Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
That notification seems confirming my supposition that Google is consolidating that homepage with some other of the existing ones... hence, I'd test the canonical hack I explained above.
Hi!
I see that the website you link to in your question is a WordPress.
So, my question: do you have Yoast SEO installed?
If the answer is yes, then you should be aware that since April 2018 Yoast SEO changed how the default set up of the media attachment URLs of WordPress are treated by the plugin.
Since then, you must explicitly tell the plugin to not let those URLs (created by WordPress, not Yoast, to be clear) indexed.
Many other websites using Yoast are suffering this kind of issue (this is the bad of not reading the plugin updates' specifications), so that Yoast itself published this post few days ago https://yoast.com/media-attachment-urls/, which explain how to correctly set up the plugin and what to do to purge the Index of your media attachment URLs (aka deindexing them).
I hope this will help you out.
EGOL was right asking more information also for one precise reason: in some website a "thin page" maybe the best thing the same website can offer to a visitor because that page answers exactly to what the user needs from it.
That is why so often the Googlers say that thin content per se it's not a problem.
It's a problem if it is due to some technical issue or because of bad on-page SEO (i.e.: a page with a photo and no caption and written description of the photo).
So, to better answer your question, we need to know more about the nature of those thin pages you are talking about.
p.d.: using "noindex, follow" is not anymore suggested by Googlers. In fact, few months ago, John Mueller declared that if Google sees a page with a noindex,follow for a long time, then it will start considering the "follow" as a nofollow", so the original reason of its use won't be satisfied.
Enriching your keyword thesaurus with the words Google bolds in the SERP for your main keyword is correct.
In fact, they are synonyms or what Google as "synonyms" of your keywords or "query".
I do the same, and it works... albeit it's a very manual procedure, so I wouldn't recommend it as a general task you do for every keyword you are targeting.
Apple is doing what is doing because it decided to go the subfolders way for their main website, but they obviously own also the ccTlds for brand protection and redirect them.
Once, though, it was using subdomains for its ecommerce part (now they are subfolders under each country section.
Actually, it is not correct to say that one solution (subfolders, ccTld or subdomains) is better than another. It all depends on the specific business needs and, secondly, on technological needs.
However, it is true that when a company is starting an internationalization of its business, a better option is going with subfolders, so to give them some strength via internal linking, while not forgetting to improve the popularity and authority of the country targeting subfolders with localized link building and digital PR campaigns.
On a middle/long term, though, and traffic and conversion metrics justify it, it may be better to move the subfolder to a unique domain name geotargeted to the marketed country. The reason of this choice can also be found out of the SEO world (i.e.: in the UK the marketing strategy is different than in the USA because of nuances of the same UK market or different seasonality).
Regarding hosting... having a site hosted in the country the site itself is targeting is not anymore a ranking factor in International SEO since when cloud hosting became mainstream.
However, it still remains a (tiny) geotargeting signal for Google, as they repeated sometimes on Twitter and Google Hangouts.
In the case of markets where Google is not the main search engine, but others like Baidu in China, Naver in Korea, Yahoo in Japan and Yandex in Russian speaking countries, then I would strongly suggest to go for ccTlds, because those search engines do not work the same way Google does (hence, SEO it's different. A good example of this is Naver).
Hi vtmoz!
Did the issue you described here still present?
Hi... I'm sorry to tell you that the answer offered by Gaston is not totally correct.
So, in your Spanish page you have these hreflang and canonical annotations:
This is not correct because you are not adding also the self-referential hreflang annotation
Google is very precise about this, and it states its need in the help pages as well in many Googlers tweets and webmaster office hangouts.
The rel="canonical" is correct. Remember that the self-referential and the alternative href URLs must always be canonicals.
Finally, regarding the subfolders blocked via robots.txt, yes! that's totally incorrect:
if you're blocking Googlebot from accessing the Spanish, French and Italian subfolders, then Googlebot won't be able to parse the code of their pages, hence it won't be able to see also the hreflang annotations... with obvious erroneous consequences.
Your question is quite convoluted, so I hope to answer it correctly :-).
My first thought when reading your question was: "Why do they want to associate two so different set of products?".
