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I typically use this in an .htaccess file:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^[0-9]+(.[0-9]+){3} [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.yourdomain.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Explanation: If it is an ip, doesn't start with www, or doesn't have the www, rewrite it to the http://www.
2 ways:
If you are going to be leaving the first "indexed" one up for the time being add in a canonical as soon as you can. If not, 301 it to the new one. It may be indexed, but I don't see a benefit to it since there isn't any description to the ones you already have in there and they probably aren't ranking:
Hello Zack,
That is an issue that they are working on, I know this because I already discussed this with one of their help desk people. Here is the page that describes the changes: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/brand-new-open-site-explorer-is-here
In addition to that, here is some additional information I can share with you:
you may see “questionable” links with weird file extensions. This is due to the crawler reaching much deeper into sites where there are more download links. We are looking into fixing this bug as soon as we can so these won’t be counted as links.
A few other points.
site:templatemonster.com/flash-templates.php
Doesn't show anything, (except the few items which you have blocked by robots.txt, so that is normal) which leads me to believe you had an issue as Ryan said on July 19th. Luckily they kept you in the results for "Flash templates" even with a different page.
I would also advise to add descriptions to all pages at the same time you are adding canonicals. Why does the 'Problem' page flash-templates.php not have a description tag? Perhaps a coding issue that is causing this issue as well?
If you are doing it as a way of formatting the page and still offering an option or button that allows the user to see the rest of the text, then it is not the same thing that you are thinking of in regards to Google. Google states that you should not hide text on the page to purposely try and trick the search engine.
In E-Commerce situations it is very common to hide part of the text, for instance when you have 4 tabs for "description, features, specification, colors, etc." it is a good idea to use a 'display: none' so that all 3 of the tabs are not shown all the time. This is not considered Black Hat, it is considered good design.
Matt Cutts has said quite a few times, if it is good for the user it is good for Google.
It is when you intentionally hide a block of text on the page with no way for the user to view it that you are using Black Hat technique.
Are you looking for a shared hosting, VPS, private server?
I have 2 VPS's and admin 3 private servers on Liquidweb.com with zero problems with the servers or getting support. The support questions were billing and modifications to the servers, not server related hardware or software issues.
Glad that helped.
There's a few different ways to get across this depending on who is coding it and how the backend is setup.
In Example 1 you can do:
The htaccess rule will look like:
RewriteRule ^Ship-to-(.*)/$ /your-php-script.php?school=$1 [QSA,L]
with the page being:
http://www.dormroommovers.com/Ship-to-Arizona-State-University/
So the "Arizona-State-University" will be the search term for your database query, which looks like the way you are currently doing it. Now there are 2 drawbacks to this:
In example 2 we move over to using a numeric value which also has 2 drawback:
The htaccess rule will look like:
RewriteRule ^Ship-to-(.)-(.)/$ /your-php-script.php?school=$2 [QSA,L]
with the page being:
http://www.dormroommovers.com/Ship-to-Arizona-State-University-23/
So the "Arizona-State-University" is just for SEO value, and the value of the item we are looking for in your database query is $2 since it is the second variable (.*) in our URL string or '23'. Using Auto Insert Id in the database table for the schools makes sure that there is only 1 item with that ID and the database will automatically INDEX that column to make it faster for searching.
The drawbacks:
Now, you can also do caching to keep the database from doing additional queries on pages that do not change, or don't change that often.
Other things I would look into to get rid of the duplicate content is;
Can you currently:
If not, have that stuff worked in. Just changing out the school name is going to cause problems with duplicate content if it is not already.
Let me know if I answered everything.
A few issues with this situation. I wouldn't move the seasonal stuff to the home page if they have their own pages, and the way it is being done here is creating duplicate content. I have never seen this done before where someone if moving an internal page to the home page and looking to have a canonical from the home page to an internal page. I would probably recode it so that it is an item featured on the home page and not the full home page.Adding in a canonical and changing out the canonical will most likely do more harm than good.
