Potentially an issue with 3dCart's canonical URL feature?

I think there is potentially a bigger issue with your site / URL structure causing this maybe. Have you recently changed whether your website makes use of www / non www in the URL's? Instances of both versions are indexed in Google currently - did you enter the canonical URL in 3dCart with the www or without. And if you use Google Webmaster Tools, is this set to display URL's with or without the www?

There is currently a www redirect from non www to www however, so one would presume www is preferred - so just ensure any settings in 3dCart's admin panel that include your domain, are inserted with the www included.

Maybe on this page.

Hope this helps initially.

If you are using a content management system, these additional meta tags can often be controlled within your administration panel.

If the meta tag is hard coded into your website header, this will appearing on every page of your website and will subsequently result in you not having any pages indexed in search engines.

As Ben points out, the noindex directive instructs search engine robots not to index that particular page. It would recommended to address this issue as quickly as possible, especially if you have a high traffic website that is getting crawled frequently.

Based on the URL's you provided above, it's more than just a duplicate page title issue as the contents on the page are almost identical too.

Normally, 'default.asp' is used as a true path to the homepage, similar to how 'index.php' works. If this is the case, you need to 301 redirect (Apache) or IIS redirect (ASP) default.asp to the homepage (/).

If these variations of essentially the same page are not handled, they are seen by search engines as duplicate pages. Please learn how to implement the above here.

As long as you're sure that no organic search traffic is coming in via ranked search results pages from your site, it would be of no harm just to prevent search engines from indexing those pages as per the robots.txt directive I mentioned above - then just focus all your attention on the other pages of your site.

With regards to the unique content, always try and find the time to produce unique content on the category pages, these were the ones you mentioned you wanted to rank. Normally this is feasible providing you haven't got over 1,000 categories.

Feel free to PM me over a link to your ecommerce website if you would like me to take a look at any of the situation in greater detail.

We currently have a browser session on a local server used for serving search results without any of the cr*p that Google like to push. This gives a completely clean and accurate search results page in any brand of search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing etc) and type of search engine (web, image, maps etc).

This is mainly controlled via the use of query parameters in the URL string. No results are ever clicked on within the session as to not influence rankings. There is no web history, no personalisation, no geo-targeted within the results.

I hate everything Google have done to make search results more 'personalised' or 'targeted'. And that's not just because I work in the SEO industry either.

Granted, stripping back your search experience to the raw criteria as we have done shouldn't be this difficult and I would certainly be a solid user of Vanoogle but what we've done works for us and ensures we don't see skewed results (when we require).

How I would handle this would depend upon the performance of the ecommerce website and which entrance paths via the website convert higher.

You could easily instruct search engines not to index the search results page by adding the following in your robots.txt:-

Disallow: /search.php?search=*

But is there a real likelihood of duplicate matching content with your actual category pages? It's unlikely in all honesty - but depending on your website content and product range, I suppose possible.

If many visits to your website arrive via indexed search result pages, I would be inclined to leave them indexed however and implement measures to ensure that they won't be flagged as duplicate content.

Ways to handle this depend on your ecommerce provider and it's capabilities sometimes but more often that not, is just a case of ensuring there is plenty of unique content on your category pages (as there should be) and there is no chance of other pages of your website hindering their ranking potential then.

There are number of ways of potentially handling this depending on what kind of website you have, what platform it uses and how you want to serve your business both on desktop and mobile devices.

Typically though, the correct procedure would be to implement user-agent detection on your website so that when Googlebot (desktop search) and Googlebot-Mobile (supports both feature phone and smartphone now) both visit your website, you can serve different pages/stylesheets based on their browsing capabilities.

For pages on your mobile sub domain, use canonical links pointing to the regular versions of your content which will instruct search engines that those versions are the originals but with user-agent detection in place, both web and mobile versions of your content can safely perform in the same index and Google will rank your mobile content better for mobile device users.

Read further on this:-

7 Real Mobile Duplicate Content SEO Issues

SEO Considerations For Google Mobile Search In 2012

5 Tips For Optimal Mobile Site Indexing

Mobile SERPs & Usability

Excellent article covering everything that should be taken into consideration when launching a replacement website / website migration. Definitely recommended for the member asking the original question to work through each points contained within the article.

Great resource Keri.

There is literally tons of factors to consider. Primarily, how much will the website be changing, one would only presume considerate research has been carried out and the changes are for the better (both from a usability and optimisation perspective).