I mean, I fully understand that you are moved by SEO consideration, but - honestly - SEO should not enslave business considerations and logic.
Widget and Gears are two totally different kinds of products and, especially, they have very different kind of buyer personas. In other words: the buyer personas targeted by the widgets website not necessarily are interested in gears.
Plus, also on an entity level, there's no connection between widgets and gears, hence also for Google would be hard to start understanding for what entity set is relevant the website if it is not presenting itself as a broader ecommerce store.
So, strategically, I would not start with SEO (bear with me...) as the main channel for the new gear website, but on branding, creating a dedicated website in a dedicated unique domain name.
Hence, I'd create campaigns to support the launching of the new website and line of products, so to create a solid backlink profile from the start, which will obviously help in rankings.
Said that, I would take advantage of the visibility of the Widget website for announcing the new Gear one (I suppose the widget site has a news section and an About Us section, under which you can create a landing page explaining what other "companies/websites" are part of the "Businesses company owning the Widget website".
First of all, the answer given by Kate is totally correct, so consider it.
However, I will try to answer your question from a different perspective and starting from considering that there's a serious reason why your client needs to have different websites for targeting different countries where the same language is spoken (i.e.: some products are not available in every geography, or the client is marketing the services/products with different messages or, simply, the business company has also a physical presence in the targeted countries).
So, considering that starting point, we can find ourselves in 2 situations.
The first is the ideal one: the websites - albeit substantially identical in their purposes - are localized (different content or simply a different "writing" of the content from site to site, attention to the country level nuances of the language (i.e.: respecting British English orthography in the UK website).
In this case - apart geotargeting the domain (if its a generic domain name) via GSC or relying on the automatic geo-targeting the country code domain names have and earning "local" backlinks - you should implement the hreflang annotation in order to indicate to Google what URL to show to searchers depending on their language and location.
The 2nd case is more tricky and, unfortunately, more common: the websites targeting different countries but having the same identical content from site to site.
In this case, you should still need to implement the hreflang but, contrary to all written and available documentation, you should canonicalize all the duplicated website to the "canonical" one while indicating in the href element of the hreflang the canonicalized alternative URLs.
As I said, this is not "documented" in any Google help pages because it's formally the wrong way to implement the hreflang. In fact, we all know that that alternative and self-referential hrefs must always be "canonical" URLs.
However, this is a strong and valid exception, and it has been validated as such by John Mueller in a tweet answering a question by Glenn Gabe about this same situation.
Said all this, when it comes to hreflang implementation in this kind of situation, I always suggest running a test on a limited set of URLs before implementing it broadly.
Finally, you're asking if you can do it this on WordPress. Sure you can.
To make rest a project after a while. That pause will benefit your creativity, because your brain will work on it in the background without stress. When you return to the project, it will seems new somehow and those ideas your mind was breeding will come out with force.
I not a great fan of press release sites, as I think they are not giving a real personalized (is it correct this word?) service.
If I was you I would try to convince your clients to transform those press release into posts creating a blog. Then I would use the newsletters as a way to promote the blog with Media and contacts in Media.
That way it would be possible to create a more personal relationship between your clients' sites and the media, and from there more interesting linking opportunities.
Hi.
First of all I'd like to tell you one thing: H1 is not anymore so determinant as a single ranking factor, as you can verify from the 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors by SEOmoz.
Said that, H1 is still important, especially to help Search Engines to understand "semantically" the content of the page the same H1 is present.
That means that neither the standard solution Magento offers, neither your idea are totally correct.
Let me explain it.
To have as H1 the Logo of your site, means that you are going to have the same H1 for every page of your site. This is not suggested, because you are indirectly telling to the crawlers that "The Printer Depo" is an important keyword for every page your site have... and that is not surely true.
More over, having as H1 you logo (hence, the alt text of it) can cause that more H1 tags will be present in your page (i.e.: in the product page, usually the name/title of the product is treated as H1); and this is not really a good practice, also because you are telling to the search engines that your document is about the 1st H1 keywords and the 2nd one too, fact which may create confusion.
My suggestion (which is also a suggestion Yoast offers in its old but still useful Magento SEO guide) is to maintain the logo as H1 in your home page (using the hack you did is ok), but making the logo has H3 in all the other pages.
