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How long has it been since you deleted the old sitemap and provide the new one ? I think your Google account may just need some extra time to update correctly. it seems to me that Google updates in my WMT account seems to have a little lag time. I think it will update correctly after a few weeks to a month. I don't think you have any actual problem as much as Google is not actually finding and updating new info correctly. I would wait and see what happens after a short while. Joe

Hello Santaur, I'm afraid this question isn't as easy as you may have thought at first. It really depends on what is on the pages in those two directories, what they're being used for, who visits them, etc... Certainly removing them altogether wouldn't be as terrible as some people might think IF those pages are of poor quality, have no external links, and very few - if any - visitors. It sounds to me that you might need a "Content Audit" wherein the entire site is crawled, using a tool like Screaming Frog, and then relevant metrics are pulled for those pages (e.g. Google Analytics visits, Moz Page Authority and external links...) so you can look at them and make informed decisions about which pages to improve, remove or leave as-is. Any page that gets "removed" will leave you with another choice: Allow to 404/410 or 301 redirect. That decision should be easy to make on a page-by-page basis after the content audit because you will be able to see which ones have external links and/or visitors within the time period specified (e.g. 90 days). Pages that you have decided to "Remove" which have no external links and no visits in 90 days can probably just be deleted. The others can be 301 redirected to a more appropriate page, such as the blog home page, top level category page, similar page or - if all else fails - the site home page. Of course any page that gets removed, whether it redirects or 404s/410s should have all internal links updated as soon as possible. The scan you did with Screaming Frog during the content audit will provide you with all internal links pointing to each URL, which should speed up that process for you considerably. Good luck!

thx u.

As usual, a good answer from Chris Menke. Santaur, you asked: "Should I keep the SubCategory page "Men's Ski Clothing" if it helps usability? " I say "Yes". If it helps usability, as sub-category pages often do in this type of situation, you should keep them. You can add content to sub-category pages to help them rank better for phrases that will bring in the RIGHT customer from the SERPs, even if they don't know yet what specific product they want. For example: "Overstock Ski Jackets" or "Discount Ski Jackets" would align with your client's value prop, target high-converting keywords, and bring in the right visitor to the right page.

You do have some content and it uses your keywords.  That's good.  Perhaps a little more content might be helpful, but I've gotten pages to rank well with very little text content.  Remember, that SEO is a balance of a lot of different signals.  If you are a little light on some (like being light on text in your case), then you can make up for that with some of the others (like getting more links and social shares). Kurt Steinbrueck OurChurch.Com

Useful info on FTC http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/ftc-2013-disclosures/

No I don't think you should worry about this at all. Yes, link juice is passing to those social media sites but this is a good thing. This does not affect your PR by any means, it just means what juice that has entered your site will also enter (at a degenerated rate) the social pages. But that doesn't mean the link juice passing on is decreasing the juice that originally came to your site.. Does this make sense? Link juice is a confusing concept. It drips into your site, and then drips into external links, but that drip doesn't empty your pool... bah. I think the juice reference is what's confusing about this because why wouldn't juice move on and leave?! But it doesn't. In other words, let juice flow to your social media pages. That's a good thing. It means those pages will start to rank better as well further promoting your brand. Especially for a company like yours where I think you could really capitalize from a strong/hip social media presence. As for having the repeat links... It's really up to you. Clearly, as I said, your site is heavily reliant on social media so perhaps it makes sense. Google Analytics can tell you where people are clicking..perhaps you should look at that and see if people are actually clicking your footer links. But I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about this it isn't going to penalize you by any means. **This is all just my humble opinion. (I feel like that should be my signature heretofore)

Were you able to get this taken care of?

To expand on Oleg's answer: Canonical really only works when the page content is largely the same as well.  It is meant for when the same content can be accessed from different URLs. In the case of pagination the content will not be the same, so it is really the wrong tool for the job.  As Oleg says, the best answer would be to use the pagination markup.  However you can also get around the reported duplicate titles by simply appending the page number (for all pages after #1) in the title. So rather than top pages of "your results" you have "your results", "your results : Page 2", "your results : page 3" etc. It's a bit of a waste of title tags and also could impact CTR if any of those pages are ranking. However it is a solution to at least be aware of.

Here is my simplistic take: Create a logical site hierarchy that works for UX. Don't worry about link juice to pages like the contact page. Focus on linking to your most important (high ranking, high converting, revenue earning) pages from the home page and other high level pages.

Probably a safe way to go - even with images comprised mainly of images I'd be surprised if you saw a negative impact from the footer blurb, but I've been surprised before. To clarify: yes it's a good idea to mention your target phrase a few times, outside of your Title and H1 tags, in as organic a manner as possible. However, the "keyword density" most people discuss is related to calculating some percentage, attempting to determine the "optimal" density of the keyword phrase related to other copy. This is the "waste of time" I was talking about - sorry for the lack of clarity there.

Hey Santaur Happy to take a look but can you supply a link to your site? Cheers Marcus

I would opt for option 2, creating individual product pages to cater to the seasonal keywords. Perhaps ramp up the content you're creating within those seasons. Personally, since it's hard to determine when your latest SEO change/update will have an effect, I wouldn't mess with the core of your site for only a season. For example, you may make a change in the fall, but it won't affect your rankings until spring.

Thx Matt

Hi Antonee, There are many, many different reasons for duplicate content and while Darin's comments about Roger not discounting pages with noindex tags are spot on, my recommendation would be to read Dr Pete's epic post Duplicate Content in a Post Panda World before going any further. You might also find some value in this overview video about the Pro Tool with Adam Feldstein. There is also a great deal of information in the Help Hub, but if you are unsure of what your Pro Tools report is telling you, you can contact the Help Team from there.They will be able to take a look at the specific campaign for you and clarify anything that is difficult to understand. Hope that helps Sha