. Additionally the greater risk is when you redirect a page on your site meaning the link has been double re-directed in which case the loss of link juice is amplified.

The question is, does anybody have a view on how long it is safe to use a 302 temporary redirect for? i.e., is 8-10 months to long.

302's are for very small time frames such as a couple days. If you are looking for a suggested max time for a 302 I'll throw a month out as an absolute max, and that would probably be too long. I would be interested to hear feedback from other Mozzers on this topic.

Given your circumstance, I would 301 the pages, then 8-10 months later when the merger happens cancel the 301.

As long as the sites which currently link to Site B maintain their links, and those sites maintain their authority, then site B would not lose it's link equity. You are merely passing 90%+ of that link equity to site B for the 10 month downtime period.