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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?

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, it's hard to say without actually seeing the site. If the conversion tracking code was previously on the page and it was working, then it may have been accidentally moved to a different page? I would suggest adding the tracking code back to the correct page. If you want me to take a look, feel free to PM me the URLs and I'll let you know if there is anything else wrong.

If all of those URLs are pointing to the same file on your server, then placing the one canonical tag on it will show up when you try to access all three URLs.

As for the URL to use, I would suggest www.autoinsurancefremontca.com. So you would put the following in the HEAD of this page -

Also, you should probably 301 redirect the non-www version of the URL to the www version (or vice versa). You can do this by putting the following lines in your .htaccess file -

<code class="htaccess" title="in your .htaccess file">RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]</code>

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

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.

Yes, you should add the nofollow tag to each ad that has the 302 redirect. Or if you have a lot of ads where it's not feasible to manually add the nofollow tag, you could just use robots.txt to tell the search engines/OSE not to follow them.

I also found this forum post which may have a macro solution - http://forum.openx.org/index.php?showtopic=503507808.

You can create html banners and set this value through those.

Create a banner. choose "generic html" as the type.
Put html in the banner area. This will be something like


Hmm, I don't think SEMRush uses Google Analytics data to come up with a website's traffic count since they don't have access to the GA account either. If you'd like me to investigate further and don't want to reveal the sites publicly, feel free to PM me the URLs in question and I can give you a more specific answer.

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.

1. I'm betting you are having infinite loop issues when you are trying to add the redirect, am I right? If so, that's because both versions of the URL are both hitting the same page. Anyways, to fix this, simply add "<rel="canonical" href="<a href=" http:="" www.ccisolutions.com="" "="">http://www.ccisolutions.com/" /> to the head of both URLs to tell the search engines to only count that version of the URL in its index so you won't have a problem with duplicate content.</rel="canonical">

2. The canonical tag should fix this issue as well.

Hope that helps!

I'm not sure if I understand this correctly but I'll give it a shot. You say the competition is using the same GA account on two sites, but how does your friend know what the competition's traffic numbers are? Does he have access to their Google Analytics account? And where does the competition "show its high traffic"?

Google Analytics simply tracks how many visits are coming to a website(s) and it doesn't have anything to do with impacting any actual traffic. One way to see if the competition is fudging its traffic numbers by saying all of the GA visits are for one site only when the traffic is really for two websites, then tell them to provide a GA report showing that all of the visitors are using the same Hostname.

You can see the Hostname by going into Google Analytics and clicking on Custom Reporting. Choose "Unique Visitors" as the metric and "Hostname" as the dimension.

I can't access your report, but generally there is no problem using temporary redirects for your ads server. I would just suggest putting nofollow on your openX links so search engines/OSE don't try to crawl them and you'll stop getting the errors in your reports.

Meta Keywords are worthless. None of the major search engines use them as a ranking factor anymore. If anything, their use can actually have a negative impact since you will be revealing your targeted keywords to your competitors. (Most competent SEOs can determine your targeted keywords by looking at your site anyways but no need to make their job that much easier!)

That being said, Meta Description is still important, even if they aren't necessarily considered a ranking factor, they allow you to have control over the snippet of text that shows up under your listing in the SERPs.

A 404 error means the page is not found/it doesn't exist. My guess is that you accidentally linked to exampleX.com somewhere on your page with this URL http://www.example.com/www.example.com/exampleX.html. Simply change that to http://www.example.com/exampleX.html. Otherwise, it's hard to tell specifically without seeing the actual link/page so please provide the actual links here or you can PM me if you don't want them to be made public.

Do you know how the spam posts were published on your site? Just make sure the vulnerability is fixed so it doesn't happen again. Once the spam posts you found have been deleted from your site, you shouldn't have to do anything more since they will fall out of Google's index. Keep an eye on Google Webmaster Tools though to see if you notice any more spam pages pop up on Google's radar and then manually remove them.

Here is Google's official answer - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164734

When a page is updated or removed, it will automatically fall out of our search results. You don’t need to do anything to make this happen.

However, if you urgently need to remove content from Google's search results (for example, if you’ve already removed, updated, or blocked a page accidentally displaying confidential information like credit card numbers), you can request expedited removal of those URLs.

Our removal tools are intended for pages that urgently need to be removed—for example, if they contain confidential data that was accidentally exposed. Using the tools for other purposes may cause problems for your site.

Another Google resource if your site was actually hacked or compromised - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1269119

To take your site "offline" after being hacked. If your site was hacked and you want to get rid of bad URLs that got indexed, use the URL removal tool to remove any new URLs that the hacker created—for example, http://www.example.com/buy-cheap-cialis-skq3w598.html. But we don't recommend removing your entire site, or removing URLs that you'll eventually want indexed. Instead, clean up the hacking and let us recrawl your site.

If you can rewrite the text on each page, then that's what I would do. But if the site has thousands of pages and it's not possible to rewrite the content on every single page, then I'd suggest either moving each section of text to its own dedicated page (like History would be its own page with its own link in the navigation) OR if you think the content is important enough to be seen on every page, then you could try putting the text as an image...

Your site won't necessarily be penalized for having the same text on every page but you certainly won't benefit from it since the key is to make every single page as unique and high quality as possible.

Hope that helps!

How big is the site? It would be ideal to either keep the existing site structure so you don't need to worry about redirecting pages OR 301 as many pages as possible to the new URLs for those pages. If you have any pages on the current site that won't have a counterpart on the new site, then I recommend 301ing as many of those pages to the most relevant page on the new site as possible.

Of course, if your site is thousands or millions of pages large, then it's likely not feasible to manually go in and redirect every single page so I'd recommend at least redirecting the most popular pages to their new counterparts and then possibly redirect all of the remaining pages to the most relevant mid-level pages or even the homepage.

The last thing you want to do is simply redirect all of the pages to the root domain...

A canonical tag is to tell the search engines which version of the page should be indexed. Each page should have only one. For example, let's say http://www.example.com/index.php and http://www.example.com/index.php?utm=whatever are the exact same page except with different URLs, you will put the following canonical tag in the HEAD of this page -

This tells the search engines to ignore http://www.example.com/index.php?utm=whatever so they don't put that URL in the search engine results instead of your actual homepage.

Okay, the fact you already have an .htaccess file means you should be able to try adding the rules I provided. Put them at the top of the .htaccess file and test.

The first step would be to redirect the http://siteX.com to http://www.siteX.com or vice versa. You can easily do this with .htaccess if you have a LAMP server. Here is the code to put in your .htaccess to redirect from non-www to www (replace example.com with your site name) -

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

As for handling http://siteX.com/index.html, simply redirect that as well with .htaccess -

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://example.com/ [R=301,L]

I would also suggest adding a rel="canonical" tag to your pages just in case the search engines come across URLs with parameters, such as index.html?q=1235 then they know to index only the version of the page you designated.

Hope that helps!