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Assuming that Google is using click data from users to calculate rankings (bounce rate, time on site, task completion, etc.) where does Google get the data, especially from browsers that aren't Chrome?

We have an ecommerce website, and we show a popup for first time visitors to our desktop site to join our email list. Google has cached pages with the popup. Can I assume that this is a problem?

We are an ecommerce company, and we outsource our mobile site to a service, and our mobile site is m.ourdomain.com. We pass the Google mobile ready test. Our product page content on the mobile site is woefully thin (typically less than 100 words), and it appears that we got hit with Panda 4.2 on the mobile site. Starting at the end of July, our mobile rankings have dropped, and our mobile traffic is now about half of what it was in July. We are working to correct the content issue but it obviously takes time. So here's my question - if our mobile site got hit with Panda 4.2, could that have a negative effect on our desktop site?

We are in ecommerce, and there are a few review sites that are dominating the rankings for our products. The sites are very good - very well written content (2000+ words) and visually appealing sites. The 2 main culprits are clearly black hat. One site's backlinks are pure spam, and the other is buying footer and sidebar links. Will ratting them to Google have any impact? If not, any suggestions on how to compete? Our competing pages are product descriptions, and creating a 2000 word product description seems inappropriate. Also, all of these products are brand new, and due to extensive media spends, the search volume is very high. Since they are beating us to the punch by getting good content posted first, they are proving difficult to displace.

I recently started getting email notifications from Google re: new products on our websites. I am subscribed to Google alerts. Can anyone shed some light on this?

We recently ran cross domain canonicals for 2 of our websites. What's interesting is that when I do a search for ""site:domain1.com "product name"" the Title in the SERPs uses the Domain Name from the site the page has been canonicaled to. So the title for Domain1 (for the search term above) looks like this: Product Name | Keywords | Domain 2 Interesting quirk. Ha anyone else seen this?

Due to URL changes and parameters on our ecommerce sites, we have a massive amount of duplicate pages indexed by google, sometimes up to 5 duplicate pages with different URLs. 1. We've instituted canonical tags site wide. 2. We are using the parameters function in Webmaster Tools. 3. We are using 301 redirects on all of the obsolete URLs 4. I have had many of the pages fetched so that Google can see and index the 301s and canonicals. 5. I created HTML sitemaps with the duplicate URLs, and had Google fetch and index the sitemap so that the dupes would get crawled and deindexed. None of these seems to be terribly effective. Google is indexing pages with parameters in spite of the parameter (clicksource) being called out in GWT. Pages with obsolete URLs are indexed in spite of them having 301 redirects. Google also appears to be ignoring many of our canonical tags as well, despite the pages being identical. Any ideas on how to clean up the mess?

We have several large eCommerce websites built on Cold Fusion. It is running on IIS, not Apache. We are looking for a blogging package (CMS) that we can bolt on to the website. We don't want the blog residing in a sub-domain. The blog needs to reside in a folder. NO => blog.mydomain.com YES => www.mydomain.com/blog/ Has anyone ever adapted Wordpress for this type of situation? Can WordPress reside in a folder? Are there any other suggestions?

We have several large ecommerce websites, and we've added some tracking parameters to GWT for google to ignore. All pages are correctly canonicaled. Google has been ignoring the parameters and the canonicals, and still ranks many parametered pages for us. Has anyone run into this?

Our flagship website, up until March 16 was getting 1600 impressions and 300 branded clicks per day as per GWT. After 3/16, branded search fell to 300 impressions and 25 clicks per day. Our rankings haven't changed, and neither has our traffic. We would definitely notice the decline in GA and Core Metrics, and it is running about the same. according to GWT, 75% fewer people started searching for our brand on 3/16, but all of our other metrics are indicating otherwise. Has anyone seen this before? Is it a tracking issue on our side?

Hi! The spam score for my sites is "--" with no graph. The sites are large ecommerce sites with a ton of branded search and DAs of 50+. Simple question - are these clean spam scores, or has Moz not calculated the scores yet?

Several of our websites have experienced a major direct load traffic spike in the last 30 days - roughly 40K new visitors for each site. The bots are emulating IE9 and appear to be hitting our home page and bouncing 100% of the time. The traffic is double our usual volume, or more. Our bounce rates, conversion rate, page views, etc have suffered accordingly. The volume hasn't affected site performance, yet. Since the traffic is direct load, I can't see this being a negative SEO attack. Plus, our search visibility for everything but our brands is abysmal - there aren't any real rankings to tank. Our engineers are saying that the IP addresses are diverse, and they aren't seeing any pattern. I also checked GA for traffic locations, and we aren't seeing anything unusual from overseas.It appears that the attack is US based. Has anyone seen this before?

