Welcome to the Q&A Forum

A second one you may want to check out (Think its free, forget) is Concept Feedback.

Ok, well that case it just may not be cached yet, i know that being indexed and cached do not necessarily happen concurrently, and the cache should catch up in a few weeks.

Im trying to find some resources to back this up now.

Easy way to be sure is to do a quick search on Google to see if they are ranking. If you know for sure the Parameters make no difference its usually better to specifically signal that through the WMT console. While Google tend to be pretty smart at these kind of things they can always make mistakes so may as well give as much info as possible.

We use bing and see the same as Stephen and Branden report, however for our market segment (Financial) we also find this chanel to be better risk with lower bad rates. Evidently not sure how this would correlate to other segments but an interesting behaviour for us.

No worries. A canonical is not the same as a 301 however. You should be able to keep the translated pages and allow users to view them, a canonical will signal to search engines only that these pages are the same. A 301 will redirect users to one version of the page too which removes the value of the translated content for your users.

Here's another Q&A thread i was involved in yesterday focusing on Cannonical tags that should make this clearer.

Please do keep me posted, always interested in the outcomes.

Thanks, Tom.

The question mark sign signals the beggining of URL parameters. This will not impact your keyword however if the URL parameters do not significantly alter the content of you page then this could cause duplicate content issues as Search engines will see each parameter variation as a unique URL.

Search engines will try to identify these but to help them out you should Discount URL parameters in Webmaster tools for the respective search engine (Not just Google), and to avoid link equity being lost or dilluted implementing the Rel=cannonical tag to the page and referenceing back to a sensible root page version will mean all your inbound links work together.

Hope this helps.

You have several options, while you can never stop someone coming to your site and actively taking your content you can attempt to trip them up, particularly if they are using automated tools like scrapers. There a are a few article out there (like this) that go into details but common recommendations you will see include things like adding links to your text and images that go to other pages in your site, often the sites stealing the content will then inadvertently include  link back to you in their pages. To avoid issues of low quality link from these sources you should probably make these no follow to be safe. Then there is authorship etc. although that’s not quite right for product descriptions etc., though you could investigate the feasibility of this.

Other than that there is enforcing your copyright but to do so you need to locate the stolen content. Again multiple tools out there such as copyscape that Remus mentioned, but again a quick and easy one would be to set up Google alerts to look for that content. Then you can contact the webmasters and utilise DMCA takedown requests etc if necessary.

But if you are looking for methods to physically stop people taking your content im not aware of a fool proof one i am afraid.

Hope this is helpful.

In respect to Google and other search engines they will determine the language based on the content. So other than having unique URLs for the different content normal site structure considerations come into play. I would also be inclined to use a subfolder and Google's webmaster guidelines for multi lingual sites show no preference.

Heres the relevant bit:

_Google uses the content of the page to determine its language, but the URL itself provides human users with useful clues about the page’s content. For example, the following .ca URLs use fr as a subdomain or subdirectory to clearly indicate French content: http://example.ca/fr/vélo-de-montagne.html http://fr.example.ca/vélo-de-montagne.html_

Signaling the language in the URL may also help you to discover issues with multilingual content on your site.

Hope this helps.

Short answer no.

To use the disavow tool you need to be logged into webmaster tools, and you need to use the disavow tool under the profile of the relavent site. As such Google will know that any links you are trying to disavow are associated with, and only authorised for, the site you have signed in under.

Hi Tim,

Yes a canonical tag is useful for resolving duplicate content, and acts in a similar fashion to a 301 from the perspective of search engines and passing of link juice, yet allows users to view the original page. So the use depends on the context of your duplicate content issues.

For example say you have a common issue, multiple versions of the home page under /, /index.aspx and /home these are all versions of the same page, no content has changed, what the user sees is not reliant on anything in the URL. In this case a 301 is your best bet back to the root version of the page you want, it shall also help prevent people building links to the various versions as when they take the address from the URL bar it shall already be the version you have selected.

Now say your a retail site selling frogs (Don’t ask, i have a fondness for using frogs in my examples) and you have a product listing page of all the frogs you sell. this could stretch over multiple pages and be paginated. For example /frogs, /frogs?page=1, /frogs?page=2 etc. In this case you don’t really want all these versions of what is effectively the same page ranking, particularly as content won’t change much and can be seen as duplicate. Additionally you don’t want any link equity being split between all the paginated versions however you DO want the user to be able to view these pages. In this case the use of Canonical can be perfect (or rel next/prev but I’ll ignore that for now)

Now it gets a little more complicated and we begin to get to the areas where you can hurt yourself from an SEO perspective. Say your customer can sort by clolour of frog aswell, this adds another parameter to your URL and more duplicate content. i.e /frogs, /frogs?colour=red, /frogs?frogs=blue. Here you can do the same as above and canonical back.

