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Honestly I'd be surprised if you were penalised for this. At worst, you may be a little hindered algorithmically but even then, if you've got sufficient, quality content on your site, a solid structure, good page titles etc then this should just be a minor detail at the end of the day.

Talking purely about rankings, SEO is really just about sending overall signals and patterns these days; just make sure this isn't one of many risky signals. Of course, if you can fix it (maybe with the help of a dev) then it would be wise.

If it were my site, my biggest concern would be the impressive this gives to the user. Does it feel like they're having keywords blatantly shoved in their face? If so, the issue becomes a little more important. Search engines don't buy your products, users do!

This can always be a tough one and it's hard to get specific advice here without knowing the type of product and maybe some examples where the structure has to be multiple layers deep but... generally speaking, the nav and site architecture should really be designed from the broadest categories to the narrowest and always focussed around the users' intent.

Rand did a Whiteboard Friday about 12 months ago about information architecture which you may find helpful here. Either way, if it's going to legitimately improve the user experience by having additional subcategories directly in the nav then go for it. If you just want them there for that internal link strength then I'd probably recommend against it.

Happy to discuss further if you're comfortable sharing some examples but if not, that's fine too

Nope, you'll be perfectly fine.

The only way you'd be in danger is if any of the following changed:

• Server latency/performance
• Server geo-location
• Server stability
• Your new package being too restrictive and throttling you somehow for reaching a cap

Speed, stability and location are the only things that really matter with a host from a ranking perspective so you should be just fine with the change. Good luck!

No problem Lauren,  happy to help.

I did just remember a working example of a strong company here in Aus that has split their services across multiple niche sites, no doubt for all the reasons I listed. They do rank very well for each of their niches; usually #1.

The site is http://www.carsales.com.au/. You can find their other sites under the "Our Sites" menu item in the top right corner of the nav and also under "Sites" in the footer.

This is about the best compromise I can think of, though I'd be hesitant about those followed links between each site. If you went this route, I'd suggest making them nofollow at least.

Best of luck with the campaign!

The pros and cons can both be quite compelling here so it usually comes down to a question of budget and available manhours.

Pros

Targeted niche sites allow the client to be far more specific about exactly what it is that they do. This can make them far more competitive in that particular niche. As an example, one of our clients installs fake grass in commercial applications and outranks the largest national hardware chain here in Aus simply because he does one thing very well while the hardware chain sells thousands of products.

It also makes the site much easier to manage and browse from the user perspective while also being easier on the crawl budget as well.

Cons

Multiple websites means multiple SEO campaigns. You have to duplicate all of your effort for everything from page titles and meta descriptions to content and link profiles. If you have 10 micro-sites then your time investment will increase 10x!

Thinking of the user experience, you  may miss out on same conversions and/or upselling if users only visit one of these niche sites and don't realise that you provide several other services that they're after as well. Sometimes, being able to get everything they need done by a single company can be a very strong selling point. Much like paying 1 renovation company to do your entire reno rather than orchestrating 20 different suppliers and service providers.

There are ways to manage this second point to some extent like including badges or a list of other services you provide, though I would warn against inter-linking between each of these sites.

So, if you have the time and resources to put into it, you're likely to see greater success from multiple small sites but for more businesses, this just isn't viable. In that case, a well structured site and navigation is going to be your best bet, as well as strong and relevant internal linking from blog posts and building backlinks directly to those category pages from their respective industries.

There's no problem here if they're all completely separate sites and all have completely unique content.

Assuming both are correct, it's not really any different to having competitor websites in the same niche.

Nope, unfortunately not. Donford's answer is the only way you can remove those sitelinks without hurting your SEO.

Google wants to provide users with the best possible experience and sometimes this means providing them with links to the strongest/most used parts of your site directly from the SERPs. You can at least take it as a positive that they're showing up!

I think I'm a little confused here as to what you mean by "product" in the context of real estate. Are you referring to different types of listings (e.g. office lease, retail lease etc?)

If I were designing a real estate website, the structure would be as follows:

website.com/listing-type/state/area/suburb

You mentioned the site isn't in English so just to clarify above, the last two will be depend on regional user preferences. For example, here in Brisbane (Aus) it would be expected that I can search for properties in the "Greater Brisbane" area, meaning Brisbane City and surround suburbs. Within that region there are a bunch more suburbs

More specifically:

website.com/office-lease/qld/greater-brisbane/west-end

The reason I'd be doing this is that not only is it an easy logic to follow but it really caters toward a user's intent. If I'm looking for an office space to lease, there's no point in presenting me with all types of listings from an area because all I want to see are office leases.