A better situation might be to redirect the home page to that seasonal page, but I would still venture towards having it as a featured item on a home page that is in fact the home page.
As for the internal stuff, you have duplicate content. Just changing a few words on the page doesn't reduce it that much, and your descriptions aren't really changing at all. Since you have very few colleges I would create individual pages for each college, make the content different by including the teams, campuses, etc.
Usually anything after a ? in the URL is considered the same URL. Granted on Page 6 (for me) using the site command:
Shows the full listing of schools.
Using a canonical to the page:
/How-Ship-To-School-Works.php?School=Goucher College
I would advised against, and am not really sure it would do what you want.
If you want to still use the pages with the duplicate content you can use an htaccess and rewrite the individual colleges to that script, so you don't have to recode anything. you could then canonical to those versions. So using the above example change it to:
/move-to/Gougher-College/ or /Gougher-College/ etc.
RewriteRule ^/Gougher-College/$ /How-Ship-To-School-Works.php?School=Goucher-College
Nice catch. I agree it should be:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ $1.php [R=301]
If you are doing this to all pages on the site you can knock it out with an htaccess file like this:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ $1.php [NC]
The amount of juice you will lose will be made up in the long run by having the keyword in the page name.SEO should be a long-term goal, and having the keyword in the page name is the best situation.
I have, and would recommend, doing it.
I'm assuming that you are doing it on a new domain company and not buying old domain names, and these domain names are the same as the main company to make sure no one else has them or types them in wrong.
In this scenario lets assume we are using mydomain.com and bought mydomain.biz. I would, if using cPanel, use a parked domain which is an alias and use an htaccess to make sure that all incoming traffic are using or 301'ed to the correct domain.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
This will keep you from having duplicate content, and having to create a few sites and redirect them either through Javascript or other means like a php header("location: http://www.mysite.com"); .
Hope that helps.
As Ryan said, do 301's. You don't want to have the old versions up and canonical them if you don't have to.
Imagine the confusing surfers that land on something because of an old link, and then click around and end up on the new version.
I would venture to say GWT for a few reasons:
If it is a Fan page, and you have a FB account, you will be able to just add yourself as an admin. There shouldn't be a separate login.
Oh that would be evil, especial just after another update.
Would certainly keep SEO's on their toes, and cause me to pull out more hair trying to rationalize some of the things I have seen over the past week.
Hello Bob,
The nofollow keeps your site from passing link juice through the link. We have this option for situations where we either don't want the link juice to flow to the other site, or we don't know who the other site is (ex. comment links). This does not mean that the link will not be followed by the search engine.
If it is a shady site, I would use a nofollow, but I would also question why I am linking to it. It does not hurt your site to have follow links unless they are questionable. I have seen many sites with decent PR that have link pages with 100's of links on them.
In your example I don't see where you are linking to other domains. Are they your other domains? Are they companies that don't need anything. I have not had an instance where linking to a good company has hurt anything.
Is there a best practice?
If it's a good link, let the juice flow, if not, question why you are linking to it.
Linking to a site that is considered an authority or brand in the niche will align your site with that site and could help you in the long run. Birds of a feather.
There are other ways to link to sites without using the a href such as by incorporating javascript, but in a situation like yours I would not even think about it.
Is it a Fan page? I have had this problem already, here is how you know the difference:
With fan pages you can have multiple admins.You would log in to Facebook as yourself and then go and admin it.
If it was done as a personal page, where you have to login to that account, you might have a problem on your hand as there is no administration on something like that.
In my opinion:
If it was done as a personal page I would start by creating a Fan page and then just posting on the current one for everyone to go and 'Like' the new one because the current one will be shutting down. It will take a few weeks for everyone to move over and you may loose a few who don't log in to FB anymore.
There are advantages to doing it as a Fan page including:
As Steve stated, "What do you mean by 'similar' content?"
Please make it easier on us and post links to the items in question, there could always be more going on than you're aware of.