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This depends what your goal is, are you looking to rank both pages in search? If so, you will need to create unique content on both pages.

However, if your goal is to promote one of the pages via other means, you can put a rel canonical tag in the header of the site, which will give content attribution back to the original page and will solve your duplicate content issues.

Here's more information on the rel canonical tag: https://mza.bundledseo.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

As another option, you could simply noindex one of the pages.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for the speedy answer, I had suspected the same thing so I'm glad we've come to the same conclusion. Thanks for your help.

Good evening Mozzers. Couple of questions which I hope you can help with. Here's the first.

I am wondering, are we likely to see ranking changes if we remove the .html from the sites URLs.

For example

website.com/category/sub-category.html

Change to: website.com/category/sub-category/

We will of course make sure we 301 redirect to the new, user friendly URLs, but I am wondering if anyone has had previous experience of implementing this change and how it has effected rankings.

By having the .html in the URLs, does this stop link juice being flowed back to the root category?

Second question:

If one page can be loaded with and without a forward slash "/" at the end, is this a duplicate page, or would Google consider this as the same page? Would like to eliminate duplicate content issues if this is the case.

For example: website.com/category/ and website.com/category

Duplicate content/pages?

Thanks for your advice, I will take a look at the Google webmaster video you've referenced. As we try to rank for specific search terms in our main categories, we put content in there so it can be indexed and it's great for user experience. That's why I was thinking to also implement the rel=canonical tag so the content wasn't duplicated over a series of 10 pages, but if we noindex and use the rel=prev and next tags, that should solve the issue. It's the same for filterable results really, as the content on the page can be duplicated when users choose to filter by specific options, such as size or colour.

I would like to ask about a technical SEO issue that may cause duplicate content/crawling issues.

For pagination, how the rel=canonical, rel="prev" rel="next" and noindex tag should be implemented.

Should all three be within the same page source?

Say for example, for one particular category we may have 10 pages of products (product catalogues). So we should noindex page 2 onwards, rel canonical it back to the first page and also rel="prev" and rel="next" each page so Google can understand they contain multiple pages.

If we index these multiple pages it will cause duplicate content issues. But I'm not sure whether all 3 tags need adding.

It's also my understanding that the search results should be noindexed as it does not provide much value as an entry point in search engines.

Yeah, we was going to build a fully optimised page with different content to the homepage. But the company only offers billboards so I think the better solution would be to optimise the homepage for the billboard advertising search and not to build another page that targets that particular search term.

It's sometimes difficult to decide whether to optimise the homepage or a separate landing page to target their main service search term. It's much easier to gain links to the homepage than a service page.

I'd like some professional opinions on this topic. I'm looking after the SEO for my friends site, and there are two main search terms we are looking to boost in search engines. The company sells Billboard advertising space to businesses in the UK. Here are the two search terms we're looking to target:

• Billboard Advertising - 880 searches P/M
• Outdoor Advertising - 720 searches P/M

It would usually make sense to make a separate page to target the keyword "billboard advertising" on its own fully optimised landing page with more information on the topic and with a targeted URL: www.website.com/billboard-advertising/ and the homepage to target "outdoor advertising" as it's an outdoor advertising agency.

But there's a problem, as both search terms are highly related and have the same intent, I'm worried that if we create a separate page to target the billboard advertising, it will conflict with the homepage targeting outdoor advertising.

Also, the main competitors who are currently ranked position 1-3, are ranking with their home pages and not optimised landing pages to target the exact search term "billboard advertising".

Any advice on this?

Hi KJ,

First things first, do you have a physical address for each location and are these set up in Google My Business? I doubt you have premises in each location, so ranking for all the areas is going to be an uphill task.

Google is smart and knows if you have physical premises in the targeted location, after all it's all about delivering highly relevant results to its users. Lets say for example you're an electrician and a user searches for "Electrician in Sheffield" - realistically, if you only have premises in Leeds, it's going to be difficult to rank above the company who is actually located in Sheffield.

I would firstly target 2-3 of your primary locations and focus on building 10x content, I would aim to write 1000+ words for each page (completely unique content) whilst focusing on your set keywords, but be natural and don't keyword stuff. Put reviews from customers in that specific area on the landing page and build citations from local directories.

