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Interesting. This is the first one I've seen, and it's much more obscure than the Olympics.
I'm guessing they use this one to choose what YouTube video to show in one of their info boxes at the top or on the right 
Although on second thought I would expect them to already know which video, and probably which song, is the most popular. I wonder why they're asking then.
I just did s search for Hayley Kiyoko, and Google asked me which song is my favourite from her new album.
Is this a new thing? I've never asked Google a question before and had it ask me something back, other than "did you mean... (the correct spelling for what I was looking for)?"
Thanks Thomas.
AggregateOffer is what I was looking for.
I'm implementing Schema.org, (JSON-LD), on an eCommerce site. Each product has a few different variations, and these variations can change the price, (think T-shirts, but blue & white cost $5, red is $5.50, and yellow is $6).
In my Schema.org markup, (using JSON-LD), in each Product's Offer, I could either have a single Offer with a price range, (minPricd: $5, maxPrice $6), or I could add a separate Offer for each variation, each with its own, correct, price set.
Is one of these better than the other? Why? I've been looking at the WooCommerce code and they seem to do the single offer with a price range, but that could be because it's more flexible for a system that's used by millions of people.
Interesting. I have 2 more thoughts:
If I do a search for "site:globecar.com truck" I see the page, so it's in the index.
However, what are you trying to rank for? Maybe the title should start with "Montreal Truck Rental" instead of "Montreal Truck & 4x4 Pick-Up Rental" - especially if you're trying to rank for the upcoming moving season.
The good news is that on my personalized search results for "montreal truck rental" your Atwater location is the first item in the local 3-pack, however, that might be because I rent cars from you sometimes - when I use the Mozbar to do a non-personalized search using Google.ca in Montreal you don't appear anywhere in the first couple of pages.
Do you have any messages, penalties, or warnings in Google Webmaster Tools?
Will the old pages continue to exist in the WP database? If so, I believe Yoast SEO has a place you can enter a URL to redirect to.
If the old pages will not exist, I prefer to add mod_rewrite RewriteRules to the .htaccess file. This way the webserver redirects the pages without having to initialize WordPress, so it can be a lot faster.
Also, depending on the Post Type WordPress sometimes does this on its own. I know it does for "Post" post types, but I don't know which others. Test your old URLs and see if they're redirecting to the new ones automatically. Make sure to test each kind of URL that has changed - Posts, Pages, Categories, Tags, and any Custom Post Types.
I don't know SEO implications, but if you use a unique URL on each YouTube video it'll be easier to track which ones get more clicks, (assuming Google makes that info available from the URL shortener - I haven't used it).
You could add some more yard/garden-related stuff, especially if you can feature sculptures or metal art similar to what your client is selling, (bonus points if a product she sells is actually used in a garden). If you start now-ish, it's even seasonal!
Is there a good way to avoid it on for a blog that's part of a larger site, (the whole site isn't a blog - and couldn't be powered by a blog CMS like WP - but we have a blog, currently on a subdomain)?
You already have Yoast SEO installed, it can generate sitemaps for you, and I don't think 3500 pages is beyond its ability.
In your WordPress admin, go to SEO > XML Sitemaps, and make sure the XML Sitemap Functionality is Enabled, (the Enabled box should be purple). Once you've done that go through the tabs and turn on/off the parts of the sitemap you want. I would pay special attention to the Post Types tab and make sure any important post types are turned on.
Not that I'm aware of, unfortunately. Patience is an important skill when dealing with Google
I'm not 100% sure I understand the situation - but there are 2 things I think it could be, so here's an idea for each:
Is each page for a specific part? If so, you could put that it the title - for example "Alfa Romeo 156 1997 Piston Heads – Meteco SA"
Is each page for a specific used car that's being sold for parts? If so, what if you have a place to enter a short, (3-5 word), description for each car, then add that to the title somehow? You could also add a slightly longer description to put on the page where you give a little of the car's history or condition, which might also help the customer, (eg, "This alpha romeo has a seized engine"). Edit: it looks like you might already have the description, but I don't read Greek so I'm not 100% sure.
Other than that, maybe a car ID would work - eg, "Car Parts Alfa Romeo 156 1997 #562 – Meteco SA", but I'm not sure if that would help the customers much. How about the date that you got the car? By the time you combine model, year, colour, engine capacity, and date it must be almost unique.