Ciao Mike,
first of all my compliments for having "A" grade on every page of your site.
And now I will try to answer to your question.
Good luck with PPC, it is a great marketing tool, but can be a real pain in the... if not well planned.
Hi... I'm sorry to tell you that the answer offered by Gaston is not totally correct.
So, in your Spanish page you have these hreflang and canonical annotations:
This is not correct because you are not adding also the self-referential hreflang annotation
Google is very precise about this, and it states its need in the help pages as well in many Googlers tweets and webmaster office hangouts.
The rel="canonical" is correct. Remember that the self-referential and the alternative href URLs must always be canonicals.
Finally, regarding the subfolders blocked via robots.txt, yes! that's totally incorrect:
if you're blocking Googlebot from accessing the Spanish, French and Italian subfolders, then Googlebot won't be able to parse the code of their pages, hence it won't be able to see also the hreflang annotations... with obvious erroneous consequences.
Hi Philip,
I'd invite studying what a site like Booking.com does, because it can offer you the answer you are looking for.
For instance, we have the hotel Residence Michaela in Milano Marittima, and it is listed in the Italian and English version of the site:
If you, then, use the Structured Data Testing Tool by Google, then you'll see how both have the aggregate rating (you must be logged in Google to see the links here below):
Those Booking's pages of the Residence Michaela have a link to the Review pages (click on the "Good 7.3"):
The two reviews' pages work differently. The Italian one presents first the reviews in Italian, which are the big majority of them. The English one, instead, presents first the ones in English, and just after the ones in Italian or in a language different from English.
Substantially they are doing what Rank Tracker does, somehow, and what Tom Anthony suggested in his answers.
The use of hreflang in the reviews' page is essential if you are going to present the same reviews, even if ordered differently.
I hope this helps you.
Don't take me as good example (I'm not).... in fact I use none of above (gfiorelli1)... but you know, when you have a nick attached to you since the BBS era.
Seriously talking... brand name is always better for the twitter handle of a company. For the "professional" twitter handle of an employer of the company, the best is Name-Brand.
Yes, as Google itself (and Bing) told to Danny Sullivan in an interview that I strongly suggest you to read: http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389
Hi Kevin!
The first thing you must ask yourself is this one: why do I need to post articles in posts/articles directories.
Surely you'd like to do it for link building reasons...
But is it worth the time and bucks spent? I personally think it is not.
The fact is that article marketing directories give you an easy way to create backlinks is surely tempting, but they are bad quality links. As Rusty wrote, they pass very few PR because:
Secondly, the articles published in those kind of directory right now rarely are picked up by other webmasters in order to fullfill their content needs, therefore the original reason to be of those sites (publish your original content to see it redistributed with an attribution link) is totally failing and fading.
So... in order to see some kind of effect on your ranking thanks to this hiperspammed tactic (and I'm sorry to notice that Rusty practically suggest to follow this way) you would need literally hundreds if not thousanda of articles.
That means that even though article marketing at first seems fast and cheap, on a large scale it is not, all the contrary: it expensive, time wasting and overly distracting.
If you have the money and time to engage in that kind of big scale strategy, then you'll probably see still a good effect on your rankings, results that probably will be blown away if only Google decide to put a final end to these kind of links.
I don't say you have not to use article marketing (or PR sites for press releases), but do it once in a while creating always original content, not respinning it all over the web and just to create diversity in your link profile.
But I suggest you to change your link building chip, and start using other more productive and effective ways in order to create link building occasions:
I do really suggest you to look at this old (august 2011) Whiteboard Friday by Rand Fishkin:Article Marketing: Mostly a Scam
Ciao!!!
Hi Alan and Matt,
I am sorry to tell you that if you set up the hreflang for "Europe" as hreflang="en-GB", that won't work.
That annotation, in fact, tells Google to show the URLs having it only to users searching in English from Great Britain.
It would be better to use only "en" in European website.
Said that, this is not the best solution either, because it is telling Google: "show this to users searching in English globally (but not if they are in the USA).
If the European web site is meant to reach users who not necessarily are using English as default language (eg: Spanish, French, Italians, Germans et al), than a solution could be tagging the European website with the "x-default" hreflang.
