Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
To summarise, some of the products on my web site I have placed in more than 1 category, simply for added exposure.
The problem I had was duplicate content with different urls, such as: www.example.com/category1/productname.html and www.example.com/category2/productname.html
I figured that the best solution would be to do some url rewrites and now the url is just:
www.example.com/productname.html
So question 1)Do you think this was a good move? I did this July/August, not sure exactly what date, but I'm still having problems ranking well for these inner pages.
It's fair to say I sell some unusual items. When I google my most unusual item in quotation marks I'm still nowhere to be seen, except a category page which link to this product. There is only 5 results for this search term, which clarifies its uniqueness.
So Question 2) Am I doing anything wrong, i've waited and waited since making the url rewrites, I assumed 2-3 months would be adequate. Google webmaster tools says everything is fine with no issues. Some other inner pages are ranking ok, so I'm a little mystified.
Any replies are much appreciated.
[edited by: tedster at 6:42 pm (utc) on Nov. 16, 2008]
[edit reason] remove info that identifies the site [/edit]
Do you have a 301 redirect in place from the old url to the new one? If not, you have probably lost all the backlink juice the old urls built up.
Do I understand correctly? Whether the url included "/category1/" or "category2/" your site was still serving the same page, right? If that's the case, I would probably have looked for a way to pick one of those and redirect the other to that one - rather than change every url.
Changing urls that are already indexed is not something to take lightly, even on the same domain. If you do it 100% technically correct, and you avoid canonical url problems [webmasterworld.com] it can be rather quick and painless. But after this many months, I'd assume something is not right with your new set up.
The answer to both of your questions is Yes.
I'm a little unsure what direction to take now, I'm guessing I can only wait and see what happens.
Any other suggestions?
[edited by: tedster at 8:42 pm (utc) on Nov. 16, 2008]
1. your server returns a true 301 http status in the header
2. you have eliminated any canonical url problems
3. googlebot is requesting the new urls
4. old urls are dropping out of the site: operator results (this may be gradual, but it should have started by now)
1. your server returns a true 301 http status in the header? - Yes
2. you have eliminated any canonical url problems? - Yes
3. googlebot is requesting the new urls? - Yes, all angles have been covered here, when I do the 'site:' command at google all the new urls (or most of them) are showing and the old ones are not. I've worked hard on google webmaster tools, created a new sitemap too, created a robots.txt to stop spidering any old products that we no longer sell etc and made sure all titles are unique and recently (couple of weeks ago) added a snippet of the product description (first 160 characters) as my meta description, until then I didn't have any meta descriptions at all.
4. old urls are dropping out of the site: operator results (this may be gradual, but it should have started by now)? - Answered this in (3).
Just to add a bit more information. I'm hoping I haven't overdone any seo, I added a H1 tag (which is solely the product kw) and a H2 tag, which is about 10 words or so which also includes the kw, the key word is usually 2 or 3 words.
Finally a few internal pages are ranking fairly well, but fairly recently even my hopepage has been dropping in and out for it's main kw.
I have also decided to draft in a copywriter to help with the web site content and get it in better shape, which should help, I hope :)
