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Hi Asif!

Firstly - I'd suggest that as soon as possible you address the core problem - the use of session ids in the URL. There are not many upsides to the approach and there are many downsides.That it doesn't show up with the site: command doesn't mean it isn't having a negative impact.

In the meantime, you should add a rel=canonical tag to all the offending pages pointing to the URL without the session id. Secondly, you could use robots.txt to block the SEOmoz bot from crawling pages with session ids, but it may affect the bots ability to crawl the site if all the links it is presented with are with session ids - which takes us back around to fixing the core problem.

Hope this helps a little!

Hi Mike,

The 301s should take care of the link juice. A rel canonical tag wouldn't do any harm if it eases your mind though.

Is there a reason you are serving the whole thing https? If not, as Jane, James and I all agree on - it is probably best to only use https where necessary.

Google doesn't mind which you use. However, you should make sure that each page is viewable via only one of the protocols and 301 redirects to the other if accessed via the 'incorrect' one. It can be a mixture of both, so you could use http for browsing the site, then switch to https when the user beings the checkout process.

I normally advocate http until the checkout process begins, unless there is a reason to do it differently.

Unsure why SEOmoz tools are missing it, I can see you are using All in One SEO pack and you do have meta descriptions. You actually have 2!!!

The head area of your pages has all sorts going on with javascript and many link tags. If possible you should try to clean it up a bit, I'd suggest. Then obviously ensure you have only one meta description.

Hopefully when a moz staffer sees this thread they'll take a look into your bug.

Having them under the same GoDaddy account is not a problem - as Google doesn't know they are all under one account.

However, if you have the same administrative/technical contact details for them in the whois data then that is certainly something Google has access to and is checking.

What JoelHit is pointing out is a list of other ways that Google might be able to make a connection between the different sites, i.e having the same GA account monitoring them all makes it fairly obvious they are 'under the same roof'.

They sure can, try searching in Google for:

~SEO

You'll notice that even the phrase "search engine optimization" is emboldened, as Google knows it is a synonym.

Alan makes some good points, and I agree 100% about not making the text read clearly; websites are for people first. However, sometimes making it read clearly means using synonyms or secondary target keyword phrases.

I'd say if you are targeting a single keyword then maybe it isn't so important, but with phrases of 3 words or so then the secondary phrases or phrase synonyms it does become more important if you want to target those search terms also.

I will just add that you need to be very careful. Maybe try the ones out that everyone has kindly suggested and then use SEOmoz Campaigns or other tools to check the quality of it.

This Whiteboard Friday post from last week has one of Bing's team pointing out how it is very important that your sitemap is of a high quality (no 404s, 302s or 301s for example), or it could be ignored completely:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/bings-duane-forrester-on-webmaster-tools-metrics-and-sitemap-quality-thresholds

I would say a bit of both. It is fine to repeat your primary keyword phrase several times on the page; the number of times depends upon the amount of content. SEOmoz's On Page tool recommends 4 repetitions. However, you should also try to use some synonyms and secondary target keyword phrases also.

A good resource I saw posted today which might be of interest:

http://lsikeywords.com/

I think your best bet is rel=canonical. Furthermore, Google agree:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

This section is directly related to your issue:

---

How do I specify a canonical page?

snip

If you publish content on both http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish and https://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish, you can specify the canonical version of the page. Create the element:

---

Hope that helps.

Here you go, I managed to dig up informative blog posts for most of the active tools:

Trifecta

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/goodbye-page-strength-hello-trifecta-seomozs-latest-analysis-tool

Competitive Link Finder

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/competitive-link-finder-provides-qualitative-link-building-ideas

Linkscape

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/linkscape-education-series-learn-the-ins-amp-outs-of-how-linkscape-works

Juicy Link Finder

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/new-premium-services-link-directory-juicy-link-finder-tool-new-pricing

Crawl Test

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/crawl-test-seo-tool

Blogscape

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/announcing-blogscape-and-seomoz-labs

Hi Janice,

I'm not aware of any central location for all the docs. The main page has short descriptions:

http://www.seomoz.org/tools

Then some tools have their own help section:

http://www.seomoz.org/rank-tracker/help

Others have a longer description on the page:

http://www.seomoz.org/crawl-test

The other good resource are the blog posts where tools are introduced, which are easiest found by googling the toolname, for example:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/goodbye-page-strength-hello-trifecta-seomozs-latest-analysis-tool

I know you were maybe looking for something longer and more details, but I'm afraid that is all I'm aware of. I think the introductory blog posts are pretty thorough though. Hope this helps!

Yep, I think I agree with your point about new links = quick boost, and old links = authority. This agrees with my general view that old links don't weaken with time, and also form a solid base for your link profile. However, hearing these conflicting viewpoints recently really piqued my interest.

If I'm reading this right though, it is only the URLs they've got to stop using, not the content. Therefore a 404 provide alternate content suggestions isn't necessary in this case; I agree that a 301 redirect is best solution - it passes the human traffic and the link juice to the correct location.

As to whether it is worth the cost, then of course it is the famous answer of "it depends". However, I'd imagine that the cost of redirects should be pretty minimal and if the old URLs drive just a couple of conversions (whatever that may be) then it should have been worthwhile, even ignoring the link juice.

In the last week and a half at a couple of shows in London, and including today on SEOmoz Q&A, I've heard polarised opinions on this topic, so thought I'd throw it out there to see what other people think, and what evidence/experience people have with this.

Basically - some people are saying older links are worth less than new links, and others are saying old link are worth don't devalue and are possibly worth more.

I have to admit, I don't have a strong opinion on this, as it is really hard to judge on live projects, and I think it is a case by case thing.

Any thoughts?

I also mostly do client work. However, I do tinker with building my own sites, normally to test out new ideas to see what is working and what isn't; sometimes these go great and then it is like an extra little Christmas gift!

Just to chime in on this, albeit maybe a little late now... I had the same thought as I was reading through this with using rel=canonical to point the old pages to the new for now, so the search engines don't have any duplicate content issues until a 301 redirect can take over when the new site is fully launched.

However, depending on your rollout schedule, this would mean that the SERPs would soon be indexing only the new pages. You'd need to ensure that the traffic diverter you are using would handle this. Otherwise you could put the rel=canonical on the new pages for now, which would avoid the duplicate content until you are fully launched. Then you'd remove it and 301 redirect the old pages to the new.

Just something you maybe want to think about! Hopefully your traffic diverter can handle this though.

Good thinking, but actually HTML pages are not necessarily static, so I agree with David that it shouldn't make any difference.