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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

Looking to level up your SEO techniques? Chat through more advanced approaches.


  • Hello, WHAT WE NEED NOW: We need 300 product descriptions done. We have reached the point where we're hiring this done. How would you recommend we go about this. 200 products will be rewriting the supplier's product descriptions (one sentence each) and filling out a quicktable. There's just nothing to do there, no information anywhere. About 100 products will be where the person writing the description and filling out the table will have to google the product's manufacturer and rewrite the information off of that website in an intelligible, interesting, paragraph that is informative. Would you recommend we hire someone local to come work in our office that specializes in our niche, or are there any GOOD services out there for our case, even if it's just for the first 200. OUR FUTURE PLANS: We'll guess at the top few products and do some 10X work ourselves. No hiring needed there. Once we know the top 50 products we will do some more deep hiring for 10X product descriptions, but that can wait. Thanks.

    | BobGW
    1

  • I have a website with product pages that use the same URL, but load different data based on what's passed to them with GET. I am using a Wordpress website, but all of the page information is retrieved from a database using PHP and displayed with PHP. Somehow these pages are not being indexed by Google. I have done the following: 1. Created a site map pointing to each page. 2. Defined URL parameters in Search Console for these type of pages. 3. Created a product schema using schema.org, and tested it without errors. I have requested re-indexing repeatedly and these pages and images on the pages are still not being indexed! Does anybody have any suggestions?

    | jacleaves
    0

  • tldr: we consolidated several of our domains from longdomain.com to domain.com over a year ago and lost our highest value keywords, roughly 70% of our traffic. All our links were natural google loved our site up until that point. Things started to go sideways then... Oct 2016: 301 redirect everything from http(s)://(www).longdomain.com/* to https://www.domain.com/*, traffic starts to slump Jan 2017: Traffic has slumped 30-40% from normal seasonal levels Apr 2017: We experiment with Rankscience, implementation is botched creating a robots.txt disallow: / which is corrected in a week. traffic slumps even more during this period, but this issue seems to recover over the next month or two (hard to tell since now we have multiple factors and seasonal traffic). Oct 2017: Start an engagement with a seo firm that has experience with migration issues. They find some pages which are not redirecting and claimed that google is confused by that and pages we were redirecting wouldnt pass all the pr value until every page on our old site (including non public ones that google seems to have scraped from emails) was redirected over. Interm: Site audits from the seo form, many minor onsite improvements, link disvow, etc etc, no impact really. Current day: Stumped, and the business is hurting from the lost rankings and cost of seo. Those high value rankings are just gone and I did everything by the book as best I know. Redirects, same content, just punished. Up until the interacting with Rankscience and the seo firm, I handled all the serp related concerns myself. This has left me pretty disillusioned and at my wits end on where to look next.

    | sonar
    0

  • Hi, My client has a large website and has a navigation with main categories. However, they also have a hamburger type navigation in the top right. If you click it it opens to a massive menu with every category and page visible. Do you know if having a navigation like this bleeds page rank? So if all deep pages are visible from the hamburger navigation this means that page rank is not being conserved to the main categories. If you click a main category in the main navigation (not the hamburger) you can see the sub pages. I think this is the right structure but the client has installed this huge menu to make it easier for people to see what there is. From a technical SEO  is this not bad?

    | AL123al
    0

  • Hi all. I have a dilemma that I'm trying to work out a solution to and could use some input. We offer a Foreign Qualification (FQ) service for businesses, and thus "foreign qualification" is a strong keyword for which we currently hold great ranking position for our service page. FQ is different in each state, so we have a series of blog posts focusing on the requirements for each state. "Alabama foreign qualification" is one of many long tail keywords (50 states x various phrasings) we're targeting here. The problem is that it's impossible to write 50 blog posts that are not very similar content, since the process is similar, just not identical, in each state. I'm worried about duplicate content penalties here. I'm thinking that I'd want to create a landing page that serves as a hub for each of these blog posts, perhaps with a reference table for the 50 states too, and set the blog post canonicals to this landing page (thereby pushing all state-focused long tail KWs there). However, I don't want to take away ranking strength of the aforementioned service page for the primary keyword. If I do this, and also link the new landing page to the service page using "foreign qualification" as the anchor text, am I more likely to add or take away from the strength of the service page? Thanks for any and all insight!

