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Good day doctorSIM!

Actually there was a really great post up on Moz last month about this very thing- http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights

Enjoy!

Greetings Samantha,

Combining all your sites into one has several advantages, for example-

• Cutting maintenance, programming and upkeep costs
• Allowing all new trust to flow to one site instead of X sites
• Giving your local dealership pages the trust strength of the main domain
• Brand cohesiveness

Having a main group site with individual locality pages within it is definitely doable from a local ranking perspective.  We have a franchise client who has over 50 brick and mortar locations in 3 states and we are able to rank them locally with the same amount of effort you would put into a separate site (from an SEO perspective).  You'll want to make sure, at a minimum, you do the following-

1. Each dealership has it's own locality page on your site
2. The address, phone number, etc. on your locality page exactly matches the same in your Google Places pages
3. Link your local Google Places pages to the matching locality page on your website.
4. Though not required, I would recommend 301ing your locality websites home, about, contact, etc. to their corresponding locality page (inventory can be 301d to it's appropriate page)

As for a recommendation, I would say do what fits best for you.  It seems from what you're saying there are some financial benefits to merging and there are no SEO hurdles to prevent you from doing so.  Good luck!

If you are using rel canonical then you can have the same on each page and it should be okay.

Otherwise, I would make sure your paginated pages don't have it.  The next/prev helps Google to understand these are subsequent pages of the original category but it doesn't really give instruction as to the preferred page, etc. (like the canonical would) so you could end up with Google ignoring the content after it sees it too many times.

Yes it doesn't surprise me you'd be having problems on those higher page categories.  Testing is always the way to go when in doubt.  Out of curiosity, what e-commerce system are you using?

I personally prefer the slash but it doesn't make any difference as long as you're consistent and if as you say Google is already indexing most without, I'd probably go that way too!

Greetings Oren,

Good question.  We use this tactic a lot with clients and on our own website but we don't necessarily include it on every page or post in an attempt to reduce blindness to the form.  We do it quite often though.  The key is to make sure you don't just thrown the form in there but actually call the reader to action in some way.  ie: "For more information on (what the post topic is about), sign up for our monthly newsletter below:"

If definitely improves conversion rate (although I don't have any specific numbers for you) and with the right hook in the call to action is very effective in lead generation, and also classifying your leads into buckets of interest for different types of email campaigns (or whatever).

Greetings alrockn!

You do have quite the dilemma here.  I actually think you will have problems if you leave it all as-is; you're between a rock and a hard place!

Most e-commerce programs do a terrible job on the technical SEO front out of the box and require some degree of customization to get it all straightened out.  The pagination of category pages is a very common problem.  I will take your word for it that you cannot modify your template(s) but any reasonable suggestion I think is going to require some degree of template modification.

The problem you're most likely going to run into is a thin content issue on your category pages.  I'm assuming all of those paginated page versions would also have the same category description (if any) and if there is nothing unique about your main page Google is likely to ignore it.

To address your question on hard coding the first page as the canonical, I think that is really the only option you have.  You'll want to make sure that category page does have some level of unique content on it (ie: category description text) so it is unique enough to attract Google's attention.

Could you not do some conditional coding to check the page version and modify the canonical accordingly?

Good day MozAddict!

SEO for Magento is near and dear to my heart.  From a technical SEO perspective, I would recommend cleaning up the items you mentioned as it can cause issues.  The biggest concern is trust flow and having trust split between two versions of the page (ie: the slash and no-slash).

So both the 301 and canonical tag will pass the same amount of trust as the other.  So your question is, which do you go with?  I think both are fine however I prefer the 301 myself for dealing with the trailing slash issue and here's why.

As time passes, believe it or not, people will link to some of your pages naturally.  Because a canonical or 301 doesn't pass the full trust earned from the link, I'd rather someone link to the correct version.  If I'm using the canonical tag, they may indeed link to the non-preferred version and I would lose some of that trust, whereas if I am using the 301, they will automatically be shown the correct, preferred version and I earn all the trust from that natural link.

Moz has a great article on canonicalization if you want to read more on it.

Hope this answer is useful to you!

It should work with posts, pages, custom post types, etc without needing that plugin.

Good luck!