Having those lease types further up your hierarchy is going to give them a little more preferences in terms of SERP position as well. From what I understand, these are the sub-category pages you're looking to rank?

As a working example of this as well, I just had a look at realestate.com.au's URL structure and it's the same as my suggestions above. Their site is very flat because it's almost entirely search-driven but the URL still lets us see their site architecture

http://www.realestate.com.au/property-townhouse-qld-spring+hill-416944062

Looks like other comments have covered the duplicate pages so I won't go into that but to answer your other question about page titles for thousands of products, templates are your friend.

I'd suggest manually crafting the page titles for your key landing pages, categories and potentially sub-categories depending on how many there are. The below info is for the individual product pages.

Just set them up in your CMS to use descriptive variables. It won't always be perfect but short of writing thousands of titles and constantly writing new ones for new products, it's the most viable.

For example, if you sold car tyres, the page titles for your product pages would look something like this:

[Product Name] - [Product Number] | Your Website Name

What you end up with is auto-generated page titles like this (details clearly fabricated):

TreadMax Pro Tyres - XVN90P | Ed's Tyre Warehouse
Performax Ultra Tyres - PUH862 | Ed's Tyre Warehouse

Like I said, these aren't ideal. A good page title should be far more compelling but we have to reach a reasonable compromise. The thing to remember here is that if these individual products are showing up for someone in the SERPs, they've probably searched for something like an exact product name or product ID. Since they're toward the end of that sales funnel already, simply showing the product name and ID can be all they really need.

Hope this helps!

Hi there!

If this were my client, I'd be having a very serious and educational chat about the direction the campaign is headed and strip it back to basics. The below suggestions assume the site doesn't currently rank anywhere that's going to bring them any real volume of traffic.

Remove the Subdomains Subdomains are treated as separate websites so sanfrancisco.website.com is viewed as a completely different website to seattle.website.com. While that may be ok for the end user, what this means for optimisation is 2 different link building campaigns, two sets of content (both of which need to be unique and still genuinely valuable) and 2 sets of ranking signals.

You mentioned they have 14 locations set out like this so what you've actually got is 14x the work needed. Honestly, this is not a good use of your time or their budget.

Remove the Spammy Blog Posts The reality is, nobody is likely to actually read a series of blog posts that are so blatantly keyword heavy. The most probable outcome is that users will be given a very low quality vibe and steer clear of the brand in the future.

Also, having that much keyword spam on your site is playing with fire. It doesn't provide a good user experience and search engines these days are easily capable of understanding exactly the aim.

Blog Posts Don't Target Keywords

Blog posts should absolutely have a target audience and perhaps a common search phrase in mind, but they shouldn't really have a keyword focus like other pages on your site - there should never be a post that's built around the phrase Insurance San Francisco for example.

Focus Your Time; Work on the Primary Domain

As I touched on above, splitting your time across 14 subdomains is not a great use of your time or their budget at all. Rather than trying to churn out 60 low quality blog posts from questionable sources to meet this arbitrary requirement, spend that same time writing 1 or 2 high quality, uniquely valuable posts each week then promoting them through various channels like social media, influencer outreach etc. It's going to give you far better quality signals than huge amounts of rubbish across 14 subdomains.

More importantly, this approach gives users a reason to stay on your site and build that crucial rapport. in the insurance industry, people tend to shop around and do their research for a bit before they commit to the purchase and swamping them in keyword spam is not a way to build that relationship.

Go Back to Basics

From my experience, any site that's in this bad shape is probably going to have a lot of other fundamental issues (thin, keyword heavy content, a terrible backlink profile, poorly structured and keyword heavy navigation etc) that really should be addressed before even thinking about blog posts.

If this were my client I'd be treating it like a brand new website and going from the top. Ignore the domains and plan to take them offline, plan the site architecture and nav then get to work on improving the site one element at a time with a heavy focus on the user experience and the real end goal (traffic that converts) rather than keywords and SERP position.

You can rank #1 all day long but if your site is heavily spammy, it isn't going to convert!

That's probably not what you wanted to hear and perhaps not the sort of info that you're looking for here but to be honest, I think any further time that gets tipped into forging ahead with those spammy subdomains is time very poorly spent. I hope you find it helpful either way!