    | mkupfer
    1

  • Hi,
    so our website (www.18brandz.com) has been up for 8 months now and has not been ranking yet, we are indexing, moz crawler SEO issues are regularly fixed and we are down to about 25 non major issues, i started using google lighthouse to optimize and had made changes. we post GOOD quality in house written unique content, we follow an SEO templet of guideline i wrote for titles/meta title tags, structure, site speed has been optimized and as for the moment we rank A OR B with no major issues on all speed checking sites possible (gtmetrix/google speed insights/ webspeed... etc) but nothing. and i cant figure out why we wont rank, our field of digital marketing is a tough one and very competitive , i know, yet not ranking for so long seems odd. our only know fact major disadvantage is the lack of links and no link building strategy. any suggestions? any idea?

    | SharonEKG
    1

  • Hello, I'm developing a website for a law firm, which offers a variety of services. The site will also feature a blog, which would have similarly-named topics. As is customary, these topics were taxonomies. But I want the articles to enhance the value of the service pages themselves and because the taxonomy url /category/divorce has no relationship to the actual service page url /practice-areas/divorce, I'm worried that if anything, a redundantly-titled taxonomy url would dilute the value of the service page it's related to. Sure, I could show some of the related posts on the service page but if I wanted to view more, I'm suddenly bounced over to a taxonomy page which is stealing thunder away from the more important service page. So I did away with these taxonomies all together, and posts are associatable with pages directly with a custom db table. And now if I visit the blog page, instead of a list of category terms, it would technically be a list of the service pages and so if a visitor clicks on a topic they are directed to /practice-areas/divorce/resources (the subpages are created dynamically) and the posts are shown there. I'll have to use custom breadcrumbs to make it all work. Just wondering if you guys had any thoughts on this. Really appreciate any you might have and thanks for reading

    | utopianwp
    0

  • A potentially spammy website http://www.rofof.com/ has included a rel canonical tag pointing to my website. They've included the tag on thousands of pages on their website. Furthermore http://www.rofof.com/ appears to have backlinks from thousands of other low-value domains For example www.kazamiza.com/vb/kazamiza242122/, along with thousands of other pages on thousands of other domains all link to pages on rofof.com, and the pages they link to on rofof.com are all canonicalized to a page on my site. If Google does respect the canonical tag on rofof.com and treats it as part of my website then the thousands of spammy links that point to rofof.com could be considered as pointing to my website. I'm trying to contact the owner of www.rofof.com hoping to have the canonical tag removed from their website. In the meantime, I've disavowed the www.rofof.com, the site that has canonical tag. Will that have any effect though? Will disavow eliminate the effect of a rel canonical tag on the disavowed domain or does it only affect links on the disavowed website? If it only affects links then should I attempt to disavow all the pages that link to rofof.com? Thanks for reading. I really appreciate any insight you folks can offer.

    | brucepomeroy
    1

  • Hi All, I have an issue where the content (pages and images) of Site A (www.ericreynolds.photography) are showing up in Google under different domains Site B (www.fastphonerepair.com), Site C (www.quarryhillvet.com), Site D (www.spacasey.com). I believe this happened because I installed an SSL cert on Site A but didn't have the default SSL domain set on the server. You were able to access Site B and any page from Site A and it would pull up properly. I have since fixed that SSL issue and am now doing a 301 redirect from Sites B, C and D to Site A for anything https since Sites B, C, D are not using an SSL cert. My question is, how can I trigger google to re-index all of the sites to remove the wrong listings in the index. I have a screen shot attached so you can see the issue clearer. I have resubmitted my site map but I'm not seeing much of a change in the index for my site. Any help on what I could do would be great. Thanks
    Eric TeVM49b.png qPtXvME.png

    | cwscontent
    1

  • https://www.hackerearth.com/blog/artificial-intelligence/artificial-intelligence-101-how-to-get-started/ We are ranking for 121KW for this page. And 22KW are ranking in the 1-3 position. I am not able to understand why will it rank like anything. Considering that it has just 4  inbound links. Will some help me to understand this mystery. When we try to write a good in-depth content then we are not ranking but for such content, we are doing fairly good.