Some questions to ask...

1. Will the URL's / URL structure change at all or will all URL paths be kept intact?
2. Will the actual content on each page be changing at all?
3. Is any content being removed or added?

These three questions will pose the biggest ranking changes...

All three should be addressed for the better which should then see a positive climb in rankings (if anything at all). If any URL's are changed, as Erik points out, 301 redirecting these is essential, however this won't pass 100% weight through to the new destinations so it's possible the authority leakage on these alone could cause a drop in rankings (temporary of otherwise).

Hope that helps for now.

The allow directives need to come before the disallow directives for the same directory/file paths. (I have never personally tested this although it makes logical sense to instruct a robot to access one particular path within a directory structure before it sees that it is blocked from crawling that directory).

For example:-

Allow: /profiles

Disallow: /s2/profiles/me

Allow: /s2/profiles

Allow: /s2/photos

Allow: /s2/static

Disallow: /s2

As per how Google have formatted their robots.txt.

A small amount of weight / authority will be lost when changing the URL's and 301 redirecting to the new locations. It's only fractionable but could be the difference between 3 or 4 positions in the search results within your niche.

It's possible there could be an issue with the 3rd party plugin you used, they may have overlooked something critical in this process.

When did you notice the drop in rankings / traffic? Is it possible it could also be due to Panda/Penguin preparation/updates also?

Did you actually rewrite the URL's using mod_rewrite in .htaccess or change the permalink structure in Wordpress?

If the new URL structure was implemented correctly, did you test the 301 redirects to ensure they were actually redirecting to the correct destinations?

Have you analysed the traffic in analytics to establish what URL's are seeing the drop in traffic? If the old URL's were indexed in Google with authority, the change to your URL structure would have caused a dip in organic rankings and subsequently traffic...

I'm not entirely sure I follow the situation but certainly yes, if your website was only launched a week ago, it's highly unlikely it's ranking for anything and the authority of the domain is likely to be much weaker than others that are more established on the web.

What type of query are you analysing a ranking for? Is it a query on your brand / company name? Are the retail stores part of your company too or outlets that resell your products? Links are just one of many factors and quality of links far outweighs quantity of links so there is plenty else to consider if you want to outrank these other two websites. Without more information on this, it's difficult to point you in the right direction however.

No, it won't be of that much use no. Homepage PageRank ought not to be focused on too much, I've seen domains with homepage PR that are just complete garbage anyhow.

Again, the same with 'dofollow' links, there's far more 'weightier' metrics to be attracted to than whether a link is followed or not.

At the end of the day, it's just yet another business directory probably serving little purpose...

Is anyone going to use it? Probably not.

Will you get any traffic via the link? Probably not.

Will you see a return on the cost? Probably not.

In my view, definitely not worth looking into. Ask yourself this, what would make this website a good link prospect - if all you come up with homepage PR4 and dofollow. Then you're going about it all wrong.

Check out this. Hopefully should help.

Hey Kathy,

Sorry I meant is the single site that you had 4000 backlinks from still indexed at all (if you're saying the owner had to take it down)...

Thanks

You're welcome.

Ad positioning and strategy really is dependant on your intentions. Personally, I won't even stop to read content on a blog that inserts ads within the body. I perhaps would think one Adsense block at either the top or the bottom of the article body would be deemed bearable but anymore than that, you run the risk of getting flagged at Google for low quality / poor ad to content ratio potentially.

It's unlikely that whether a page contains multiple

tags or just one, the effect of that page's performance on this metric alone will be minimal. H1 tags won't have a massive amount of affect and is just one of many hundreds of factors. Whilst with HTML5, multiple

tags is possible, why would you want to anyway? Header tags should be for structuring content in a hierarchy and typically, you would rarely want to have two topics competing for main precedence on the same page.

In the sense that a report is alerting that there are too many links on a page though is going to be because it is warning of authority leakage more than anything else though.

Granted, the insertion of 'just' in my previous statement probably misleads...

I agree though that if you were to link every page to every page, it would just cause a royal headache to crawlers - why one would do that though is beyond me.

It's unlikely to purely be a result of this one incident though. Are there any pages of this domain still indexed in the search engines? If not now, then if this was the cause, I would be expecting your rankings to be reinstated... Otherwise, there is likely issues elsewhere too.