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Hi, I've been involved in a major ecommerce site relaunch, redesign and backend and have been involved in several successful ones before. On the whole things have gone great. Of course there are some minor bugs to fix, rendering issues etc but my real concern is a significant decline in conversion rate BUT only for IE and Edge users. All other major browsers conv rate has increased. Trawling through analytics and the site itself in those browsers there is no obvious sticking points e.g bounce rate has improved on all browser inc IE & Edge, no particular point in the funnel is suffering more than others, no particular page or landing page is doing much worse than others etc. it just seems like all the kpi's (except bounce) are down a little on the 2 microsoft browsers, which has a significant impact. One of the things that changed on relaunch is that we moved to https and im wondering if that might be causing an issue with IE / Edge security or privacy settings or that functionality on the site that relies on cookies is being affected, though in testing we haven't come across anything. I'd appreciate any advice or insight. Thanks, Andy

Hi, I help manage a large site that uses a lot of params for tracking, testing and to help deal with paginated content e.g. abc.com/productreview?page=2. The paginated review content correctly uses rel next and rel prev tags to ensure we get the value of all of the paginated review content that we have. The volume of param exclusions I need to maintain in Google & Bing Webmaster tools is getting clunky and frustrating. I would like to use self referencing canonicals, which would make life a lot easier. Here's my issue: If I use canonicals on the review pages the paginated content urls would also use the same canonical e.g. /productreview?page=2 pointing to /productreview I believe I am going to lose the value of those reviews, even though they use the rel next rel prev tags. BTW airbnb do this - do they know something I don't, don't care about the paginated reviews, or are they doing it incorrectly, see http://d.pr/i/14mPU Is my assertion above correct about losing the value of the paginated reviews if I use self referencing canonicals? Any thoughts on a solution to clearing up the param problem or do I have to live with it? Thanks in advance, Andy

Hi, I've seen a big ranking drop for many major terms, for a particular site, just on Google. This happened Fri 20th or Sat 21st just gone. I don't see any news on an algorithm update over the weekend.I had changed many of the sites major page title protocols 2 weeks ago but a) I would have expected any negative effect before now and not all at once b) the protocols were carefully crafted to avoid traffic drops for major terms and c) i'm seeing traffic drops for keywords that still start at the beginning of the page title d) im seeing drops for some pages which are still using the OLD page titles. I had even tested the protocol on a number of pages in advance to ensure it wouldn't cause problems. As a bit of background - the title protocols were changed to make them more user friendly and less keyword heavy. CTR from search improved so was hoping for better not worse rankings! Ideas, gratefully appreciated.Andy

A friend has a large site and his dev team are about to launch with the sitewide addition of trailing slashes on urls, which are not on the original site. Both versions of the url work e.g. /example and /example/ and the dev team is reluctant to change back as it will take 3 days (developers hey?) My SEO mind tells me this is a bad thing. Yes you could: 301 from non slash to slash but sitewide I don't like the idea because of the small loss in link juice x lots of pages. You could canonical from non slash to slash but the non slash is the original and canonicals are supposed to point to the original version of the content. Any thoughts appreciated Couldn't the devs use the htaccess file to force the / version to the non / version?

A friend has relaunched a website but his web guys (he didn't consult me!) didn't do any 301s and now traffic unsurprisingly has tanked. The old site and database no longer exists and there are now 2000+ 404's. Any ideas how to do the 301s from old urls to new product urls WITHOUT it being a massive manual job?

Hi, SCENARIO: A site has say 3 examples of the same product page but with different urls because that product fits into 3 different categories e.g. /tools/hammer /handtools/hammer /specialoffers/hammer and lets say the first 2 of those have the canonical pointing to /specialoffers/hammer YET that page is now redundant e.g. the webmaster decided to do away with the /specialoffers/ folder. ASSUMPTIONS: That is going to seriously hamper the chances of the 2 remaining versions of the hammer page being able to rank as they have canonicals pointing to a url that no longer exists. The canonical tags should be changed to point to 1 of the remaining url versions. As an added complication - lets say /specialoffers/hammer still exists, the url works, but just isn't navigable from the site. Thoughts/feedback welcome!