    | Rajnish_HE
    1

  • Hello, I have a page with multiple bike tours on tour and under my image as anchor text linking to the different destination I have written the region + bike tour. Is it ok to write bike tour that many times bike tours or would it be better to write variations of it such as "Bordeaux biking, Strasbourg to Colmar by bike for (Alsace bike tour) or doesn't it matter ? Thank you,

    | seoanalytics
    1

  • If you can, please provide any and all talking points that I can use in this argument. It seems that no matter what I show him, including Matt Cutts' video debunking Keyword Density back in 2011, it doesn't seem to stick. He is fully, 100% convinced that keyword density is hugely important and we need to focus our time and energy on it. Any sources you might have to help me show him that this is a myth would be hugely appreciated. Thank you.

    | TaylorRHawkins
    2

  • I have several Tumblr blogs. Created when Tumblr links were worth more, and now primarily for my amusement. But, I'd like to get whatever link juice I can out of them. I thought only the footer links were do follow, but when I check Moz it's showing all links as do follow. Any idea which is true?

    | julie-getonthemap
    1

  • I have a unique title tag for every page on my site but depending on what page a user lands on, that title becomes the title tag for the entire site. For example, if you come in from SERPs via the "Zach King: My Magical Life" page, the title "Zach King: My Magical Life" title will be applied to every page on the site even though they have unique title tags. This is the site: https://www.shelfstuff.com/book-shelf. Any ideas on how to fix this?

    | craigkleila47
    0

  • We have about 10 high-level product categories with 100's of products from different suppliers. What is the best way to structure our product catalog and content to drive SEO? Basically, we get all our content from the manufacturer and want to make sure we are setting up the product pages and structure correctly. Any ideas or sites that do it very well? Thank you! 🙂

    | Jamesmcd03
    0

  • Hi In November, we have switched our website (https://www.insidermonkey.com) from HTTP to HTTPS. Initially, we noticed slight search traffic loss but later discovered it might be due to HTTPS switch. A month later we added the https version at search console, and then saw an immediate huge drop (about 25-30%). We discovered the problem might be due to poor redirection and noticed our redirects were 302s instead of 301s. To fix the problem, we implemented the 301 redirects and submitted the sitemap containing links to the old site at the new search console property (https). We've gone through points listed on the page below: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543 We fixed the redirects to 301 Double-checked the sitemaps Made sure we had a properly installed SSL certificate (Now, we get A+ from https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.insidermonkey.com) Made sure we have no mixed-content errors (we don't have any issues at search console.) We only avoided implementing HSTS, in case we might want to switch back to HTTP.
    We had a small improvement in the following month, but our traffic did not fully recover. We wanted to test for the possibility to switch back HTTP by switching only 2 articles in our CMS to HTTP. Our traffic got worse, not only for those but for the whole site. Then we switched back those 2 articles to HTTPS again and implemented HSTS. It seems our search traffic getting worse day by day with no sign of improving. In the link below you can find the screenshot of our weekly search traffic between 1 October - 1 March. We are down from 500K weekly visitors to mere 167K last week. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Y1TQbj_YtGG4NhLORbEWbvITUkGKUa0G Any ideas or suggestions? We are willing to get professional help as well. What is the way to find a proper consultant for such problem with relevant experience?

    | etakgoz
    0

  • In other words how does google know which entities are the closest to each other ? Thank you,

    | seoanalytics
    0

  • Hi I'm working on a big site migration I'm setting up redirects for all the old categories to point to the new ones. I'm doing this based on relevancy, the categories don't match up exactly but I've tried to redirect to the most relevant alternative. Would this be the right approach?

    | BeckyKey
    1

  • Hi all, One question about the href lang tag. Our webshop sells to 4 different countries (the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium & Spain). The navigation is a little bit different for these countries, depending on how popular certain product categories are in certain countries. So, for example: Netherlands --> Category A and B are in the top navigation
    Germany --> Category B is a subcategory of product A. We want to implement the Hreflang tag, would it be a problem that the navigation/site structure (and therefore the URL structure for certain categories) are a bit different? So: The url for category B in the Netherlands is: https://www.website.com/nl/category-B/
    The url for category B in Germany is: https://www.website.com/de/category-A/category-B/ Thanks in advance! Best!