I thought of one other possibility: Your sitemap.xml is probably auto-generated, so this shouldn't be a problem, but check to make sure that the URLs in the sitemap.xml have the www.
Other than that I'm out of ideas - I would wait a few days to see what happens, but maybe someone else with more experience watching Google will have seen this before. If it does resolve, I'd like to know what worked.
I'm not convinced that robots.txt is causing your problem, but it can't hurt to change it back. In fact, while looking for instructions on how to change it I came across this blog post by Joost de Valk, (aka Yoast), that pretty much says you should remove everything that's currently in your robots.txt - and his arguments are right for everything:
If you're using Yoast SEO, here are instructions on how to change the robots.txt file.
I don't know why this is happening, but this is what I would check:
One theory is: When you moved to the non-www version of the site, Google started getting 301s redirecting it from www to non-www, and now that you've gone back to www it's getting 301s redirecting it from from non-www to www, so it's got a circular redirect.
Here's what I would do to try to kick-start indexing, if you haven't already:
Good luck!
That's not so horrible - it just says not to crawl the plugins directory or the admin, and to delay a second between requests. You probably don't want your plugins or admin directories being indexed, and according to this old forum post Google ignores the crawl-delay directive, so the robots.txt isn't the problem.
For more on 301s, read "301 Redirects: The Horror That Cannot Be Uncached." It's not quite true that they can't be uncached, but it's incredibly difficult to do so. From a UI standpoint, if someone has a cottage they like, and has bookmarked the URL, then one day they visit the URL and get a 301, their browser will cache that 301 for months, even if the URL comes back and starts returning a 200 with content.
Ok. I think it'll help, but don't expect miracles. However if, for example, your client is a privacy lawyer, it might help more than if he/she is a bait & tackle shop
I'm also going to recommend WordPress. It's big, battle-tested, and relatively easy to set up and use. They also get security updates out quickly, and your site will auto-patch itself if the security update is critical enough. Non-crucial updates are also very simple to install, (click a few things in a web interface).
For the E-commerce part, WooCommerce is the big guy in the room. I'm also happy with WP e-Commerce, (disclosure: I contribute to its development sometimes), if Woo doesn't work for you. Shopify just launched WordPress integration as well, if that's more up your alley.
As for SEO: Yoast SEO will do a ton. Also, if you really like code you can make WordPress output markup in pretty much whatever way you want without sacrificing the upgradability I started with, so if you're willing to go deep enough, it's, (to me, a WP fan), the perfect CMS.
Like Mary, I'm not a guru, but don't think it'll harm your SEO, but:
TL;DR: If you can get rid of them I would.
Others may disagree, but I think it would count for something, but I don't know how much.
But why would this even happen if it wasn't a paid link scheme or something similarly shady?
If this is a brand new website, at a new URL, for a new business, (or a business that has never had a website before), then I would use a new UA. If this is a redesign, and the old website is going away, I would use the same UA - then you'll be able to track what the new design did for you.
WordPress should take care of it, I don't know why it didn't happen. Between that and you seeing the non-www canonical, maybe there's a full-page cache in action, that hadn't been invalidated yet.
Do you want the www or not?
If you remove it now, you run the risk of people who visit the site frequently being stuck in a redirect loop and not being able to visit your site. When a browser receives a 301 redirect it caches it, very stubbornly. If you now change the 301 to point back to the original location your frequent visitors browsers will have cached the 301 that points from non-www to www, and if www returns a 301 that points to non-www, they'll just be stuck in a loop. If you want to go back I would try to make turn the current 301 from non-www to www into a 302, then change back in several days or weeks. That might not be very great for your SEO, though.
If you want to stick with the www, then stick with it. I'm not sure what I was seeing earlier, but when I check your homepage now with curl the non-www redirects me to www, as expected:
Johns-MBP:~ John$ curl -I http://mefco.co.nz
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2016 20:38:22 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.31 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.31 OpenSSL/1.0.1e-fips mod_bwlimited/1.4
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.6.16
X-Pingback: http://www.mefco.co.nz/xmlrpc.php
Location: http://www.mefco.co.nz/
Cache-Control: max-age=604800
Expires: Sat, 26 Mar 2016 20:38:22 GMT
Vary: User-Agent,Accept-Encoding
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8Johns-MBP:~ John$
Where did you get the canonical info you posted above, is it from Moz? If so, it's probably outdated information. Remember what Matt wrote above about Moz & Google taking time to re-crawl your site. The way to check what your canonical tag, if any, says right now is to view the page source, ( in Chrome: View > Developer > View Source), and look for it, (Ctrl/Cmd + F to Find in the source, then type "canonical"). In your case, your canonical is now set to the www- URL - I'm not sure if you changed it since Matt looked, or if a cache expired, but it appears correct now.
