Webmaster tools help

[EdHarrison]

I am looking for somebody who can be recommended to help with webmaster tools, I have various outstanding messages suggesting things to be done / fixed that are beyond me - I have always found Google's own tools a nightmare!

thank you

[chickenhouseman]

What are the messages?

[EdHarrison]

Duplicate meta from SellerDecks crazy method of extended info pages that use the store page meta for every single popup!

A duplicate title for the mail form

[chickenhouseman]

you have 2 pages that have the same contact us page title? does that mean there are 2 pages or it's finding it via a cgi-bin link and a standard link? sorry, I don't use the standard contact page so guessing. The same with extended info. Do you have an example? At a guess you'd need to either remove the description or create a new variable just for extended info descriptions. How about thinking of it as a second line of the normal meta description then you could combine the 2 in your OG description to make that a sensible length?

[EdHarrison]

I changed the parent meta and deleted all info pages but google is taking forever to sort it out

[chickenhouseman]

have you checked that the extended info pages aren't still on the server? i have had it not delete a deleted page when i've taken it out of actinic.

You could do a 301 redirect for every one you've deleted.

[EdHarrison]

Not to great with 301's - It should be sorted but still showing up, I changed the meta that it was copying to all info pages and deleted all info pages - my 404 page seems to work with deleted pages.

SEO is as mysterious as ever

I fear technically my site lacks a lot in SEO but the minefield of companies offering SEO services is just plain scary.....like the "have you had an accident in the last 5 years" types.

[chickenhouseman]

They are things that take a while to go. I think that unless you 301 a page google will keep the last known version indexed and after a long time of getting a 404 might decide to drop it. Did you have them there for long?

In the crawl errors you should see all the pages that are giving 404s. The quickest way I've found to work with these is to download them, open in excel and then find / replace the front end to a 301 redirect and then in the next column write the new URL. Then just cut and paste the lot into htaccess.

[EdHarrison]

They were there some months, I thought changing the meta on the page they took it from would kill the duplicate.

Edit - a slow improvement, down to 52 duplicates Today