    | AMAGARD
    0

  • Hi Mozers, I'm using search operators for a count of how many pages have been indexed for each section of the site. I was able to download the first 1000 pages from Google Search Console but there are more than 1000 pages indexed, so I'm using operators for a count (even if I can't get the complete list of indexed URLs). [Although, if there is a better way, PLEASE let me know!] Anyway, in terms of search operators: from my understanding, the more general the URL, the more results should come up. However, when I put in the domain site:www.XXX it gives me FEWER results than when I put in site:www.XXX/. When I add the backslash to the end of the domain, it gives me MORE results. And when I put in site:www.AAA/BBB/CC it gives me MORE results than when I put in site:www.AAA/BBB. What's with this? Yael

    | yaelslater
    1

  • If i want to create a redirect from a page where the slug ends like this "/?i=4839&mid=1000&id=41537" to a static, more SEO friendly slug like "/contact-us/", will a standard 301 redirect suffice? Thanks, Nails

    | matt.nails
    0

  • We are currently re building our URL structure for eccomerce websites. We have seen a lot of site removing the page path on product pages e.g. https://www.theiconic.co.nz/liberty-beach-blossom-shirt-680193.html versus what would normally be https://www.theiconic.co.nz/womens-clothing-tops/liberty-beach-blossom-shirt-680193.html Should we be removing the site page path for a product page to keep the url shorter or should we keep it? I can see that we would loose the hierarchy juice to a product page but not sure what is the right thing to do.

    | Ashcastle
    0

  • My website NorthernCaliforniaHikingTrails.com/blog has 400 or so tags, and it also has an extensive set of categories. I'm thinking about deleting all the tags, but keeping the categories and consolidating them a bit. Is there a significant SEO advantage to having tags in my case? I've seen a few very high-ranking websites actually rank for a tag, but I doubt my site will reach that level. Any help appreciated!

    | John8899
    0

  • Hi We have roughly 8500 pages in our website. Google had indexed almost 6000 of them, but now suddenly I see that the pages indexed has gone to 45. Any possible explanations why this might be happening and what can be done for it. Thanks, Priyam

    | kh-priyam
    0

  • Hi I have paginated pages on a crawl which shouldn't be paginated: https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs My crawl shows: <colgroup><col width="377"></colgroup>
    | https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=2 |
    | https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=3 |
    | https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=4 |
    | https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=5 |
    | https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=6 |
    | https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=7 |
    | https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=8 |
    | https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=9 |
    | https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=10 |
    | https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=11 |
    | https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=12 |
    | https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=13 |
    | https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=14 |
    | https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=15 |
    | https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=16 |
    | https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=17 | Where is this coming from? Thank you

    | BeckyKey
    0

  • My rankings just tanked big time.  The only problems are #1 Canonical Tags #2 Missing H-1 Tags, #3 URL too long. Are these high priority items now? I just lost a ton of page one rankings after very high rankings for the past 6 years.

    | Boodreaux
    0

  • Hi When is it best to use the  x-default hreflang attribute value tags? Screaming frog is flagging lots as missing, but is it necessary? Thanks

    | BeckyKey
    0

  • Hello, is the number of topics you cover important or is it best to cover only a few topics but in more depth ? Thank you,

    | seoanalytics
    0

  • Sorry to go in-depth here, but want to give all available information. We went live late April 2018 with our two websites in Shopify (moved from Magento, same admin, different storeviews...which we find later to cause some issues). Both of these websites sell close to the same products (we purchased a competitor about 5 years ago, which is why we have two). The nice thing is that they do almost identical amounts in sales. They have done very well for years, especially in the last two years. Well, the core algo update around May 22nd-24th 2018 happened and wiped out about 65% of our Google traffic for one website (MySupplementStore.com). And this latest update, wiped out another 20%. I couldn't figure out why this would have happened, because we were very cautious about keeping things separate, unique descriptions etc. So I did some digging and this is what I found: The reviews we migrated over from Magento somehow were combined and added to both websites. This is something I didn't notice. I had this resolved a month ago so that each site's reviews are now only on that website. Our blog section was duplicated across both websites during the migration. Again, something I didn't notice, as we have close to over 1,000 blog posts per site. This was resolved two weeks ago. As I was looking more, I found that the last 6 months, a person working for us (for 3 years), started writing descriptions and pasting them on both websites, instead of making them unique to each website. I trusted her for years, but I think she just got lazy. She quit about a month before the migration as well. We are currently working on this, but its been taking awhile because we have over 5,000 products on each site and have no idea which ones are duplicates. I did also notice: Site very slow when checking site speed tools. Working on that this week. When I take snippets of text or do searches, many times it shows up in omitted results. No messages in Google Webmaster Tools So the question is... Do you think it is the duplicate content issues that caused the drop? Our other site is Best Price Nutrition, which didn't see a big drop at all during that update. If not, any other ideas why?