You could go through any HTTP 301 and canonical settings in the Yoast SEO plugin, (which I see you're using), but I don't think you're at that point yet. Go through and make sure everything's set to www, if that's what you want to use. Really, I think you're almost there, and probably at a point where you should wait a few days to see what happens. I made a huge change on our site last weekend, (changed 99% of our URL structure), and after a bit of bug-fixing during the week we're only seeing the start of the result in Google & Moz now.
In addition to what Matt said, make sure you're using a 301 redirect to redirect from the non-www version of your site to the www version. I'm pretty sure WordPress does this on its own, but you can check:
I thought of something while I was writing this, so I checked for you, and found:
Does the non-/news section of the site use the same WP install? If only part of the URL is redirecting I imagine that Google & Moz may be slightly confused.
Have you checked for a manual penalty in webmaster tools? I don't think that's the problem, but it's worth a look.
My hunch is that you have a duplicate content problem. I haven't been SEO-ing for years, so I'm not familiar with what Google does in certain situations, but https://www.credible.com/refinance-student-loans and https://www.credible.com/student-loans are relatively similar: The testimonials are identical, the list of lenders is similar, and the structure of the two pages is nearly the same. I realize that one page is about getting a student loan in the first place, and the other is about refinancing, but I wonder if Google isn't making that distinction - especially since you're getting caught in the "we have omitted some entries very similar to the ... already displayed" filter.
Maybe someone else can chime in here too to confirm or deny the change. FWIW the two pages linked above were recently indexed by Google - March 14 and 13 respectively.
If you end up wanting to DIY, the Canadian Local Search Ecosystem infographic helps show you the places to submit. It's a little out of date, but if you can figure out the current version of each source and submit to them you should be ok.
I did one in 2014, (I usually do non-local SEO), and at that time it was hard to find the Yellow Pages option to just submit without buying an ad, but it's there, keep looking.
Are you running a CMS? If so maybe it has one built-in or available as a plugin - for example the Yoast SEO plugin on WordPress will create a sitemap, has plenty of inclusion & exclusion rules, (including a per-page override), and helps you do a bunch of other stuff too. I'm most other CMSs have something available by now.
If it's a custom-built dynamic site maybe your development team, (or developer), can add sitemap functionality. If you have a lot of pages, backed by a custom database, the best way to make sure your sitemap is up to date will be to generate it based on your data, not let some 3rd-party tool follow links around your site - Google can do that already!
If you are not running a CMS, or a custom app, how many pages do you have? It might be easiest to write the XML sitemap by hand, (although I'm a developer, so that's easy for me to say), or try out Logan's recommendation.
That's smart about the title tag. I'm not super concerned about CTR for pages that have no content - but that's because I assume they're not ranked well, since they have no content, and I could be wrong about that. However, when they do start having content, that delay between when they have content and when Google updates the title that it displays will not be fun.
It looks like noindex is the way to go here - thanks to both you & Nico - I hadn't even thought of it, I was stuck on 404 vs canonical.
I'm still learning about refresh rates & the inner workings of Moz - today I learned a bit more, thanks Matt.
Just realized I never answered the question about the title tag appearing further down - I think this is normal. Yoast SEO tries to put all it's output in the head together, and it's usually near the end of the section, so it's suppressing WP's default <title>tag higher up, then spitting out a new one down lower. My understanding is that the position of the <title> has no effect on SEO.</p></title>
No problem! I guess I my lesson should be to always start by making sure whatever we're troubleshooting is on
Try enabling it. I think that if it's disabled, Yoast SEO won't do anything to your title tags, so they'll just be the WordPress default, which is usually "Postname | Sitename." My hunch is that enabling that setting will put Yoast to work and both your settings in Titles & Metas will be respected, and your overrides in the metabox will be as well.
Once it's enabled check the source again, you'll know right away, (before Google or Moz has a chance to get in there and punish you if it's the wrong thing to do).
I guess we should check the obvious - go to yoursite.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wpseo_titles - that's the first tab of Titles & Meta - is the Force Rewrite set to enabled? (it looks like the purple background means enabled - it's a kind of confusing colour choice).
