Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Do we need to have unique 3 digits in URL, like stated here in technical guidelines from Google -- https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787?hl=en&ref_topic=4359866.

Or, is having and submitting Google News XML Sitemap a way around that -- https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/68323?hl=en

Will registered trademark symbol within a URL be bad? I know some special characters are unsafe (#, >, etc.) but can not find anything that mentions registered trademark.

Thanks!

Do on page site maps help with SEO or are they more for user experience? We submit and update our XML Sitemaps for the search engines but wondering if /sitemap for users is necessary?

What is the best way to handle interstitial ads for the search engines? We saw in Google Webmaster Tools a big spike in 403 errors all from interstitial ad URLs.

Would noindex work? Blocking the /interstitial in our robots.txt file? Will that affect the search engines from moving past the ad URL.

We're going to be running our mobile site on the same domain and generating content for users on mobile devices with style sheets (will not have m.domain). The content on our URLs will be the exact same.

My question is if we need to create a mobile XML Sitemap to submit to the search engines.

Do we need to create the Sitemap, that will contain the exact same URLs as our non-mobile Sitemap, and just include <mobile><mobile>tags around the URLs? Or do we need to create a mobile Sitemap at all to alert the search engines that we have mobile content?</mobile></mobile>

Thanks!

We have hundreds of pages that are getting categorized as duplicate content because they are so similar. However, they are different content.

Background is that they are names and when you click on each name it has it's own URL.

What should we do? We can't canonical any of the pages because they are different names.

Thank you!

What if a partner brand wants to post the full text of a story on one of their FB tabs, Please advise whether this would be duplicate content, thanks!

Need help: Do canonical tags do the exact same thing that wordpress already does with it’s permalink function?  Or are these 2 separate things?  thank you.

If there are canonical tags pointing to the web version of each mobile page, what should a robots.txt file for a mobile site have?

Is there any data out there that tells the % of CTRs sites get on mobile SERPs?

Thanks!

Thank you all for the responses. I hope they start supporting it soon.

We have heard Bing takes canonical tags as hints, but do they support cross-domain canonical tags? I don't think this has ever been discussed? Does anyone have an answer or insight?

Thanks!!

Thanks for your reply EGOL. That's exactly what I saw with one of the posts that had nofollow links. The sydication partner's version was ranking higher.

Hi Daniel!

Thanks for your reply. So you think that having a nofollow link back to my original piece won't be an indication that my post is the original one?

Yes, I was thinking cross-domain rel canonical could be the way out.

Thanks again!

When syndicating content, I have heard/read that even if the piece you syndicate has a link back to your site (original post), the engines should be able to tell your post is the original because of the link that is pointing back. Is this the case when the links are "nofollow"? I think not, but I just would like to get someone else point of view. I think that if they don't want to follow the links, they should at least add noindex meta robots tags to the post so it doesn't create duplicate content...

Any thoughts?

Thanks!