Based on the information you provided, yes, I would recommend a 301 redirect to do what you are trying to accomplish versus a 302 or no redirect.

If you can keep doing it manually, then that's what I would suggest. If you want to try the robots.txt route, try putting the following code in the robots.txt file in the ads.espectador.com root -

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Here's a helpful blog post with more details - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts

Hi Dana,

If all you are doing is adding the canonical tag, then it may take some time before Google picks up on it. Probably looking at a few days or maybe a week or so, but you should definitely notice an improvement (if you have in fact seen a negative impact in your rankings/organic traffic due to the meta refresh/duplicate content issue). My suggestion is to simply add the canonical tag and keep an eye on Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to see if you notice any changes. I'll keep an eye on this thread in case you have any more issues or questions.

I'm willing to bet that the reason you are seeing a 98% drop in traffic from simply changing a theme is that the Google Analytics tracking code was not properly installed on the new theme.  I know you already mentioned that you checked with your programmer and didn't find any problems with the tracking code itself, but I can see that the GA account numbers are two different accounts. I checked the source code of a page using the current theme as well as a cached version from the old theme and the Google Analytics tracking account numbers are different.

This is the page in question - http://www.incredibleinfant.com/safety/pacifier-use/

**Current theme -  ** _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-28262936-1']);

**Cached theme - ** _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-32310484-1']);  (Google cache from April 5th, 2013)

So if you are looking at the Google Analytics data for the 323 account, then that's why you are seeing a 98% drop in traffic once the new theme was installed. The actual data should be captured in the 282 profile, which you hopefully have access to.

And it's not surprising that you've noticed some rankings drop since that often happens when doing a site overhaul if the site architecture, internal linking structure, on-site SEO are not kept exactly the same. This decrease in rankings is likely only temporary as the search engines will recrawl and reindex the new versions of the pages.

Hope that helps!

Hiding text by making it the same color as the background is a big no-no. It might work temporarily, but if Google ever discovers it, your site will certainly be penalized. I would suggest adding the H1 tag as the main headline but styling with CSS it so it is not in a huge 24 point ugly font, but still make it the primary headline for users and search engines to both access.

It will take some time before OSE updates its index. Let me know if you don't notice any changes once OSE has been updated.

I'm not sure why you would want to remove the sitemap.xml from the SERPs, but I'll answer your question anyways.

One option would be to remove the URL via Google Webmaster Tools.

Another option is to use the X-Robots-Tag directive in the HTTP header and set it to noindex. Here is some more info on how to set it up http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/07/robots-exclusion-protocol-now-with-even.html and http://sebastians-pamphlets.com/handling-googles-neat-x-robots-tag-sending-rep-header-tags-with-php/

I would suggest starting out with the SEOmoz Beginner's Guide to SEO - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo

Try putting it in quotes -

Redirect 301 "/products/product-name%20" http://www.site.com/products/product-name

Let me know if that doesn't work...

Hmm, I am seeing your original page rank #7 for "iphone 5s abonnement" here in the US on Google.com and then #3 when I try searching on Google.nl... are you still seeing them at #33?

And, do the include pages have any original content or are they exact duplicates? Rather than redirecting them, I might suggest putting original content on them in order to rank for each individual product.

It's hard to diagnose exactly what happened going off only the info you provided. Has the site seen a drop in rankings for all of your keywords, or just certain ones? How much of a decrease? And all your pages? Or just your homepage? Have you made any changes recently either to on-site content and/or linkbuilding? Have you received any messages or noticed anything unusual within Google Webmaster Tools?

Hmmm... I was going to also suggest trying replacing the %20 with an actual space -

Redirect 301 "/products/product-name " http://www.site.com/products/product-name

Now that you say none of the redirects are working as expected, did you try adding the 301 redirects above the Drupal rules in your .htaccess file? Can you paste the contents of your .htaccess?

Yup, IFTTT is the way to go. I use it for several Twitter accounts.

(Also, I had written a more detailed reply but I got an error message from "incapsula" and then I lost my response, ugh. So maybe Moz should look into this...)

moz.com -

Access Denied

Error code 15

This request was blocked by the security rules

This situation is quite common. If you are able to move the corporate information to its own page that you can link to from each product page, then that's what I would suggest doing.

Yup, use the canonical tag to tell the search engines which URL should be designated as the "correct" page to index. Here is some more information from Google - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

I haven't looked at the search volume or competitiveness of those particular phrases, but I'm curious - have you analyzed them? I'd be a bit leery of clients coming to you and giving you a list of keywords to rank for when they might not even have any search volume and/or are very competitive (just my experience that most clients aren't SEO-savvy and haven't done any actual keyword research, your client may be much more knowledgeable about SEO and know that those keywords are the ones they need help ranking for).  I would suggest analyzing all 10 of those phrases and then also doing keyword research to see if you can come up with other variations that you can target and start ranking for and actually start generating traffic for in the short term. My favorite tool for this situation would be LongTailPro - you can enter in all of these phrases and it automatically generates variations and automatically analyzes by search volume and competition.

(I'm not affiliated with LongTailPro at all, just think it's a great tool!)

Would it be possible to only post the content on the blog and then add a few paragraphs on the main site which then links to the blog for the full article? I think that would be ideal.

Otherwise, you could try using the cross domain canonical tag in order to get the blog ranking for the content. The issue is that Google considers the canonical tag to be a hint rather than an absolute directive, so it might not necessarily work. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html

I would just add the 301 redirect directly on the page. If you are using PHP, this should work -

header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); header("Location: http://www.domainb.com/page.php"); ?>

I just went to the site in both Firefox and Chrome and I am getting the http protocol. My guess is that your site with the https is cached in Firefox and that's why you are seeing it. Have you tried clearing your cache and restarting your browser?

Hmm... I just looked up the site in OSE and I see that ccisolutions.com is being credited with the most internal links and I don't see the other URL anywhere in the top pages. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=www.ccisolutions.com&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=internal&target=page&group=0

Are you seeing the same thing? If not, can you let me know what you are seeing and where you are seeing it?

I see that you do have the rel=canonical tag set up correctly so even if you left the breadcrumb link to the old URL, eventually it shouldn't matter. However, if you're able to, I would recommend changing that breadcrumb link to point to the correct URL just to keep everything consistent.