We have 2 identical ecommerce sites. Using 301 is not an option since both are major brands. We've been testing cross domain canonicals for about 2 dozen products, which were pretty successful. Our rankings generally increased. Then things got weird. For the most part, canonicaled pages appeared to have passed link juice since the  rankings significantly improved on the other site. The clean URLs (www.domain.com/product-name/sku.cfm) disappeared from the rankings, as they are supposed to, but some were replaced by urls with parameters that Google had indexed (apparently duplicate content). ex: (www.domain.com/product-name/sku.cfm?clicksource?3diaftv). The parametered URLs have the correct canonical tags. In order to try and remove these from Google's index, we: 1. Had the pages fetched in GWT assuming that Google hadn't detected the canonical tage. 2. After we discovered a few hundred of these pages indexed on both sites, we built sitemaps of the offending pages and had the sitemaps fetched. If anyone has any other ideas, please share.

We have duplicate eCommerce websites, and we are in the process of implementing cross-domain canonicals. (We can't 301 - both sites are major brands). So far, this is working well - rankings are improving dramatically in most cases. However, what we are seeing in some cases is that Google has indexed a parameterized page for the site being canonicaled (this is the site that is getting the canonical tag - the "from" page). When this happens, both sites are being ranked, and the parameterized page appears to be blocking the canonical. The question is, how do I remove canonicaled pages from Google's index? If Google doesn't crawl the page in question, it never sees the canonical tag, and we still have duplicate content. Example: A. www.domain2.com/productname.cfm%3FclickSource%3DXSELL_PR is ranked at #35, and B. www.domain1.com/productname.cfm is ranked at #12. (yes, I know that upper case is bad. We fixed that too.) Page A has the canonical tag, but page B's rank didn't improve. I know that there are no guarantees that it will improve, but I am seeing a pattern. Page A appears to be preventing Google from passing link juice via canonical. If Google doesn't crawl Page A, it can't see the rel=canonical tag. We likely have thousands of pages like this. Any ideas? Does it make sense to block the "clicksource" parameter in GWT? That kind of scares me.

Hi! We are in the process of overhauling our websites, and I am hoping that some of you can post URLs for websites that are ranking well and using lots of creative content to help rank their ecommerce category pages. You can post your own, or others that you admire.

We have 2 ecommerce sites that are 95% identical. Both sites carry the same 2000 products, and for the most part, have the identical product descriptions. They both have a lot of branded search, and a considerable amount of domain authority. We are in the process of changing out product descriptions so that they are unique. Certain categories of products rank better on one site than another. When we've deployed unique product descriptions on both sites, we've been able to get some double listings on Page 1 of the SERPs. The categories on the sites have different names, and our URL structure is www.domain.com/category-name/sub-category-name/product-name.cfm. So even though the product names are the same, the URLs are different including the category names. We are in the process of flattening our URL structures, eliminating the category and subcategory names from the product URLs: www.domain.com/product-name.cfm. The upshot is that the product URLs will be the same. Is that going to cause us any ranking issues?

I am not a developer - I am researching this for our team, so please, be gentle... I am also not quite sure how to ask this question. We want to serve up custom pages for visitors from Google organic. We aren't doing anything underhanded - the pages will have very small differences that will not affect our rankings and won't land us in Google jail. When a Google visitor hits one of our pages, what specific piece of data are we looking for to determine: a. It's a Google visitor b. He/she came from organic results. I need to tell our developers to look for something that triggers the custom page. It's the same data that Google Analytics uses to trigger the appropriate visitor type. Please pardon my naivete.

If we want to change the UX for different types of visitors (ex: direct, google PPC, google organic, bing organic, etc.) what is the best way to do it?  With Universal Analytics, where can we find the source and medium?

Without Google Analytics, how would we be able to identify visitors who are from Google Organic? What's the cookie?

Does anyone have any experience with this situation? We have 2 ecommerce websites that carry 90% of the same products, with mostly duplicate product descriptions across domains. We will be running some tests shortly. Question 1: If we deindex a group of product pages on Site A, should we see an increase in ranking for the same products on Site B? I know nothing is certain, just curious to hear your input. The same 2 domains have different niche authorities. One is healthcare products, the other is general merchandise. We've seen this because different products rank higher on 1 domain or the other. Both sites have the same Moz Domain Authority (42, go figure). We are strongly considering cross domain canonicals. Question 2 Does niche authority transfer with a cross domain canonical? In other words, for a particular product, will it rank the same on both domains regardless of which direction we canonical? Ex: Site A: Healthcare Products, Site B: General Merchandise. I have a health product that ranks #15 on site A, and #30 on site B. If I use rel=canonical for this product on site B pointing at the same product on Site A, will the ranking be the same if I use Rel=canonical from Site A to Site B? Again, best guess is fine. Question 3: These domains have similar category page structures, URLs, etc,  but feature different products for a particular category. Since the pages are different, will cross domain canonicals be honored by Google?