It may be that the client is very reluctant to such a drastic change so it would take a very strong educational approach and, if they're financially driven, focus on the fact that optimising a single site, they need to pay you to do less work for more return; "more for less".

There are a lot of elements to consider when doing an eCommerce SEO campaign and both schema and your page titles/meta descriptions form just small parts of it.

Are you currently researching how to SEO the site or are you at a point where the majority of work is done and you're looking to refine schema/meta info?

This really comes down to a question of page and domain strength. Just like regular organic results, their placement in the local pack is going to depend on a number of relevancy/geo signals in conjunction with the usual trust factors.

If the new website is going to have a full campaign attached to it and specifically targeting that store's location then I'd suggest using this one. If the national site is going to be the stronger one, perhaps the SEO time is better spent focussing on that site rather than splitting it across two.

Hi Malika,

From the info you've provided, removing those 301s is going to be a good idea.

Below is a relevant section from a Google Developers article. The article is specifically referring to mobile site speed but the point applied to desktop as well.

"(2) Number of redirects should be minimized
Additional HTTP redirects can add one or two extra network roundtrips (two if an extra DNS lookup is required), incurring hundreds of milliseconds of extra latency on 3G networks. For this reason, we strongly encourage webmasters to minimize the number, and ideally eliminate redirects entirely - this is especially important for the HTML document (avoid “m dot” redirects when possible)."

If you're 100% sure there are no backlinks or traffic heading to those old domains, there's no reason to keep the redirects in place, particularly if the redirected pages are old enough that it's unlikely anyone has them saved in an old email or under their browser favorites.

There is some level of SEO value to be had from these but as the other comments have touched on, they're not necessarily the best ways to go about it.

Done correctly, each of these methods are perfectly fine, just make sure you're doing it for the right reasons. For example, don't just start dumping links all over Reddit and play the numbers game. You risk getting banned but more importantly, the best you can hope for is a negative association with your brand name.

On the other hand, if you have a resource that is very relevant to a particular topic then by all means, link to it. As an example, if you find a thread looking for specific data on a topic and you happen to have a (quality!) infographic that addresses the query perfectly, you're going to genuinely help answer the question and this is the key factor.

Also, each of these should be used sparingly. If 80% of your link profile consists of Stumbleupon links, you're not going to gain all that much strength.

Hi Bob,

You're mostly on the right track here, especially with taking out that footer spam. Rather than just relying on Analytics to locate your keyword targets (most of this is obscured these days and it only shows how people are finding you now rather than where they could find you), take a quick look at the Moz and Backlinko guides on advanced KW research.

These guides are very thorough and the process involved is time-consuming but worth the effort. If you are very heavily time-restricted, I'd suggest at least grabbing data from Google's Keyword Planner and SEMrush to point you in the right direction.

In terms of the content, there are two things to be mindful of there; both quality and quantity. The quality should be the most important factor, addressing the user intent rather than just filling an arbitrary word count. As for quantity, my recommendation is always 1500+ words per landing page. Of course, this much content should be styled in a way that doesn't just appear as a massive wall of text.

In terms of creating new pages, just create the ones that are going to make sense to the user.  Rand did a great Whiteboard Friday that I find myself referencing a lot around here on how to go about ranking for multiple locations when you only have the one office.

Good question Matt and a tough one to answer!

In a general sense, good SEOs can become very powerful entrepreneurs if they put the time into it. We already have exposure to a broad number of industries and have a great understanding of just how those clients go about finding various products and services.

Combine this with our well-versed ability to plan, document, communicate and build a powerful network of people we can leverage effectively as well as access to designers and devs and there are few things we can't do well in the online space.

As for how we can apply our skillset within SEO, I completely agree with John-Henry in that the same tactics we use for link prospecting can be fantastic for outbound marketing. Used effectively, they can ultimately turn an outbound campaign into inbound leads; potential clients seeking you out as a result of your demonstrated value and the referral network you've built.

hmm, that's very strange. You may be right that's it's simply a trust factor here then, though the .org site would have been to considerably stronger than the .com to rank higher for your own TLD!

I've seen this plenty of times with brand names being outranked but not domains. Perhaps an SEO revision is a good place to start and compare this against the .org?