Note, though, that this a quite extreme use of the x-default.
The big mistake, anyway, is creating an European website itself:
Finally, personally I would not suggest to a ccTld for targeting European users, because that ccTld would geotarget the site to its country (eg: .es to Spain). Better a generic domain name (.net or even .eu, which is a generic domain name and does not have any geotargeting power), or even a subfolder/subdomain.
Finally, when creating the different country sites, I remind you that in certain countries is spoken the same language. For instance Ireland and UK share English, but they have different currencies, obviously different postal system and phone numbers and, especially, a different culture, so that you should not think in having an European EN version serving all the English speaking countries, but localizing each one of them.
To not talk, and I really end my answer, countries like Switzerland (French, German, Italian and Romance), Spain (Spanish and Catalan), Belgium (French and Flemish), Ukraine (Russian and Ukranian).
12/19/2016 2016 was an intense year, especially when it came to SEO and Google in particular. Gianluca Fiorelli predicts trends for 2017 based on evidence of what we've seen come to pass.
8/2/2016 From parsing and indexing optimization, to semantics and structured data, to the opportunities of personalized search, Gianluca uses evidence from Google's actions, statements, and patents to help you craft a future-proof user-first game plan.
11/24/2015 RankBrain. We know it happened, but beyond that, the details of this Google algorithm update are largely a mystery. What is RankBrain, what does it do, and is it even possible to optimize for it? Join Gianluca Fiorelli as he outlines what we do know and ponders the possibilities of what we don't.
8/5/2015 What are the different types of content, and which metrics should we use to figure out whether they were successful in reaching their audiences? In this practical guide, Gianluca offers his approach and a wealth of additional resources.
3/12/2015 Understanding your brand's archetype and narrative mode can embed you deep in the psyche of your customer. Learn how.
12/29/2014 In the past weeks I have been asked several times what my previews about SEO and marketing are for 2015. In this post, I'll use Lego as a shining example of just where we're heading.
9/30/2014 Nothing like the "The 200 Google Ranking Factors" actually exists. It is a myth, and those who claim to be able to offer a final list are its prophets. This post explains how the myth was born and the importance of knowing the stages of search engines' working process.
9/12/2014 We don't need to create heaps of pages to target long-tail keywords. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Moz associate (and long-time community member) Gianluca Fiorelli explains how we can use topical hubs and an entity-based approach to tell Google about connections it might otherwise have missed.
6/25/2014 The Moz Community is one of the biggest SEO communities online. Analyzing the Moz Q&A, then, can help us understand what SEOs are really talking and worried about. Here's the result of analyzing more than 11,000 questions.
5/13/2014 Gianluca endeavored to learn more about our industry by analyzing more than 20,000 questions from Moz's Q&A section. Along the way, he discovered quite a bit about what makes for an effective online forum. Today's post covers what he learned.
3/5/2014 Personalized search results have been around for quite some time, but they've changed so much that we need a new term for them: private search results. This post is a snapshot of what we're seeing today (including +Post Ads), along with guidance for how best to take advantage of the latest trends.
12/19/2013 How will Google evolve after the acquisition of Wavii, Behav.io, PostRank, Grapple, and machine learning and neural computing technologies? Gianluca Fiorelli paints a picture of Google in 2014, based on entity search, semantic, and über-personalization, covering how Google's recent acquisitions will interact with one another in order to shape our search experience.
10/24/2013 There are many misconceptions about Google's Hummingbird update. What exactly did the update do, and how is it different from Penguin and Panda? How is it related to the move toward 100% (not provided)? This post consolidates the information we have available to answer all of these questions and more.
9/3/2013 With recent posts mentioning the rise of contextual and implicit queries, we are now seeing a deep personalization of search. This takes many forms, and has very real implications for our work as marketers. It's time to break down the silos and see the bigger picture.
8/7/2013 Brand storytelling offers us a way to connect with our audiences in truly memorable ways by appealing to their emotions. People have been telling stories for as long as they've been around, and with a few examples, we see how ancient wisdom can be applied to modern tactics.
6/3/2013 Sometimes, we have to look at things from far away to really understand them. In today's post, we look at the web and the universe at large, and realize that these two mysteries may have more in common than we think.