This discussion is strictly theoretical... I won't hold anyone to their answer. If I have 2 websites that are identical in every way and let's say the domain authority for both is 40, and I 301 redirect one site to the other, what would the DA become? Same question for single pages, both with a PA of 40. If I 301 redirect one page to the other, what does the PA become for the remaining page?

We are a large catalog company with thousands of products across 2 different domains. Google clearly knows that the sites are connected. Both domains are fairly well known brands - thousands of branded searches for each site per month. Roughly half of our products overlap - they appear on both sites. We have a known duplicate content issue - both sites having exactly the same product descriptions, and we are working on it. We've seen that when a product has different content on the 2 sites, frequently, both pages get to page 2 of the SERPs, but that's as far as it goes, despite aggressive white hat link building tactics. 1. Is it possible to get the same product pages on page 1 of the SERPs for both sites? (I think I know the answer...) 2. Should we be canonicalizing (is that a word?) products across the sites? This would get tricky - both sites have roughly the same domain authority, but in different niches. Certain products and keywords naturally rank better on 1 site or the other depending on the niche.

We are running an A/B split test (Started on 12/12), and a few days after we started the test, we fell from position 9/10 (about 3 weeks on page 1) to position 11/13, and we've been there ever since. We are still running the test. We disallowed the test page in robots.txt, but that's all. no canonical no noindex
-no Google Experiments code. Theoretically, Google could crawl the site, and find the page, but then the page is disallowed. The alternate page is not indexed. Could this explain the rankings drop?

We are doing a major overhaul on our site, and we have some questions about URLs, breadcrumbs and ecommerce. Currently, a product can reside in multiple categories, and can have multiple URLs based on how a user navigates to the page. We handle this via canonicals, but it's awful for SEO on many levels. O-U-C-H. The main issue is that a product can reside in multiple categories. At this point, Plan A for our overhaul is that a product URL is always going to be www.domain.com/product-name-sku.html/. Neat and clean, and avoids end-user confusion if they navigate to the product through a category that doesn't match the URL. Plan B: We can anchor a product to a category or subcategory, (www.domain.com/category-name/subcategory-name/product-name-sku.html) but we think that this cuts down on usability as users can navigate to a product through different categories, and the URL may not match the user's navigation. Based on how Google has devalued URLs for ranking purposes, I don't think that there is much of an SEO advantage to Plan B. Am I wrong? A product can show up in multiple categories - for example: www.domain.com/womens-clothing/ www.domain.com/womens-clothing/dresses/ www,domain.com/womens-clothing/dresses/maxidresses/ Category breadcrumbs take care of themselves. What is the best practice to handle the breadcrumb on the product page considering that there are multiple paths a user can take to a product? Options: 1. The breadcrumb on the product page dynamically changes based on how the user navigates to the page. The URL is always fixed as per above, but we change the breadcrumb based on the session. ex: Product: Black Ruffled MuuMuu Home > Womens Clothing > Black Ruffled MuuMuu Home > Womens Clothing > Dresses > Black Ruffled MuuMuu We would be showing Google different breadcrumbs based on how the bot navigates to the page. Are there any issues with this from an SEO perspective as it would seem to provide the better user experience? 2. The breadcrumb on a product page is always fixed. We anchor a product to a category or subcategory and the breadcrumb is always the same no matter how a user navigates to the product. This is simpler from a development perspective, and we are always showing the same breadcrumb to Google. IMHO, this is not as good for usability. ex: Breadcrumb is always:  Home > Womens Clothing > Dresses > Black Ruffled MuuMuu regardless of how a user navigates to it. Which way would our ecommerce experts recommend?

Just started SEO on some legacy sites running JS navigation. Are there any proven ways to stop Google from parsing links and passing internal linkjuice? Ex: iframes, Ajax, JS, etc. Google is parsing some JS links on a couple of our legacy sites. The problem is that some pages are getting link juice and others aren't. It's also unpredictable which links are parsed and which aren't. The choice is rebuild the navigation (ouch), or figure out a way to block JS links entirely and build a simple text based secondary nav for link juice distribution. I definitely don't want to use nofollow. Any thoughts?