    | vetofunk
    0

  • Hello, I would like to display 3 different english versions of my website : 1 for UK, 1 for CA and 1 for other english users. It would look like this for a page: . (english content with £ prices) <link rel="alternate" href="https: xxx.com="" en-ca" hreflang="en-CA">(english content with $CA prices)</link rel="alternate" href="https:> <link rel="alternate" href="https: xxx.com="" en="" " hreflang="en">(english content without currency)</link rel="alternate" href="https:> I wonder if I can mix this hreflang without country code with hreflangs with country code for the 2 other specific versions... or if the hreflang without country code version will appear whatever the country, even if i specified it . In other terms, is  hreflang="en" > hreflang="en-CA" + hreflang="en-GB" if tagged together on a same page? Thank you

    | AlexisH
    0

  • In this: https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo it says that simply redirecting - provided you don't change anything on the page - isn't going to cost you rankings. Is this still true, or is there any new data/case studies that have been done since? I haven't seen anything updating it and just want to make sure because it's from 2016. We want to do simple 301 redirecting without any changes to the page. Or has anyone had an opposite experience?

    | AngieJohnston
    1

  • Hi Guys, Looking for reverse image search tools for link building. I want to dump 1000s of images into the tool, so it can find their usage across the web. I have tried picmatch.ca but their support is not great and Tinyeye. Are there any recommended reverse image search tools recommended here on Moz? Cheers.

    | robincar0l
    0

  • Hi My website has millions of URLs and some of the URLs have duplicate versions. We did not set canonical all these years. Now we wanted to implement it  and fix all the technical SEO issues. I wanted to consolidate and redirect all the variations of a URL to the highest pageview version and use that as the canonical because all of these variations have the same content. While doing this, I found in Google search console that Google has already selected another variation of URL as canonical and not the highest pageview version. My questions: I have millions of URLs for which I have to do 301 and set canonical. How can I find all the canonical URLs that Google has autoselected? Search Console has a daily quota of 100 or something. Is it possible to override Google's version of Canonical? Meaning, if I set a variation as Canonical and it is different than what Google has already selected, will it change overtime in Search Console? Should I just do a 301 to highest pageview variation of the URL and not set canonicals at all? This way the canonical that Google auto selected might get redirected to the highest pageview variation of the URL. Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.

    | SDCMarketing
    0

  • We are in the process of restructuring our site and are trying to figure out Google's preference for location pages and services. Let's say we are an auto repair company with lots of locations and each one of them offer some unique services, while other services are offered by all or most other locations. Should we have a global page for each service live with a link to the location page for each shop that offers that service? OR Should we built a unique page about each service for every location as a subfolder of each location (essentially creating a LOT of sub pages because each location has 15-20 services. Which will rank better?

    | MJTrevens
    1

  • Hi, I have a new client that has pagination handled incorrectly on their website.... They have it setup as follows: example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=1 example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=2 example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=3
    etc etc rel=canonical from page 2 to page 1
    rel=canonical from page 3 to page 1
    etc etc i.e. they aren't using rel=prev, rel=next To get them to invest in the development time need to change this I need to explain to the client how what they have is negatively affecting things? Anyone? Thanks in advance!