Failing that, are there other caches that might need to be busted? An easy way to check would be to edit the title of a post or page - add an exclamation mark or something, save, and check the source. If the exclamation mark is there then it's not a cache problem. If it's not then look for caches elsewhere. Other caches might be:
I just learned something great by investigating your question. Let me share it with you, (and maybe answer your question while I'm at it).
I searched Google for "Personalized Cutting Broads & Humidors" to see if I see the same thing as you do, and I do, so I clicked through to https://www.etsy.com/shop/TaylorCraftsEngraved to see what's going on. When viewing the source on that page we can see that the title tag is:
<title>Personalized Cutting Boards & Humidors by TaylorCraftsEngraved</title>
Notice that the word "Etsy" isn't there at all. First, I thought Google was giving Etsy special treatment - after all, they're a huge site. Then I noticed this:
That's an Open Graph tag. Based on that I'm guessing that Google is adding the Site Name Open Graph property to the end of the title that they display. I may have to go add an og:site_name tag to my site today.
Your'e right, ideally these URLs would not exist until needed. The problem I have is that our search is set up so it doesn't require an HTTP Post to the server - it works by manipulating the URL, so if someone searches for Service 5 at Location 1, the URL /location-1/service-5 has to present them with something - we're using a search form, but a signup form would work well too, and I think there is some limited use to the user to say "no, we don't have anything here."
I guess I could rebuild the page somewhat to make the "There are no results for Service 5 at Location 1" message bigger - it could even be in the Title / H1, then show my re-search or signup form - that would get rid of duplicate title tag problems, but my content would still essentially be the same - a form - so I'd have duplicate content problems.
Noindex would be a good idea, and easy to do. Do you know how easy it is to un-noindex later? As in, if I remove the noindex meta tag or header, how long will it take search engines to pick up on the change?
These URLs are in my sitemap too, and I should try to get rid of them there, but checking if there are search results in each location when building the sitemap is going to kill the webserver
I'm a bit surprised that the override in the metabox isn't being respected 100%, but I haven't played with the manual overrides much. Are you using a full-page caching plugin, like WP Super-Cache? If so you might have to clear the cache's contents to see the changes.
I think the problem should go away because you edited the Titles & Meta settings, but you can check right away. Do you know how to read HTML, at least sort of? Look at the page's source, (in Chrome: View > Developer > View Source), and look to see what's between the <title>and</title> tags - they will be fairly near the top, (you can Ctrl+F in View Source to find them). That's the title tag that we're trying to change, so if "| Parker Staffing Services" is gone, Moz, (and maybe Google), will be happy, then it's just a case of waiting for Moz & Google to re-crawl your site to see the changes.
If that doesn't work, and you don't want to set the site name to something shorter, there's a way to do it with PHP. I believe Yoast SEO passes the title tag through a WordPress filter before outputting it to the page. You can hook on to that filter and replace "| Parker Staffing Services" with an empty string. This is a bit overkill, though - you should be able to solve the problem in the admin interface.
I think you have a few options:
In the Titles & Metas section Yoast uses a sort of templating system. So if you go to the Post Types tab and remove %%sep%% and %%sitename%% from the Title Template under the "Posts" heading, (probably the first one), you'll be removing the "| Parker Staffing Services" from all of your Posts. You can do the same for Pages, Media, and any Custom Post Types you have installed on that tab.
The other tabs are similar. Taxonomies is just a scary word for Categories, Tags, and things that behave like categories & tags, and has nothing to do with stuffed animals like it looks like. If you go that tab you'll see a lot of the Title Templates end in %%sep%% %%sitename%% so you can remove those as well, if you want. That'll take the "| Parker Staffing Services" off of the Tag & Category archive pages, (pages like example.com/category/new-staff). The Archives tab works the same way. If you're worried about messing things up, a quick hack is to take a screenshot before changing anything, or do a database backup.
You can also override these templates on a per-post/page/CPT basis using Yoast SEO metabox, (that's what WP calls the boxes in the admin), on the Edit Post/Page/CPT screen in the admin. The Yoast SEO metabox is usually right below the box you write your actual content in, but it may be forced down depending on what plugins you have installed. If you don't see it at all click the "Screen Options" tab in the top right of the screen, it'll slide down and show you a bunch of checkboxes, where you should be able to make the Yoast SEO metabox visible. In the Yoast SEO metabox, click the title in the Snippet Preview, and the snippet editor will magically appear, letting you edit the title tag & meta description for that page only.
