I believe they do get indexed, don't have any physical proof as of the moment. The easy way is to simply set it up on a test landing page, then request manual recrawl through Google Search Console of that page. and see if it gets indexed.

Hi there.

Basically, canonical link tells search engines to move all the ranking weight to a page, linked by canonical link. Therefore if google thinks that page A should be ranked for a given keyphrase, but this page A has a canonical link to another page B, page B will be considered as a ranking nominee and page A will be discarded. Which means that all meta data and other things WILL be taken from page B.

Hope this helps.

Couple ways you can go about it.

1. Is any of the traffic going to the old spammy domain any good? Does it convert? If not, then don't worry about redirecting,  there wouldn't be any point, only spam signals

2. If there is some good traffic, then do IP limitations, hostnames limitations etc. That can be done in htaccess or on the server itself. There are other more elaborate ways to filter out spam traffic as well, but that depends on how you or your IT guy is familiar with it. One of the simplest solutions is to route all traffic through CloudFlare, it has quite nice spam filtering, and it's free.

Hope this helps.

"... maybe a lot of traffic will convert. "

WILL convert? so it's not converting now? If so, it's kind of optimistic that will change, no?

Since you don't own old domain, you can't really reliably do anything about it anyway.

At this point, I would say not to forward at all, start from scratch.

Yeah, your suggestion makes sense.

Keep the old one while the new one is ranking up.

Now, here is perfect scenario for you - keep working on the new site, and get full ownership of the old one. Then through IP blocks, cloudflare, removing all spammy backlinks etc, get rid of all or most of the spammy traffic and signals. And then redirect.

Hard to say who and why is putting you on those websites.

The only way to truly get rid of those backlinks is to reach out to those websites' owners. You'd have to obviously find someone who speaks the language.

Now, what you can do though is this:

1. Disavow all those crappy links - that'll get Google to lower the "spam score" of your website;
2. Block all traffic by IPs, geolocation and/or hostnames/referrers (that'll prevent from actual unrelated traffic)

That should clean it up pretty good.
Of course, that requires full control and ownership of that domain and website code. If you can't get that - again, my suggestion is just to part ways.

You are always welcome.

If you got more questions, you can always hit me up on my Twitter @DigitalSpaceman

Howdy.

So, there are couple ways to do it.

1. Find a plugin which works (don't know if such exists
2. Use htaccess rewrites. In this case you won't be able to use manufacturer dynamicaly though.
3. Change the catalog model files. Here is a link for couple examples: http://www.placementedge.com/blog/how-to-add-a-prefix-to-magento-product-urls/ All you need to do is append matching variables before the product urls.

Hope this helps

Hi there,

The third URL you are referencing, is actually indexed:

https://dmitrii-regexseo.tinytake.com/tt/NDY4NDY4N18xNDgzNjgzMA

As for "crawled, not indexed" - in most cases it happens because of one and only reason - Google is seeing your page as thin content, not worth being indexed. Typically it happens on bigger sites with a lot of similar pages. In your case, you got many courses, with exactly same structure. So, if the content is not completely different, then Google might deem it not worthy.

As for the bug you referenced - did your URLs drop off the index exactly at the time when this issue has been discovered? (aka within the last week?).

Do you have any cannibalization happening?

To me it looks like that's the case. If I do this search: "site:https://www.ihasco.co.uk/ Sexual Harassment Training course"

There are many pages that are indexed and are ranking: https://dmitrii-regexseo.tinytake.com/tt/NDY4NDcwN18xNDgzNjg4Mg

So, basically, you have pages that are more authoritative with similar content. Therefore your courses pages are dropping as thin content.

I would recommend doing some internal linking optimization to tell Google what is actually important. Look in GSC for internal links metrics.

Hope this helps.