    | QubaSEO
    0

  • Hi, Hope someone can help me out here. This is the current situation: We sell stones/gravel/sand/pebbles etc. for gardens. I will take a type of pebbles and the corresponding pages/URL's to illustrate my question --> black beach pebbles. We have a 'top' product page for black beach pebbles on which you can find different types of quantities (differing from 20kg untill 1600 kg). There is not any search volume related to the different quantities The 'top' page does not link to the pages for the different quantities The content on the pages for the different quantities is not exactly the same (different price + slightly different content). But a lot of the content is the same. Current situation:
    - Most pages for the different quantities do not have internal links (about 95%) But the sitemap does contain all of these pages. Because the sitemap contains all these URL's, google frequently crawls them (I checked the logfiles) and has indexed them. Problems: Google spends its time crawling irrelevant pages --> our entire website is not that big, so these quantity URL's kind of double the total number of URL's. Having url's in the sitemap that do not have an internal link is a problem on its own All these pages are indexed so all sorts of gravel/pebbles have near duplicates. My solution: remove these URL's from the sitemap --> that will probably stop Google from regularly crawling these pages Putting a canonical on the quantity pages pointing to the top-product page. --> that will hopefully remove the irrelevant (no search volume) near duplicates from the index My questions: To be able to see the canonical, google will need to crawl these pages. Will google still do that after removing them from the sitemap? Do you agree that these pages are near duplicates and that it is best to remove them from the index? A few of these quantity pages do have intenral links (a few procent of them) because of a sale campaign. So there will be some (not much) internal links pointing to non-canonical pages. Would that be a problem? Thanks a lot in advance for your help! Best!

    | AMAGARD
    1

  • Hey guys, What are all the ways you can implement schema markup Plugins (e.g. wordpress, shopify) Google data highlighter in GSC Google Structured Data Markup Helper Google Tag Manager Also is google data highlighter different to Google Structured Data Markup Helper? Cheers.

    | michel_8
    0

  • I've added our phone number and email address in the header settings in Divi. For whatever reason, when I'm editing the header elements I can see it, but when I view the website it's not showing... I cannot figure out what the issue is. I've never run into it before. Also, the menu looks different, it does not match what it shows in the header elements edit area vs live site. XLRpuxghzHUN LxPX4iND6B 2ekykrCH7Pn

    | LindsayE
    0

  • I head up SEO for a niche job board. We disallowed our job ad pages (/job/) in the robots.txt as this is user-generated content and really eating up our crawl budget, causing penalties etc. Now Google for Jobs has hit the UK (our strongest region for traffic), I'm torn about what to do next. Our jobs will only show in GfJ if we remove the jobs pages from the robots.txt and apply the directed structured data to every single jobs page and monitor this constantly. I will also have to constantly invest in our website developers no indexing / canonicalizing new job pages and paginations. Is GfJ worth it? I have spoken to one other job board who has seen more brand awareness from appearing in GfJ but almost no traffic / application increase. But are we missing a trick here? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

    | gracekimberley1
    1

  • Hi, We have a ecommerce website that performs very well for our brand pages on the text results including the reviews snippet. Our brand pages also include embedded videos. Until now we have always ranked poorly on video results. Our videos are hosted over youtube. In order to boost our video result we have recently submitted a video sitemap to help crawlers find out our videos. The result is the following : our brand pages are now only competing in the video results space. Instead of showing as a text result with our reviews snippet, it shows as a video in a carrousel widget. Within the video tab we are ranking top. We have experienced a drop in CTR since then. Moz have reported a drop on all our brand keywords for text search although the video widget shows our brand there. Is there a way to compete for both videos results and text results, making the choice to keey the review snippet widget? Is the video sitemap useful only to compete within the video space? Cheers

    | mattam
    1

  • For a long time, we were ranking 1st/2nd for the term "Manual handling training". That was until about 5 days ago when I realised that Google had started to index not only a query stringed URL, but also an old version of the URL. What was even weirder was that when you clicked on the result it 301 redirected to the page that it was meant to display... The wrong URL that Google had started to index was: www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/manual-handling?channel=retail The correct URL that it should have been indexing is: https://www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/manual-handling-training I can't get my head around why it has done this as a 301 was in place already and we use rel canonical tags which point to the main parent pages. Anyway, we slapped a noindex tag in our robots.txt file to stop that page from being indexed, which worked but now I can't get the correct page to be indexed, even after a Google fetch. After inspecting the correct URL in the new search console I discovered that Google has ignored the rel canonical on the page (Which points to itself) and has selected the wrong, query stringed URL as the canonical. Why? and how do I rectify this?

    | iHasco
    1

  • I am working on overhauling the on-page SEO for ecommerce website on Sitecore. I've done all my research and I am ready to plug the Title tags and descriptions in. So, if the page on Navigation is 'SHOP' this is in the Title tag box. How do I add my 70 characters of keywords? Thanks. JOE

    | iJoe
    0

  • Having a heck of a time finding info on this one... We're working on a multilingual website which uses WPML. I've used the All in One SEO plugin to customize meta data (title, description, etc). These strings do not appear in the list of translations in WPML. Does anyone have any experience with this setup? How do you enable WPML to translate meta data set via the AIO plugin? Thanks!