Im noticing a huge % of pages on my sites and those picked at random from Google searches, high traffic pages from big sites like booking.com have not been cached since 22nd Oct by Google. Anyone else noticed this or got insight on it? Andy

It seems like Google confirmed this week in a G+ hangout that content in click to expand content e.g. 'read more' dropdown and tabbed content scenarios will be discounted.  The suggestion was if you have content it needs to be visible on page load. Here's more on it https://www.seroundtable.com/google-index-click-to-expand-19449.html and the actual hangout, circa 11 mins in https://plus.google.com/events/cjcubhctfdmckph433d00cro9as. From a UX and usability point of view having a lot of content that was otherwise tabbed or in click to expand divs can be terrible, especially on mobile. Does anyone have workable solutions or can think of examples of really great landing pages (i'm mostly thinking ecommerce) that also has a lot of visible content? Thanks Andy

Hi, I've done a fair amount of research on international SEO including here on MOZ but was hoping some fellow Mozzers might have some practical examples of how they have got 1 domain to rank in multiple countries, ideally US & UK. Im possibly looking at getting a high authority domain which ranks great on US into the UK engines. I want to keep to the 1 domain to benefit from the high authority and for logistical reasons. Thanks in advance, Andy

Hi, I have rich snippet mark up showing in serps for some pages but not others. All pages test fine using Googles structured data testing tool. Whats really annoying is that they seem to appear for some pages but not others within the same directory / page format. None of googles troubleshooting suggestions on the issue are a problem i.e. Does your markup follow our usage guidelines? Is your marked-up content hidden from users? Is your markup incorrect or misleading? Is your marked-up content representative of the main content of the page? Have you supplied enough information? Have you only recently updated your content? Does your markup include incorrect nesting? Reviews: Does your review use count instead of vote? There are alot of instances when the same mark up is used twice e.g. on product x page in one directory and on product x page in a different directory (theres no dupe content). I wondered if that could be a reason but there are alot of instances when product x in directory a has the snippet when it doesnt in directory b. There doesnt seem to be an identifiable pattern as to why one page whould show the snippet and not another. Any feedback appreciated. Happy to pm example pages. Andy

Hi, I need to identify the conversion rate for a product, lets call it a spanner. I have 100s of spanner product urls and I ensured that the url protocols must include the product name e.g /red_spanner so its easy for me to work out the conversion rate in analytics for all my spanner pages as I just add 'spanner' to the landing page filter, hit the ecommerce tab and bingo. What I cant figure out is how to work out the conversion rate for all spanner sales which includes alot of sales which didnt originate on spanner pages e.g. home page > search result > checkout. Theres 1000s of variations of this e.g. email > home > search > product page > checkout. How can I work out the total conversion rate for spanners which needs to include: people landing on a spanner page and people who didnt arrive at a spanner page and did a search with eventually got them to the spanner pages. Hopefully its not as complicated as I think! Thanks in Advance!

Does anyone know of a list/resource of abbreviations recognised by Google? For example does Google recognise w/ as with? Andy

I think radical new search result snippets, move away from anchor text, possible Google pull away from non G+ social signals (in favour of rel author) could be highlights in 2013. What are your predictions?

Theres been a bunch of updates recently which have hurt aggregators: Reducing the number of search results to 7 for branded search queries The DMCA update which penalises those with trademark related takedown requests against them. At least 2 'domain diversity' updates, the most recent last week, which seeks to reduce the ability of sites to dominate SERPS e.g. a site which may have 2 search results on page 1 now may have 1. Plus Its commonly believed that Google favours big brands over smaller brands e.g. Marriott over examplehotelaggregator.com. Is this a deliberate ploy against aggregators in favour of brands i.e. does Google believe a brand site is a better search result than an aggregator? A brand site returned above an aggregator for a branded term may be seen by Google as a better fit, a better search result that should be higher. But is that true? Consumers like to see unbiased reviews and lowest prices and that isnt always available at the brand site. Thoughts please.

