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Hello All,

We've just noticed a huge drop in ranking for one of our key search terms. On January 9th we dropped from page 1 (Google UK) to page 7 - out of the top 50 completely! Nothing has changed on the page for a number of months, and rankings for other search terms seem unaffected.

Has anyone else been affected recently in a similar manor?

Sorry if this sounds a little vague - but we're struggling to understand how this might have happened. It seems very odd that only this particular search term would be affected so dramatically.

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

This is good news sugar-coating bad news Thanks!

There are several sections getting flagged for duplication on one of our sites:

http://mysite.com/section-1/?something=X&confirmed=true
http://mysite.com/section-2/?something=X&confirmed=true
http://mysite.com/section-3/?something=X&confirmed=true

Each of the above are showing as having duplicates of the other sections. Indeed, these pages are exactly the same (it's just an SMS confirmation page you enter your code in), however, they all have canonical links back to the section (without the query string), i.e. section-1, section-2 and section-3 respectively.

These three sections have unique content and aren't flagged up for duplications themselves, so my questions are:

Are the pages with the query strings the duplicates, and if so why are the canonical links being ignored?

or

Are the canonical pages without the query strings the duplicates, and if so why don't they appear as URLs in their own right in the duplicate content report?

I am guessing it's the former, but I can't figure out why it would ignore the canonical links. Any ideas?

Thanks

Yes - to both you and @MagicDude4Eva - it seems this is about the thin content as opposed to the index of products listed there. Page titles and URLs are indeed unique, but the content can certainly be worked on. Thanks a lot for your help

The products only exist at one URL - but they can appear in multiple sections. The sections have different titles/descriptive text at the top, but list the same products.

We've removed a ton of errors, duplication and other stuff since signing up to SEOmoz Pro, but we're getting to the point where what we have left isn't that easy to fix. On one of our (ecommerce) sites we have several sections where people buy products that are applicable to the area of the home. In one or two instances, a particular list of products is the same for two or more different areas - for instance the "Bedroom and Landings" and "Hallway and Stairs" sections may list  the same 10 products. This is obviously flagging up as duplication in our reports.

What is the best way to handle this situation? Make the one with the highest authority canonical? Point both to another canonical page? Or, try and convince the product department that we should have a more generically name section that both link to?

Thanks for any advice!

I won't be too hard on the programmers - I'm a programmer myself. Our small business has developers and designers doing the bulk of the SEO. I can see you've looked in to it as I have - there are many factors involved if I was to decide to "fix" this myself. To be honest, I don't fancy it - I'm hoping the better approach will come from the wonderful SEO Moz developers who might put in a fix. Hint hint.

Howdy folks, we've been a PRO member for about 24 hours now and I have to say we're loving it! One problem I am having with however is a CSV exported from our crawl diagnostics summary that I've downloaded.

The CSV contains all the data fine, however I am having problems with it when a URL contains a comma. I am making a little tool to work with the CSVs we download and I can't parse it properly because there sometimes URLs contain commas and aren't quoted the same as other fields, such as meta_description_tag, are.

Is there something simple I'm missing or is it something that can be fixed?

Looking forward to learn more about the various tools. Thanks for the help.