Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I guess it depends how much duplication there is. If the pages contain completely duplicate content with no unique content at all then the best move would be to noindex or nofollow them. Otherwise rel=canonical is probably fine.

Duplicate content is detrimental but the issue is relatively easy to solve. Just ensure you add rel="canonical" tags to the duplicate pages to allow Google to identify and rank the preferred page.

Hi Asif

That page is being indexed

https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=cr&ei=rpEdU6OzHcOUhQfkjIDwAQ#q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mycity4kids.com%2FDelhi-NCR%2Fsearch%2Fguitar-classes

It's just not ranking that well.

Probably worth trying to obtain relevant, high quality links to that page. Also, does appear to have a lot of keyword stuffing (guitar classes appears over 20 times on the page). The listings could probably benefit from short descriptions rather than key phrase based tags.

Having 'search' in the URL will not (on its own) stop your pages being indexed. A quick search for 'search' shows many pages indexed with search in the URL, domain and subdomain

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=search+&oq=search+&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60l5.976j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8

Without seeing the pages, it'll be difficult to ascertain the reason(s) these pages are not being indexed.

Hi Irving,

Sometimes the .htaccess files are hidden so you just need to change your FTP client to allow the viewing of hidden files

http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/how-can-i-see-my-htaccess-file

After than, you should be able to view the contents of a .htaccess file by using notepad or any other text editor.

Hi Jorge

The rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag is not suitable for pages that are in the same language as these are essentially duplicates rather than alternative language versions.

I'd use the  rel="canonical" tag to point to the main page until the translations of those pages are available.

Webmaster Tools should allow you to see any issues.

Hi Tom, yes - I think you'd be better off creating a page on website B which explains that website A is now website B.

I would also explain the site move on all the other redirects (but only for visitors arriving from website A). Yoast writes a good post about how to do this.

https://yoast.com/change-domain-name/

Hi DHStom,

This seems like a reasonable approach.

But is there really a need to have the landing page on the old site to state that 'website A no longer operates..'? Is website well known and/or does it have a loyal customer base? Also does website B offer all the same products as website A used to?

I agree with Andy. I wouldn't expect any issues with an anchor. I'm pretty sure Google would ignore it. Although using a query string parameter (?) would not be good.

Anyway, Google Analytics allows you to track parameters using an anchor and some think that this is a good way of consolidating link juice and avoiding duplicate content issues.

http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2009/02/02/hashing-it-out-referral-tracking/

This doesn't sound right. Mine have been updating weekly. Try contacting help@moz.com. They should be able to help.

It seems to me that your developers are placing the 301 redirect rules in something like a .htaccess file. In this case, it is better to have fewer redirect rules to keep the size of the file down.

But why don't they store the original URL and new URL in a database - which can be queried and the appropriate 301 header initiated to allow the redirect to take place (if appropriate)? This way you could easily add a few thousand without any performance issues.

As far as the titles/urls are concerned, the system shouldn't change the URL every time the title changes. This will cause problems in the future. I'd ask the developers to change this.

Nor would it do anything negative. Searches for 'buy local' and buy local appear to return the same results...in my location anyway.

Hi Mario,

I agree with Jeff. You need to move your site up a folder.

You could write rules that remove the '/coastal/' from the canonical URL for the Yoast plugin, 301 redirect /coastal/* to /* etc - but this is really messy.

It's fine to have your site on the root domain....it's no less secure.

Hi Gareth, I had the same issue a few weeks ago. I contacted support on help@moz.com and they had it all back within minutes.

Hi

I was curious about this too. And then I found this

https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/20770156-Open-Site-Explorer-to-crawl-HTTPS

Looks like it was in development but had some issues. Hopefully it'll be available soon.

The best way to solve this issue is to mark these pages as duplicates by using the rel="canonical" link element,

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

Yahoo answers appears to use country subdomains

e.g. uk.answers.yahoo.com for UK and fr.answers.yahoo.com for France.

They don't have a tr.answers.yahoo.com so guess that it doesn't exist.

Hi Bob,

This effect is done using a background image.

The image being used is this one:

http://www.3dcart.com/images/5/main-panorama3.jpg

It has a width of 2500 and height of 444. This ensures that it takes up the whole screen on devices less than 2500px wide (which is most of them). The image has feathering on the left and right - which allows it to fade to the same as the black background on devices largest than 2500px.

The site specifies the image, width and background colour in their CSS file:

.panel0 {
     height: 444px;
     background: #18100d url(../images/5/main-panorama3.jpg) no-repeat center top;
}

and to display the background image - they use HTML similar to this:

[SOME STUFF]

I hope that helps.

Sorry Dan. I feel I didn't really answer your question properly.

What I would do is check if these pages have any external links using something like Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO. If they don't, then it would be fine to change the URLs and 301 redirect the existing pages to the new ones as it's likely that the existing PageRank is passed from your own internal links. If external links do exist then you might want to consider doing nothing - depending on the authority of these links.

It might be on most pages but still be an error - for instance if you're using mod_rewrite and the dot has been placed in the rewrite rule then a single error could potentially affect many pages.

If these pages rank well and it's for purely aesthetic reasons that you'd like to remove the dot, then you may want to consider leaving the pages as they are since using a 301 redirect may result in a loss of some of the existing PageRank.