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We have been using vanity urls for some of our pages. Mostly the pages that have a vanity URL have a long URL length. But now the problem is, the vanity URL is getting displayed on the search engine when the particular keyword related to the page is entered. I checked the google search console, the vanity URL is indexed and the original URL remains unindexed. What should I do? Is adding 301 redirect to the vanity URLs are solution? Since some of vanity URLs are not redirecting to the original. Some of the original pages are not getting traffic. Also, can using canonical tag help?

Hi there - was wondering whether someone might be able to help. For a period of a day and a half, all the traffic to our website's blog articles were mistakenly being redirected to our homepage. A number of these articles ranked in the top 5 in Google worldwide for their targeted keywords, so this was a considerable amount of organic traffic that was instantly being redirected. It was a strange site glitch and our web team rectified the error, but now all these articles have disappeared from Google rankings (not visible anywhere in the first five pages). I'm presuming this must be linked to this redirect issue - we've been advised to wait and see whether Google restores these rankings, but I'm still concerned as to whether this represents a more serious problem? We have re-indexed the pages we are most concerned about, but am not sure whether there is anything else obvious we should think to do. If anyone has any thoughts, I'd be happy to hear them!

We have an iframed calculator on one website (www.renewablesguide.co.uk) which has a text link to another of our websites (www.solarguide.co.uk) which is where the calculator originates. We allow other sites to embed the calculator which gives us the benefit of a followed link back to our site. However in the case of renewablesguide (which we own) we've added a tab to the calculator on every page which GWT shows up as 24 000 links from this site hitting the Solar Guide homepage. As the link is held within an iframe would this amount of links be seen as spammy?

Hi Mozzers, I'd like your feedback on the following: the test/development domain where our sitebuilder works on got indexed, despite all warnings and advice. The content on these pages is in active use by our new site. Thus to prevent duplicate content penalties we have put a noindex in our robots.txt. However off course the pages are currently visible in the SERP's. What's the best way of dealing with this? I did not find related questions although I think this is a mistake that is often made. Perhaps the answer will also be relevant for others beside me. Thank you in advance, greetings, Folko

Hi We have around 10 supplementary sites that have links to our site which are now closing down but are out of our control.  We could have access to their domains so how could we maintain the link juice from these old sites which are going to our new site? However there will be no websites left on these old supplementary just domain names

Thank you for your help in advance! I've read a ton of posts on this forum on this subject and while they've been super helpful I still don't feel entirely confident in what the right approach I should take it. Forgive my very obvious noob questions - I'm still learning! The problem: I am launching a site (coursereport.com) which will feature a directory of schools. The directory can be filtered by a handful of fields listed below. The URL for the schools directory will be coursereport.com/schools. The directory can be filtered by a number of fields listed here: Focus (ex: “Data Science”) Cost (ex: “$<5000”) City (ex: “Chicago”) State/Province (ex: “Illinois”) Country (ex: “Canada”) When a filter is applied to the directories page the CMS produces a new page with URLs like these: coursereport.com/schools?focus=datascience&cost=$<5000&city=chicago coursereport.com/schools?cost=$>5000&city=buffalo&state=newyork My questions: 1)   Is the above parameter-based approach appropriate? I’ve seen other directory sites that take a different approach (below) that would transform my examples into more “normal” urls. coursereport.com/schools?focus=datascience&cost=$<5000&city=chicago VERSUS coursereport.com/schools/focus/datascience/cost/$<5000/city/chicago (no params at all) 2)   Assuming I use either approach above isn't it likely that I will have duplicative content issues? Each filter does change on page content but there could be instance where 2 different URLs with different filters applied could produce identical content (ex: focus=datascience&city=chicago OR focus=datascience&state=illinois). Do I need to specify a canonical URL to solve for that case? I understand at a high level how rel=canonical works, but I am having a hard time wrapping my head around what versions of the filtered results ought to be specified as the preferred versions. For example, would I just take all of the /schools?focus=X  combinations and call that the canonical version within any filtered page that contained other additional parameters like cost or city? Should I be changing page titles for the unique filtered URLs? I read through a few google resources to try to better understand the how to best configure url params via webmaster tools. Is my best bet just to follow the advice on the article below and define the rules for each parameter there and not worry about using rel=canonical ? https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1235687 An assortment of the other stuff I’ve read for reference: http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/seo-clean-urls http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/3857-SEO-When-Product-Facets-and-Filters-Fail http://www.searchenginejournal.com/five-steps-to-seo-friendly-site-url-structure/59813/ http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/07/improved-handling-of-urls-with.html

Hi I am working on a site that is to relaunch later on this year - is best practise for the old urls (of which there are thousands) to write a piece of code that will cover all of the urls and redirect them to the new home page or to individually redirect each url to its new counterpart on the new site.  I am naturally concerned about user experience on this plus losing our Google love we currently have but am aware of the time it would take to do this individually.  Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks

Hello, I just found that some of the urls on my  site have both ugly characters and some other things I'd like to fix (such as ---- into a single - ) After some local tests i've seen that If i leave some imperfections there will be 48k different urls  on the other hand if the renaming procedure is strict i'll have around 260k out of 2.3M urls to be renamed. If I'm going to do this I'll create new canonicals meta tag and redirect old urls with 301 headers  to the new location. The content will not change. My big doubt is SEO wise, I know that I'll have better urls, but aren't those too much redirects on a single day? what would you do if you wish to have shipshape urls and know some of these are crap? thanks