Again, you can't build citations unless you have physical premises in the location. Trust me, I've done it for years for a Roofing company and it's taken some time to see the results. He's #1 for the city he is located in, but for other cities it's a very difficult task. Writing about the same service for each location is a daunting task too, you should consider Great Content to outsource the content if you're stuck for ideas. It's a low budget solution and will save you mountains of time.

I would also use folders and not subdomains. Build a 'service areas' page, examples of urls for the roofing company below.

example.com/service-areas/leeds/roofing

example.com/service-areas/sheffield/roofing

No matter how much I research this one, there's no definite answer and there's a lot of contradictions.

Basically we're looking to launch an article on 24 expert interior design tips for 2015. Each tip is submitted from a different interior designer we have chosen who have a reputable, trusted website.

The main goal for this article is to generate various inbound links for our site from the designers and it will help to create engagement on social media. Although if we're giving out links to these designers for their contributions, the inbound links we receive in return will be little or no value as this is reciprocal linking?

Some say this is okay as it's completely natural within the blog posts, others say to avoid it as it can be seen as an obsolete practice to deceive Google. Does anyone have any more information on this and how it should be carried out?

Would a better process be to link to their social media accounts? Rather than reciprocal linking?

Thanks

Thanks Marcus, that's a great help. We use Magento for our main site but Wordpress for the blog, so we will just ensure the same tracking code is implemented and use the custom filters as you said.

Much appreciated

We have Google Tag Manager set up to track our website https://kontenta.co.uk/

Although we have a blog - https://kontenta.co.uk/designroom/

I'm just wondering if it's better to track the sites separately? If so, how do I add the blog to tag manager?

Does it need setting up as a filter to match the regular expression https://kontenta.co.uk/designroom/*

We just need to figure out the best way to measure both the website and blog traffic and if users are coming from the blog to the site, and what interactions they are making.

Thanks

Google has come a long way over the past 5 years, the quality updates have really helped bring top quality content to the top that is relevant for users search terms, although there is one really ANNOYING thing that still has not been fixed.

Websites using brand name as service search term to manipulate Google

I have got a real example but I wouldn't like to use it in case the brand mentions flags up in their tools and they spot this post, but take this search for example "Service+Location"

You will get 'service+location.com' rank #1

Why? Heaven knows. They have less than 100 backlinks which are of a very low, spammy quality from directories. The content is poor compared to the competition and the competitors have amazing link profiles, great social engagement, much better website user experience and the data does not prove anything. All the competitors are targeting the same search term but yet the worst site is ranking the highest.

Why on earth is Google not fixing this issue. This page we are seeing rank #1 do not even deserve to be ranking on the first 5 pages.

Thanks Patrick. I think Google is making it more and more difficult to rank outside of your physical location. Google is smart and recognises that we don't have physical premises in the targeted locations outside of our hometown, so it displays results of local companies in both Google local places and organic results, as it sees the more local companies as a more relevant result and disregards our target location based keywords.

Our website is powered through Magento CMS although I am losing my patience with it. We are completely restricted as to what we can do. The development costs are high and ongoing. We are a fast moving company but we feel that Magento is not the right solution for the companies future. We can not style pages to drive conversions without putting styling requests to our developers which takes months to complete and the end results are not always as we would prefer, we would prefer to style the pages ourselves using blocks etc.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

We're investing a lot in on-page content and creating categories/sub categories to target relevant keywords. Although it seems competitors with high domain authorities are clearly dominating in the SERPs and the pages have NO content. They are literally filters that create landing pages.

For example when you search "Kaydian Beds", Debenhams rank below the manufacturer with just a filtered page, this page has not been optimised with content to target the keywords, only the META title changes depending on the chosen filter.

Link: http://www.debenhams.com/furniture/beds/kaydian

Our link: https://kontenta.co.uk/brands/kaydian-beds.html

This is very frustrating as quality content should beat pages with little or no content, we will spend some time and get some inbound links to the page to try boost the rankings but does anyone have any similar experiences with anything like this?

What are the best ways to track offline conversions that have come directly from paid ads such as Adwords?

Say for example, John searches for 'luxury armchair' and clicks on one of our ads and is directed to the landing page that sells the luxury armchair. John then calls us and completes the transaction over the phone.