This is where the potential danger lies - The URLs you have canonicalled back will not be ranked in search engines, now say Red frogs are a massive seller and really popular with customers, you may want this page to rank, and canonical tags can prevent this. This is the kind of situation that can cause you a mischief. Have a read of Dr Pete’s 'What page is canonical below' for a more detailed explanation.

Hope this helps you out.

Thanks, Tom.

Heres a few extra resources you may or may not have already discovered:

• Canonical the new 301?
• What page is canonical
• Canonical URL Tag, most important development in SEO since sitemaps

I would recommend trying to get things right and going to the lower case format. As you mention it will save you headaches further down the line by keeping to a simple convention.

You can reduce the impact of the redirects by amending your previous ones to point to the new directories, this will prevent a redirect chain and you will lose less. You should then additionally redirect the new URLs of course.

Dependant on the types of inbound links your site has (and volume) it may also be worth a little outreach to other sites asking them to amend to the new final destination format.

Good luck however i know what a pain it is, I've done many site migrations myself.

Hi,

there are many reasons why these sites may be ranked above you, without doing an audit of your site and your competitors i cant advise exactly what this may be, but this white board friday by Rand may be of use to you. theres also this suplimentry article although this focuses on going beyond Moz metrics.

The ones with no links may be new and enjoying their 'holiday' period, you can check out things like that using the Who is directory among other tools to see when the domain went live.

I wouldnt expect its solely URL structure, although generally the further down the URL structure your keywords appear the less weight they carry, this is only a single and relativley small factor. having no social to may not be a deal breaker, its certainly an important up and comming factor, but could be compensated for by other things. Take a nosey at the latest pole on 2013 ranking factor weightings to see what the comunity see as important at the moment.

Sorry i have not given you a definative answer, but hopefully given you a few more things to consider and look into.

Thanks, Tom.

You should be ok, Google is ok about this type of boiler plate text, the fact you are also adding unique content to the pages to is even better as you are not replicating the entire page. There has been a recent video by Mat Cutts on the issue which you can find a write up on in Search Engine Watch.

Hope you find that useful.

You should be ok just to replicate it, but by all means use the opportunity to refresh the content, 6 pages shouldn’t take too long. If you want to be extra safe then you can of course just rewrite from scratch. The Penalty will be at the domain level so you should be ok to redirect the existing pages to the New URLs, this will signal to Search engines that the pages have been moved and not to count the redirected pages as unique content, avoiding Dupe content issues. You can also use a cross domain Canonical tag.

If you don’t want to do any redirects to totally severe your links to the old domain profile then remove the original pages from Google’s index in your webmaster tools account and ensure you return 410 status codes to individuals that request the page. If you do still want the users to redirect however 302 the page to the new location as this won’t pass link equity.

Hope this proves useful.

I would also agree with Baldea and David here, be careful not to Keyword stuff the Home page.

You can include your desired terms within elements of the page if they are relevant / to help the home page rank for those terms, but a product specific page is always going to give you the most scope to target all page elements effectively.

The Page title is only one element, SEOmoz's on page optimisation tool should be useful for you in working out how effectively you are targeting the phrase and what trade-offs are available to you.

In addition to Lynns point it would be worth discounting these URL parameters in Google webmaster tools and bing in order to avoid any possible duplicate content issues, rather than leaving it to them to work out which will also avoid the case Lynn mentions for organic search (A case we also expoerienced with a client!)

We had exactly the same issue with a client. They had simply re-hosted their site under at least 10 other domain names they owned in the misguided perception that this would improve their SEO.

They were all hosted on the same server as your latest response seems to state, and we tracked them all down by doing a reverse IP lookup using this tool.

We then had to ammend the clients DNS records for the duplicate sites and 301 them to the true site. The same site later recieved a link penalty and we then parked those domains ratyher than redirected.

Ok, well in wordress you can access the HTML by going to Appearance>editor and you will see the options on the right hand side. However do you use any SEO plugins such as Yoast?

Ok, well you can set canonical tags in Yoast. Without seeing you site set up or the offending pages i am hesitant to give more detailed advice. Best of luck.

Which particular URL are you looking at?

I have just crawled the site and the Meta titles being reported are the same i see in the HTMl (that i looked at, the crawl is 6.5k pages allready and only half way through). When i searched for your URL in Google got the home page back as you would expect and see Hull mentioned in the title, but it was in you meta title too.