4/23/2013 Every brand has a story to tell, and the way users consume stories is changing faster than ever. How will you tell your brand's story across multiple media outlets and platforms, while still giving users an active role in the expansion process? Transmedia Storytelling is here to save the day!
2/28/2013 Social content curation is an important building block of your inbound marketing strategy. In today's post, Gianluca Fiorelli shares his tips for preparing and executing your social content curation strategy, along with his favorite tools and thought leaders in the space.
2/5/2013 Every country differs in the way its citizens use the Internet to gather information, interact with online communities, and experience entertainment. In today's post, Gianluca Fiorelli uses data to paint a picture of what search and Internet usage in Italy has looked like over the last few years, and what the future has in store.
12/26/2012 We can only predict the future by studying the past. Through the story of Apollo and Cassandra, Gianluca Fiorelli predicts what the landscape of Google will look like in 2013.
12/4/2012 Web marketing and the entertainment industry have more in common than you might think. In today's post, Ginaluca Fiorelli shares the epic tale of the Beauty and the Brand to show just much SEOs and web marketers can learn from watching the trends on the Red Carpet.
9/27/2012 International SEO is on the rise for many reasons not solely related to SEO. Many companies are making expansion in the international market one of their main goals. In this post, I try to solve the possible doubts you may have about this facet of your job as an SEO, explain best practices, give some tips, and explain why companies should invest more of their budget in competing in the foreign arena.
7/24/2012 Many SEOs and Web Marketers just (re)discovered the importance of Content, maybe pushed by Google's Panda update and other various changes. Let's discover what the SEOmoz MozCon speakers have to say about the most important discipline in Web Marketing. And please, don't even try to use the "Content is King" phrase, or I'll "snap you."
7/17/2012 The world has changed a lot. I don't mean compared to last year (while it is true that many things have change...
7/10/2012 Discover what is the State of SEO in 2012 accordingly to some of the most renown SEOs and Web Marketers. Google Updates, Knowledge Graph, Author Rank, Schema.org, Google+ and the Plus-ification of G. And then Bing and its teasing to the SEO community or the definitive explosion of Mobile Search. So much as changed in one year. But one thing stays firm: MozCon is coming.
4/4/2012 Curation Content is a Content Marketing tactic that SEOs should learn and use. This guide will tell them all they need to know about Content Curation: what it is, how to do it, and why to do it for the highest benefit of their campaigns.
12/12/2011 I must admit that lately Google is the cause of my headaches. No, not just because it decided I was not going to be not provided with useful information about my sites. And neither because it is changing practically every tool I got used since my first days as an SEO (Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Gmail…). And, honestly, not only because it released a ravenous Panda. No, the real question that is causing my headaches is: What the hell does Google want to go with all these changes?
10/18/2011 One of the things I like the most is to ask questions. Yes, I was one of those unsupportable little kids always asking "Why? What? When?" questions to their parents. And that need to learn new things from others is still there, alive. That is why in the past weeks I have started an interviews' series in my blog I Love SEO, with interviews to ...
8/16/2011 Sunday, August the 7th, was a sad day for the Moz community when we lost a beloved member due to cancer.
3/4/2011 I am not a mathematician, therefore I cannot give you formulas to play with; I am not a what can be defined strictly as a technical SEO, therefore I cannot give you insides about technical methodologies to fight spam. I have an old marketing school background mixed with humanistic studies. So, my approach to the quality of SERPs issue, so hot during these last weeks, will be more philosophical and theoretical than high tech and statistic.
10/29/2010 The ultimate SEO factor: the human factor. I was lucky to attend the ProSEO Training Days by Distilled/SEOmoz in London on the 25th/26th of October. It was a wonderful occasion to see so many things recapped, that I have read in blogs, forum and chats; to learn some new things about SEO and to finally meet the people I talk with (too much?) online.
6/17/2010 This post is addressed to all the small business SEO agencies that dreams and aspires to become leaders in their respective markets, and to all those ones that have the experience and can contribute to the ‘brainstorming’ my thoughts desire to open. The future is now (The Hudsucker Proxy, Joel ...
5/7/2010 Maybe it is because here in Europe we are living the final of the most important football leagues and nothing is really decided about which team will win. Maybe because I a...