How do we know that the advertising channel is responsible for that transaction without physically asking the customer? I know Google provide free forwarding phone numbers which can be provided in the Ads, but if they call us from the phone number we list on the website there is no way of tracking down that exact sale?

Google mentions something to do with providing a unique ID, called a "GCLID" but I'm not familiar with this or how it works.

Any advice is much appreciated.

I'm currently developing my brothers new website and taking care of the SEO. He provides roofing services and uPVC fascias, soffits & guttering service. He is looking to target multiple towns and cities within a region (Yorkshire).

Each service has its own page but I'm wondering if it would be better to create a service page for each town with different content? It's quite difficult to re-write the service content for each town and not repeat yourself.

For example, we're looking to target "roofer in leeds" "roofer in sheffield" "roofing services wakefield" etc etc

Obviously it's more difficult to rank outside your physical town as the registered address is on Google maps but with content and link building we should see some results.

I look forward to hearing some feedback.

Does anyone have any experience in multilingual SEO? We are looking for software that conducts research for GEO Locations such as UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan & India. Writing content for each of these countries is difficult unless we speak their language, we could look at outsourcing the translation but conducting keyword research for each location is almost impossible.

Hi Bob,

It is a bespoke e-commerce website that is powered through Magento. So it's not a template. I thought £600.00 was overpriced and now I'm positive that it's not worth that amount of money, I will ask the company why they've quoted this much and ask for an amount of hours for the job. Cheers

Thanks Patrick, that helps. Cheers

We have an e-commerce website and we are looking to get the Schema.org markup on our site, especially for our products to increase CTR and help with rankings as this will help Google understand our pages better.

We have had two quotes from separate companies, one £100.00 and the other almost £600.00

I'm just curious how much work is involved as we don't want to get scammed for something that takes less than an hour to implement.

Possibly a contrivercial topic as it depends on the business industry and other factors. Although when we have created targeted ads, say for example British people who live in London, aged between 30-55 as our 'targeted audience', set the ads live and we get nothing but fake followers and people from eastern countries. It seems to me as a complete waste of money.

Hi Matt,

This answers my question perfectly. Everything we sell is 'designer goods' including tables, wardrobes, sideboards etc you name it.

My only concern was to have the word 'designer' too many times in the URL as it would look a little spammy, but as you described we can just keep the word 'designer' for the parent page and leave it out for the sub-categories.

We used SEM Rush and noticed a competitor doing really well in the SERPs and they have all their category path URLs removed so I was just curious if this had an impact on SEO, as the URLs looks short and user friendly.

Josh

We're looking to build some serious content and capitalise on long-tail keyword traffic for our sub-category pages, example for targeted keyword "designer dining tables".

Example of current link: www.website.com/designer-furniture/designer-dining-tables.html

Would removing the category paths help?

Example result - www.website.com/designer-dining-tables

More user friendly URLs and better for SEO would you suggest?

The only problem is, if we removed the paths would this have a hit on our traffic?

Any advice would be much appreciated. We are using Magento platform.

Thanks for your advice, that completely makes sense. I think a Wordpress blog will create new opportunities that Magento is incapable of without serious development which is costly. We'll be sure to keep the same theme. Cheers

We installed the Magento 'Aheadworks' extension for our blog but it's quite limited as to what blogging capabilities it has. We are now considering integrating Wordpress for our new blog, but keeping both on the same domain to increase the domain authority.

My question is, should we keep the same theme throughout? The blog should be informative and not sales based, so we was thinking of ditching the whole theme for the blog and not having our category navigation bar. Yes we can still have internal linking which may drive traffic from the blog to the web store.

We have been recommended the Wordpress Integration by Fishpig but I understand this carries through the Magento theme so I'm not sure exactly how it works. Could Wordpress plugins cause issues with our Magento store or shouldn't we be worried about this?

Hi Kevin,

Great response, I will check out the Fishpig wordpress integration. I discussed the idea with our web development team and they dismissed the idea, although I do have a lot of experience with Wordpress and I feel that it has much more to offer than Magento from a blogging perspective. We already have a blog by the way but it's a Magento extension which doesn't really have much to offer. We will be keeping the blog and e-commerce site on the same domain to increase the domain authority although we was unsure whether to keep the same theme throughout.

