Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Ryan, much appreciated! Andy

With the link I see what you mean. Hard to put a variable on a listing like that. There is possibly another option that would be to use canonical with rel next / previous this defines the relationship to the search engines. Have a look at Google's Webmaster blog here. Good luck, Don

This does seem like a good opportunity for you to do better than your competitors. Obviously, that's a huge amount of pages with issues. I agree with EGOL's suggestion to remove the brand name if that's one thing making your titles too long. Otherwise, prioritize your most important pages and start there. It's my perception that a good page title is important for SEO, but it's even MORE important because it represents a chance for you to communicate with the people who are finding your page in their search results. Give them a reason to choose your site over your competitor's - a too-long, keyword stuffed title won't do that.

Please ignore, I have now resolved - it was me being stupid!

Those are poor quality pages and poor quality backlinks for your site. Get rid of them.

You may be better off just doing a pattern match if your CMS generates a lot of junk URLs. You could save yourself a lot of time and heartache with the following: User-agent: * Disallow: /*? That will block everything with with a ? in the string. So yeah, use with caution - as always. If you're quite certain you want to block access to the image sizes subdirectory you may use: User-agent: * Disallow: /sizes*/ More on all of that fun from Google and SEO Book. Robots.txt is almost as unforgiving as .htaccess, especially once you start pattern matching. Make sure to test everything thoroughly before you push to a live environment. For serious. You have been warned. Google WMT and Bing WMT also provide parameter handling tools. Once you tell Bing and/or Google that you want their bots to ignore urls with certain parameter(s) you select. So if you wanted to handle it that way, it looks like ignoring the app= parameter should do the trick for most of your expressed concerns. Good luck! explosions in the distance XD

Here may be another possibiltiy: http://viralquizbuilder.com/why-quizzes/

There's a pretty rich discussion of how our near-duplicate detection works on this thread, but the short answer is 'yes.' The more unique content you have on a page, the less likely it is to be identified as a duplicate. Our duplicate detection for campaign crawl does not strip out headers, footers, sidebars, etc., and so if the unique content of the page is very small, the common elements will dominate our consideration of two pages as duplicates.

Thanks Mark, I have already (sort of) done that but have yet to establish any results - it might be worth looking into a bit more thoroughly! Andy

Hey Andy, Thanks for reaching out! The Duplicate Content errors are actually aggregated using similar criteria as Google - that's a 95% similarity on the code level. So even if something like the title is different, if the overall code is 95% the same they will be flagged and could potentially get penalized by the Search Engines. Using third party duplicate content checkers on the URLs you provided, it does look like all but one combo meet the 95% threshold. In that one case, we may have found them to be 95% similar at the time of the crawl, but they aren't any longer so that will be reflected in the next crawl. To get more information on Duplicate Content, check out our Help Hub. I hope that makes sense. Let me know if you have any other questions and have a great day!

Yep, I guess they probably wish they could change it! Have a look at their corporate website and you'll see that they just drop the ampersand from their domain name.

I really like Alan's answer. I think that the three questions one must ask are... Q1: Why are you writing? Q2: What is the content quality? Q3: Why are you linking? A1: On my site I am writing because I have something to say that I genuinely believe that people want to know and should read. I am also doing a lot of writing because I know that there is search volume for the content. I am trying to produce a quality content resource for the visitor. I am not blathering. A2: My goal is to produce several hundred to a few thousand words of content with several great photos, interesting graphs, attractive graphics and tabulated data. Before I write, I make sure that I am going to produce content that will be one of the best pages on the web for that topic. It is high quality content deliberately produced because people are searching for it. I am not blathering just to get a page up. This content can take several days per page to produce. A3: When I link, I am linking to additional information that the reader might want. Often that content is on my own website and for that my links are similar to the in-content links on wikipedia - where a keyword links to another page on my site that matches the topic perfectly. I also often link to several other pages on websites that I don't own and those links are going to content that is superior to mine in some way. Again like wikipedia. If you are writing and linking with a purpose then you might be doing well. You can assess that by determining if visitors are "liking" or "sharing" your content. If that is happening then you are doing fine. If that is not happening then maybe you are blathering because you want to put links in the content. If that is the case I would post less often and post higher quality. It will be a greater bang for the buck.

I agree completely with Simon. We too have attempted to syndicate content and had the sites we submitted to then outrank us with our own content. The fact is, if you submit your content to a site that has higher authority than you, chances are they will rank for the content, not you, even if you have canonical tags and authorship in place and even if you publish the content on your site first. We've seen this happen not just with content like articles, we've seen it happen with products (i.e. if we have the same products for sale on our site, Amazon and eBay, Amazon and eBay will outrank us for those same products), and we've certainly seen it with videos. Post the same video on your site and YouTube and YouTube will rank for the video, not your site. This isn't to say nothing should ever leave your site or get posted externally. If your business or someone at your business wins an award or does something positively newsworthy, reaching out to a reporter or blog editor with a story is a great way to raise the brand awareness you seek and obtain valuable referral traffic from the exposure. The scenario at my company is almost identical to yours. The other difficulty I face (and I'm sure you and Simon have seen this too as in-house SEOs) is one of vanity. Stakeholders can get very caught up in the number of views their videos are getting on YouTube, or the number of eyeballs an article will get if it's syndicated versus just placed on their own site. Convincing them that being the sole location of that original content is sometimes a hard sell. I think the best way to do that is to produce a couple of pieces of great content and convince them not to distribute those around, then track how well that content gets positioned in the SERPs. If you can show them some real examples of the strategy being successful on a small scale, they'll be more apt to allow you to continue down that path. Hope that's helpful!

I wouldn't bother unless it's a really well-known or well-respected brand within the cruise industry, but then I'd still expect the company name to be visible in the URL or title tag, so not too important. In these situations I try to think from the searcher's point of view - if I'm looking for a cruise - is the brand name important? As I said, not if I haven't heard of them before. George makes good suggestions - if your prices are good then that's likely to drive more click throughs than a brand name, in the limited space you have. It's also worth bearing in mind that Google may not use your meta description at all if they don't think it matches the searchers intent or content on the resulting page.

Moz Links  & DA , Majestic SEO TrustFlow and Ahrefs Ahrefs rating  Google WMT ALL

Askives is one of those sites that appears on the backlink profile of almost every site I audit.  I put it in a category I call "not seo made" and just ignore it.  A good number of those Chinese and Russian sites are the same too.  You'll find a bunch that look like this.  They often have "alexa" in the url: http://alexa.chinaz.com/ I don't disavow those or try to remove them.  Google is most interested in the links that are self made in an attempt to boost rankings. Now, there are some Russian sites that I come across in link profiles that just have random spun text and anchor texted links.  For those, attempt to contact and if you can't find contact information, share that in your Google Docs spreadsheet so that the webspam team can see that you tried and then disavow it. Good luck!

Yer i watched this today, was very interesting and useful. Lots to learn.

Did you see much movement with your SERPs after submitting the disavow?

Thanks to you all for taking the time to answer my very long question, it is very much appreciated! I will post updates regarding my my progress! Andy