Hopefully that helps.
We have search on our site, using the URL, so we might have: example.com/location-1/service-1, or example.com/location-2/service-2. Since we're a directory we want these pages to rank.
Sometimes, there are no search results for a particular location/service combo, and when that happens we show an advanced search form that lets the user choose another location, or expand the search area, or otherwise help themselves. However, that search form still appears at the URL example.com/location/service - so there are several location/service combos on our website that show that particular form, leading to duplicate content issues.
We may have search results to display on these pages in the future, so we want to keep them around, and would like Google to look at them and even index them if that happens, so what's the best option here? Should we rel="canonical" the page to the example.com/search (where the search form usually resides)? Should we serve the search form page with an HTTP 404 header? Something else?
I look forward to the discussion.
I'm fairly new, so take this with a grain of salt but:
I expect the PA might improve over time, although I can't be sure. Also remember that Moz doesn't update in realtime, so even if Google figures out what's going on and gives you credit, it might take a week or two to show up in Moz.
(I'm more confident on this answer) It'll take time. Nothing in SEO is instant, in my experience. Also, if the huge publication picked it up & linked to you, you'll probably get a bunch of other copy-cat links.
I don't believe Google will make a selection for each option in a drop-down, even if they're able to see it. The traditional wisdom is to also provide ways to click to each location - so, somewhere there should be a link to each state, then you can have URLs like /bands/arizona and show the bands in Arizona.
I also have a search-based interface, and I do OK, but our short-term plans include a way to click through to each location without submitting a search form - it should help Google find our content.
This is a tough question. I had something similar happen - a lot of distributed traffic, that wasn't real but looks real-ish. I don't remember the screen sizes we had, but it was mostly old-ish versions of IE.
Since the main action people do on our site is Search, we added a ReCaptcha after people search a certain number of times. We also found some paths the spammers take through the site and created some controls to block, or Captcha, those paths. It's a tough balance, though, because you don't want to ban real users from the site.
Could you use some JS to inspect the browser, then set a cookie? Then your server-side could look for the cookie on subsequent requests and send them to /stop-eating-my-bandwidth-you-jerk.html or a more business-friendly equivalent.
What do you mean by "Without Pre-Rendering"?
Google says they can now index some Javascript content. I believe they're using actual browsers, or something very similar, to index web pages. Depending on how true this is, there's a chance they'll index anything you have hidden away in Javascript.
You can use the "Fetch as Google" tool in Webmaster Tools to see what the Googlebot sees. I just ran a test on my site and it does render Javascript. On my site some page elements appear in a different place with Javascript disabled, and in Google's render of the page they appear in the Javascript-enabled location. If you have actual content in the Javascript I don't know what Google will do with it, but they can at least see the result of your Javascript.
There's a business I work with as a web dev that has 2 nearly identical sites - one for their E-commerce business and the other for their local business. I haven't done a full SEO analysis on the sites, but I can tell you it's not working out well SEO-wise - they're pretty buried, and I would bet quite a bit it's because of duplicate content.
If the two restaurants are truly different, each should have its own website, with its own content, on its own domain. If the only difference is the street address then there should be 1 website with a "locations" page showing how to get to each location. If they're a bit different but share a name, I would build single website, but have a page, or couple of pages about each location, (so, I would have location-specific info in a folder, eg. restaurant.com/location2/the-chef). Does that make sense?
Thanks for the insight - it does make sense to go with /location-name/service-name because people might want to look at all services in a location, but all locations for a service doesn't make much sense, (unless someone's scraping my site, and I don't want to make life easy for those people!).
Things like /within-50-miles will be canonicalized to the base location as you suggest. You're right that there isn't much difference between that and simply /service-a/location-a
I want everything to be bookmarkable, so keyword search will be either a parameter or another path, (like /keyword-{urlencoded keyword content} ), and I may or may not canonicalize that to just the location/service combo, or simply noindex it, or leave it as-is and see what happens. The /location-a/ part of the URL can accept a lot of formats, and some, like GPS coordinates, will have to be noindexed to avoid duplicate content, (I guess I could rel=canonical them to the closest town or something, I can save that as an experiment for later).
Thanks again for the insight. It makes sense to me.