We could either have a different theme for our blog and keep it 'information based' rather than keeping our product category navigation, although if someone adds an item to cart then decides to visit the blog, they cannot continue to checkout until they return back to the transactional website. It's a tricky one and an expensive mistake if we make the wrong decision.

Magento is fantastic for e-commerce although the blog capabilities are limited and our web development fees are just ongoing. I have great experience with wordpress sites and I don't have a bad word to say about the CMS, there are plugins available for everything you possibly need to develop the blog. Would it be a good idea to integrate a wordpress blog for our e-commerce store? To keep both the transactional website and the blog on the same domain, but have a different style for the blog so we're not trying to 'sell' to people looking for home improvement advice and DIY guides, our main priority with the blog is to grow the website authority.

Thanks Chad that really helps, I came across the experiment tool previously but wasn't aware this was for A/B testing. Cheers

This might be a silly questions as I may be missing something completely obvious here, but we are completely new to A/B testing. Our site doesn't receive a phenomenal amount of traffic although we are looking to set up some A/B testing for our popular products. Is there a way to split organic traffic for a specific product page. I'm aware that we need to experiment which one performs better in Analytics but I'm unsure how to redirect 50% of the organic traffic.

I've never come across this site but there are some excellent topics here that we could utilise. It does hurt the neck a little through!! Much appreciated.

We've had our blog for a little under 2 years now using Magento and we've only created 48 posts. As we're in the furniture industry topics are hard to come by and we've become stuck for ideas. Sure we have researched our audience, checked Q&A's and forums to analyse what questions our audience are asking, but the ideas are limited. It's a difficult industry to find niche articles that our audience would be interested in. Could anyone suggest any ideas on how we could find interesting topics that people would actually want to share and maybe our industry influencers would be interested in featuring on their sites, does syndication still work? Duplicate content is a big 'NO NO' for Google but as long as the third party site features a rel=canonical or link back to our original post, Google wouldn't have any problem with this?

Thanks Ryan. It seems the results are already starting to reappear which is quicker than I expected. Our web development company should have definitely consulted us before making this change but at least there's no major issue now. Thanks again.

Thanks for the advice, we will certainly implement this into our site.

Hi Ryan. Further to my original question, we've noticed some of the products we were appearing high for in the SERPS have now vanished. Although some are still showing. I assume this would be temporary whilst they are being reindexed. Should we be worried? The Web company did this without any warning.

I have recently come across the Schema markup and have researched what it's all about. Basically in short it helps search engines identify all the elements of the page. Our competitors have this implementated, so is this important for SEO? We have an e commerce store.

Life saver, I have made the changes you have suggested. Thanks very much for your help.

Our web development team have changed our domain prefix from www to non www due to a server change.

Our SSL certificate would not be recognised under www and would produce a substantial error message when visiting the secure parts of our website. To prevent issues with old links they have added a permanent 301 redirect from www. to non www. urls until our sitemap catches up.

Would this impact our SEO efforts or would it have no impact as a redirect has been placed?

Thanks

The import/export tool Magento has is really disappointing, especially when it comes to uploading images. Creating products manually is very time consuming. Could anyone recommend a method to upload products through a feed, is there any plugins etc?

Hi Joe, that's great advice. I guess as long as we mention the colours in the product description Google will pick up on that for searches.

Although there are a couple of downsides to having the alternate colours hidden. We have a colour filter on our website, so if someone is looking for an orange chair for example, the products wont appear.

The second issue is, say for example another customer is looking through our product catalogue for a grey chair, and they see the configurable product with a picture of a black chair... they won't know to click on the product to check out the grey variation. Unless we have further development done and have 'also available in more colours' etc.

Thanks

I can't find any information on this anywhere. We have hundreds of configurable products, all with coloured variations. For example, one of our popular selling chairs comes in 8 different colours. Now, should all these coloured variations be visible individually (and have their own url) or only visible when selected from the dropdown?

The problem is, when they have their own url it's going to cause duplicate content issues. It's merely impossible to write a different brief for the same product in 8 different colours. The second issue is, if they are visible individually, one colour is going to be shown TWICE to users, one being the simple product and one being the main configurable.

I hope you kind people can help!