I don't host my WordPress sites on IIS but according to their site, you have three choices for custom permalinks on IIS-

Microsoft IIS 7+ web server with the URL Rewrite 1.1+ module and PHP 5 running as FastCGI
Microsoft IIS 6+ using ASAPI_Rewrite (free for single-site server, $$ for multi-site server)
Microsoft IIS 6+ using Ionic ISAPI Rewriting Filter (IIRF) (free for single-site or multi-site server)

I got the above from this page.

Good day!

I don't think adding the canonical to your hyperlinks is going to accomplish what you want.  All of the direction Google gives is to add it as a in the of your page ( https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en & http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions ).

From a technical web development perspective, when a rel attribute is present on a hyperlink, it "...describes the relationship from the current document to the anchor specified by the href attribute..." ( http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#adef-rel ).  That being the case, a canonical would only make sense in this relationship where the link actually appears on the canonical versions.

Hope that helps!

Hello!

I wouldn't consider it to be very serious, however if you wanted to nip it in the bud, the best way would be to block /Account/* in your robots.txt and also add a meta noindex to all of your /Account pages.

The robots.txt directive asks compliant bots to not crawl the page(s) while the noindex requests search engines to not index those pages.

Greetings Samantha,

Combining all your sites into one has several advantages, for example-

• Cutting maintenance, programming and upkeep costs
• Allowing all new trust to flow to one site instead of X sites
• Giving your local dealership pages the trust strength of the main domain
• Brand cohesiveness

Having a main group site with individual locality pages within it is definitely doable from a local ranking perspective.  We have a franchise client who has over 50 brick and mortar locations in 3 states and we are able to rank them locally with the same amount of effort you would put into a separate site (from an SEO perspective).  You'll want to make sure, at a minimum, you do the following-

1. Each dealership has it's own locality page on your site
2. The address, phone number, etc. on your locality page exactly matches the same in your Google Places pages
3. Link your local Google Places pages to the matching locality page on your website.
4. Though not required, I would recommend 301ing your locality websites home, about, contact, etc. to their corresponding locality page (inventory can be 301d to it's appropriate page)

As for a recommendation, I would say do what fits best for you.  It seems from what you're saying there are some financial benefits to merging and there are no SEO hurdles to prevent you from doing so.  Good luck!

Hi Philip,

You definitely want to look into Custom Post Types.  By creating a new Custom Post Type, it can allow you to create another set of content in the same manner as "Posts" (non-archived) or "Pages" (archived & hierarchical) you can then use to separate your content into buckets like you mention.  For some folks we will create very specific custom post types like "Products" that feature items for sale.  You can also create custom fields that apply to just those post types that can then be used to add additional meta data to the custom post.

Two plugins we use for this are-

• Types - https://wordpress.org/plugins/types/
• Advanced Custom Fields - http://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-custom-fields/

Obviously there are others but that should get you started.  I'm happy to reply to any other questions you may have, just leave a comment.  Good luck!

If the content is irrelevant I wouldn't redirect it to specific pages on your site.  If it is generally still relevant to the business as a whole, you could 301 redirect it to the root URL.  If not, at the very least, if some referring visitors might become customers, you could change your 404 page to offer up calls to action or shopping options for the folks who see it.

My 2 cents.  

I wouldn't worry thought about removing the links unless they're very poor quality and their percentage is high compared to your "good" links.

It should work with posts, pages, custom post types, etc without needing that plugin.

Good luck!

I'll give you my opinion but it isn't a definitive answer.

I believe what you're seeing is a Google SERP test and they are pulling that from the content on the manufacturer's page but I agree there is no rich markup on the page like Schema to point Google to use it.

A quick search of lacrosse monkey shows me no Google ads on the page which is a pretty sure signal Google recognizes this manufacturer as a brand entity.  That in and of itself would suggest Google might also understand the products as entities and be pulling content from the product page and testing it in the Knowledgegraph to see how searchers interact with it.

Unfortunately I don't think there's much you can do about it.

Ah I love Raven.  But which part in particular?  Is it being pulled in from your Analytics?  Can you share a screenshot of what you're looking at?

You're most welcome, glad you found it useful!

Is your .htaccess file writeable by the server?  If not your permalink (and plugin) settings won't work.