    | jonmc
    0

  • Hi guys, We are currently trying to add new products to our site but we are in a quandary on what type of URL structure to pursue. For example:
    Product Name: Aspect Exfoliating Cleanser 240ml https://www.example.com.au/aspect-exfoliating-cleanser-240ml (including the size)
    VS
    https://www.example.com.au/aspect-exfoliating-cleanser 1.) Which is a better URL structure based on SEO 2018 and why?
    2.) Is there any merit in removing the size from the URL key with the aim of attracting more traffic? Keen to hear from you guys! Cheers,

    | michel_8
    0

  • Hi Moz Fam! Question... we have two pages for each state. Both pages are used in our PPC campaigns. One of the two state pages is fully optimized for organic search. The page that's optimized for organic has 1,500-2,000 words, the other one has thin content. All the content is unique, nothing duplicate. We call one set of state pages that I optimized my SEO state pages, then the other ones are our PPC state pages. Should I be setting a canonical tag to one of these pages to let Google know which one is the "master" page? (My SEO state page is the master) I've never used them, so I'm not sure what the right answer is for this. Thanks!

    | LindsayE
    0

  • We have two subdomains on our site: blogs and *www. Our most important and competitive pages are on the www subdomain. I have some pages on the blogs subdomain that have valuable backlinks. Would it be helpful to our SEO efforts for the www subdomain to move and redirect those pages on the blogs subdomain to the www subdomain?

    | RCF
    0

  • Hi Moz Community, please can I hit you with a scenario and get your thoughts? We have a client site - clientsite.com - with reasonable rankings for some of our client's target search terms/branded terms. We have built language specific subdomains - it.clientsite.com, de.clientsite.com - which have been manually translated into local languages.  These subdomains have robots 'noindex' as we only want to drive traffic to clientsite.com. We've installed a geo location tool on clientsite.com that 301s visitors to the appropriate subdomain, so content is served in their local language.  clientsite.com will be the 'catch all' for locations where sub domains have not yet been created. If Google crawls clientsite.com and is 301ed to a sub domain, will we lose SERPS?  The sub domains will have the same content (99% the same content anyway) as clientsite.com, but in local languages. Cheers guys. Steve

    | steviechat
    1

  • Hi guys, We have the following situation: After an error message in new google search console for a large amount of pages with noindex, nofollow tag, a validation is requested before the problem is fixed. (it's incredibly stupid decision taken before asking the SEO team for advice) Google starts the validation, crawls 9 URLs and changes the status to "Failed". All other URLs are still in "pending" status. The problem has been fixed for more than 10 days, but apparently Google doesn't crawl the pages and none of the URLs is back in the index. We tried pinging several pages and html sitemaps, but there is no result. Do you think we should request for re-validation or wait more time? It there something more we could do to speed up the process?

    | ParisChildress
    0

  • Hi, I have one site with a well-established link profile, but no actual reason to exist (site A). I have another site that could use a better link profile (site B). In your experience, would 301 forwarding all of site A's pages to site B do anything positive for the link profile/organic search of the site B? Site A is about boating at a specific lake. Site B is about travel destinations across the U.S. Thanks! Best... Michael

    | 94501
    0

  • We are currently implementing the SEO module for Endeca faceted navigation. Our development team has proposed URLs to be structured in this way: Main category example: https://www.pens.com/c/pens-and-writing/ As soon as a facet is selected, for example "blue ink" - The URL path would change to https://www.pens.com/m/pens-and-writing/blue-ink/_/Nvalue (the "N" value is a unique identifier generated by Endeca that determines what products from the catalog are served as a match for the selected facet and is the same every time that facet is selected, it is not unique per user). My gut instinct says that this change from "/c/" to "/m/" might be very problematic in terms of search engines understanding that /m/pens-and-writing/blue-ink/ as part of the /c/pens-and-writing/ category. Wouldn't this also potentially pose a problem for the flow of internal link equity? Has anyone ever seen a successful implementation using this methodology?

    | danatanseo
    0

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