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So if 301 redirecting all of them is seen as negative, what is the best way to consolidate all of these sites?  I thought the purpose of a 301 redirect was to permanently transfer traffic from one site to another - which would mean that a 301 redirect would be the ideal method for consolidating multiple versions of an identical site.

In essence, is there a way to gain at least some advantage from the links that these sites of garnered over time?

My website can be accessed with a number of different URL's and I am trying to consolidate the traffic to one point.  Is there any problem, SEO or technical, with forcing all users who come to my site to going to our https domain?  I have already set a preferred domain in WebMaster Tools and set rel=canonical for each page.  For instance, anyone entering the below sites would be forced to land at https://www.1099pro.com.

• 1099pro.com
• www.1099pro.com
• http://1099pro.com
• http://www.1099pro.com

Hey,

I would be redirecting each entire site to a specific page on my chief website.  Admittedly, this means that there is some precision lost because each site is a copy of the chief site but all the affiliated pages on a copy link to only one landing page on the chief site.  For instance:

• www.1099softwarepro.com and all affiliated pages would redirect to www.1099pro.com/software.asp
• www.W2Professionals.com and all affiliated pages would redirect to www.1099pro.com/prodw2pro.asp

Hey,

My company currently has one chief website with about 500-600 other domains that all feature the same material as the chief website.  These domains have been around for about 5 years and have actually picked up some link traffic.

I have all of these identical web-pages utilizing rel=canonical but I was wondering if I would be better served, from SEO purposes, to 301 redirect all of these sites to their respective pages on our chief website?  If I add 500 301 redirects, will the major search engines consider this to be black-hat link-building even though the sites are related and technically already feature the same content?

For an example, the chief website is www.1099pro.com and I would 301 redirect the below sites to the chief site:

• 1099softwarepro.com
• 1099softwarepro.info
• 1099softwarepro.net
• 1099softwarepro.biz
• 1099softwareprofessionals.com
• 1099softwareprofessionals.info
• ...you get the point

Hey,

I am a confused canonical and here's why - please help!

I have a master website called www.1099pro.com and then many other websites that simply duplicate the material on the master site (i.e  www.1099A.com, www.1099T.com, www.1099solution.com, and the list goes on).  These other domains & pages have been around for long enough that they have been able to garner some page authority & domain authority that it makes it worthwhile to redirect them to their corresponding pages on www.1099pro.com.

The problem is two-fold when trying to pass this link-juice:

1. I do not have access to the web-service that hosts the other sites/domains and cannot 301 redirect them
2. The other sites/domains are setup so that whatever changes I make to www.1099pro.com are automatically distributed across all the other sites.  This means that when I put on www.1099pro.com it also shows up on all the other domains.

It is my understanding that having on a site such as www.1099solution.com does not pass any link juice and actually eliminates that page from the search results.  Is there any way that I can pass the link juice?

I have multiple product landing pages that feature very similar, but not duplicate, content and am wondering if this would affect my rankings in a negative way.  The main reason for the similar content is three-fold:

1. Continuity of site structure across different products
2. Similar, or the same, product add-ons or support options (resulting in exactly the same additional tabs of content)
3. The product itself is very similar with 3-4 key differences.

Three examples of these similar pages are here - although I do have different meta-data and keyword optimization through the pages.

1. http://www.1099pro.com/prod1099pro.asp
2. http://www.1099pro.com/prod1099proEnt.asp
3. http://www.1099pro.com/prodW2pro.asp

Do search engines consider keywords such as "1099 E-File Software" & "1099 "EFile Software" the same?

Many of the keywords for my website will have a dash "-" when properly spelled out but there are many users who would simply omit it when spelling the word.  Another example would be "W-2 Software" as opposed to "W2 Software".

I have a tax software website for which there a multiple pages that compete using different keywords.  However, all pages but my home page have recently fallen out of the rankings completely and I really just don't know why.

For instance, my page - http://www.1099pro.com/prod1099proEnt.asp - has the title keywords "1099 Efile Software | 1099 Software | 1099 Electronic Filing".  When I run a Moz report on the keyword "1099 E-File Software" I get an "A" rating and it finds a total of 8 instances of the keyword.  However, when I run a Moz report on the keyword "1099 Software" it finds a total of 26 instances of the keyword - still with an "A" rating.

When I search the actual text/html there are only 6 instances of the keyword "1099 software" which leads me to believe that Moz/Google/Search Engines are ignoring the middle term in words like "1099 printing software" or "1099 e-filing software" and only picking up "1099 software".  Is this supposed to be happening?  Does anyone know why or how many terms can be ignored in that fashion?

I used to have multiple landing pages in the top 3 results and now all of my other landing pages have completely fallen from the rankings even though I am not keyword stuffing and am providing unique & relevant content.  If anyone has an idea as to why my rankings have dropped so drastically I would really appreciate it (I take no part in black-hat link building so that isn't the reason).

Thanks CleverPhD!  That was the decisive answer I've been looking for

Is there a problem with placing a rel=canonical link on the canonical page - in addition to the duplicate pages?  For example, would that create create an endless loop where the canonical page keeps referring to itself?

Two examples that are troubling me are:

1. My home site is www.1099pro.com which is exactly the same as www.1099pro.com/index.asp (all updates to the home page are made by updating the index.asp page).  I want www.1099pro.com/index.asp to have the rel=canonical link to point to my standard homepage www.1099pro.com but any update that I make on the index page is automatically incorporated into www.1099pro.com as well.  I don't have access to my hosting web server and any updates I make have to be done to the specific landing pages/templates.
2. I am also creating a new website that could possible have pages with duplicate content in the future.  I would like to already include the rel=canonical link on the standard canonical page even though there is not duplicate content yet.

Any help really would be appreciated.  I've read a ton of articles on the subject but none really define whether or not it is ok to have the rel=canonical link on both the canonical page and the duplicate pages.  The closest explanation was in a MOZ article that it was ok but the answer was fuzzy.

-Mike

Hey,

I recently modified my pages to conform more closely to the "A" page rankings for MOZ's on-page report card but saw declines in my keyword rankings. They keywords in question appear in my title tag, description, one image alt tag, either an h1 or h2 tag, and 4 times throughout the text of the document. I don't think MOZ would recommend these changes if it was seen as stuffing - is there any other reason why my rankings might have dropped by 1-4 positions?

Also, does anyone know of a good article/book for Yahoo/Bing SEO? My Yahoo & Bing rankings are far below Google's in most cases.  Any help would be appreciated!

-Michael