The Google 'Pirate' (no official name) seems to have gone largely undiscussed since it was launched last - Fri 10th August http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/an-update-to-our-search-algorithms.html. The idea of it is to ensure those 'Pirating' content or abusing trademarks e.g. fake ugg boot sites and file sharing sites do not appear higher in the search results than the genuine websites. Google is using DMCA take down requests for labeling sites as Pirate and demote their rankings, Im amazed not even seomoz has covered the subject yet as far as I can see, yet it is a hugely important new update, albeit affecting a relatively small number of sites now, and in some cases (at least one I know first hand) seemingly without justification (the example I know is not a file sharing, fake goods, trademark abusive site at all.) Google updating its search algorithm based on DMCA take down requests seems a bit strong - these are takedown requests, not legal proof that a site is infringing a trademark. A real weapon for negative SEO? Anyone else had experience of the pirate update or know much more about it? Outside Danny Sullivan I dont see many SEO folk covering it. Heres my own insights into it and what ive learned about what (only innocently) affected sites should do to appeal http://www.andy-maclean.net/the-google-pirate-dmca-guidance/

I am developing a new set of pages for a series of products which exist on separate sub domains linked to the root domain. The product pages on the sub domains have rich snippets; review count, review score etc. The new pages im building out are for the same products though on the root domain and with different content. Im not comfortable marking those pages up with rich snippets too given they will have the same review counts, scores etc though would like to if its viable? Any thoughts/opinions? Thanks, Andy

I have 2 clients that have apparently random examples of the 'show map of' link in Google search results. The maps/addresses are accurate and for airports. They are both aggregators, they service the airports e.g. lax airport shuttle (not actual example) BUT DO NOT have Google Place listings for these pages either manually OR auto populated from Google, DO NOT have the map or address info on the pages that are returned in the search results with the map link. Does anyone know how this is the case? Its great that this happens for them but id like to know how/why so I can replicate across all their appropriate pages. My understanding was that for this to happen you HAD to have Google Place pages for the appropriate pages (which they cant do as they are aggregators). Thanks in advance, Andy

Any advice on the following greatly appreciated: How to get multiple subdomain data into 1 Google Analytics profile? Can we get multiple subdomain data into Google Webmaster Tools (and if so how?) or do we need to set GWT up per subdomain?

A new client has mainsite.com and a large numer of city specific sub domains i.e. albany.mainsite.com. I think that these subdomains would actually work better as subfolders i.e mainsite.com/albany rather than albany.mainsite.com. The majority of links on the subdomains link to the main site anyway i.e. mainsite.com/contactus rather than albany.mainsite.com/contactus. Having mostly main domain links on a subdomain doesnt seem like clever link architecture to me and maybe even spammy. Im not overly familiar with redirecting subdomains to subfolders. If we go the route of 301'ing subdomains to subfolders any advice/warnings?

Hi, Ive been evaluating conversion rates by operating system and by browser for a client. Ive picked up significant and somewhat disturbing trends. As you'd expect the bulk of traffic is coming from a Windows/Internet Explorer combination. This is unfortunately one of the worst combinations (Windows/Firefox & Windows/Safari did worse. Chrome/Windows was significantly the best combination with Windows). Windows also performs much worse than Mac. E.g. Windows/Firefox performs worse than Mac/Firefox. Overall conversion rate for Mac is 7.07% compared to 5.69% Windows. This is based on hundreds of thousands of visits and equates to tens of thousands of dollars difference in revenue. Generally later versions of browsers perform better on both main operating systems e.g IE 9.0 converts at 6.33% compared to 8.0 at 5.80% on Windows and Firefox 4.01 on the Mac converts at 7.57% compared to 3.6.16 at 6.54% (although this dataset is smaller than Windows/IE). Page load speeds (recorded in the clients analytics) are significantly faster on Mac than Windows (as expected really). Being Windows/IE and specifically Windows IE8 represents the bulk of traffic should we be addressing this? Will any optimisation negatively affect better performing Mac/Browser combinations? Understanding that Mac users equate to 'better' converting visitors - what else could be done there? Anyone have thoughts or experience on optimising pages for improved conversion rates via IE and Windows? Thanks in advance, Andy