Building links is important for SEO but if you're just starting out on a fresh site, I don't suggest starting there. Spend the time improving the website's onsite factors and overall user experience so it's a place users want to go.

It can be difficult to build legitimate backlinks if your site is very thin on content and hard to use because, quite simply, it doesn't look trustworthy.

We've had great success in competitive industries by starting almost exclusively with onsite elements then steadily shifting the focus toward building genuine links. Below are just some of the more important elements we work on in the early days, regardless of industry. These are in no particular order:

• Page titles
• Meta descriptions
• Headings
• Nav structure and layout
• URL structure
• Landing page content (my recommendation is 1500+ words of uniquely valuable content per landing page though this figure is anecdotal - better to have 1000 words of good content than to pad it out with rubbish for the sake of an arbitrary word count)
• Site speed
• Call to action
• Overall user experience - how easy is it for users to satisfy their intent on your site?

There are certainly plenty more things to consider which Moz and Backlinko cover quite well. The important thing to remember here is that you're not jumping through arbitrary hoops to "improve rankings", you're building a trustworthy, more helpful website for users. The early ranking improvements are really just a side-benefit in the short term.

The concept of article submissions is thankfully quite dead these days. There are some instances where it makes sense but very rarely. Just like everything else in SEO, if done with the right intent (providing a helpful resource, not just building a backlink) then it can be done with reasonable success but there are better ways to spend your time.

Also, backlinks from social media are quite different to a link from another website. These "social mentions" are important because while they may or may not directly improve your rankings, they do work to build a stronger image for your brand; "146,000 people follow this brand on Facebook, they're obviously quite a strong company!".

I hope at least some of this proves helpful! Don't forget to do some thorough competitor analysis to see what your competition is up to as well. You'll never beat someone by copying them but their tactics might spark some great ideas.

Assuming you're just searching for "www.domain.com" and not using any operators (e.g. site:www.domain.com),  then there are quite a few things that could cause this.

The two most likely possibilities:

• The site is currently blocking crawlers via robots.txt; search engines are not allowed to crawl your site meaning it can't be indexed
• It has been penalised for some reason. There are so many ways to end up in a penalty, algorithmic or manual.

Oh, if they're just pages that are part of a template you're using then you can safely get rid of them without having to redirect.

Just make sure you remove all internal links to those deleted pages so you don't end up with 404s.

I can't say I've seen an instance of that happening before but chances are it's just being redirected via the htaccess file.

Through htaccess you can essentially say if the URL is prefaced with https://, redirect to the other domain.

As far as SEO benefits, there really are none that I'm aware of. Looking purely at rankings, the only value this will pass is ~90% of link juice from any links that explicitly point to the https version. From a legitimate SEO point of view (ie actually caring about users) it's more than likely going to give them a very confusing experience!

There are instances where it makes sense to push users to a https version and maybe a new subdomain or something (from www.store.com to https://www.store.website.com) but even then, there aren't too many instances where that would be ideal.

Hi Michael, thanks for the input.

I completely agree with you about content length but perhaps I'm a little confused here.

If search engines aren't going to see content hidden by jquery, would that not mean the only content I'm seen to have is what's immediately visible on page load?

Hi Steve, Wix is one platform I'm really not too familiar with unfortunately. I've probably spent 20 minutes with it in total!

If you don't want these pages on your site, the best thing to do is 301 it to the most relevant page, provided that redirect makes sense to the user. For example, if it's a page about office chairs, you don't want to be redirecting the user to a page about televisions!

hmm, that's frustrating!

The canonicalization idea isn't going to work too well since it essentially passes the strength of one page to the other so you will still only end up with a single page that ranks. Also, it doesn't present a great user experience. If anything, it probably further confuses the fact that they're both the same thing!

If you've got offices in multiple locations, you can go with a number of ideas from Rand's Whiteboard Friday on a related topic. If this does apply to you, you could use the most common term for each region. Location pages for Western states would talk about Attorneys and Western states focus on Lawyer.

It's far from ideal but if Google isn't understanding the difference here, it's about the best option I can see.

So, I'm in 2 minds about this; let me start with a bit of background info.

Context
We have a new client who is in the final days of their new site design and were when they first contacted us. Their design essentially uses 5 pages, each with several pages worth of content on each, separated with the use of jquery. What this means is a user can click a menu item from a drop-down in the nav and be taken directly to that section of content like using internal anchor links as if it were a separate page, or they can click the top-level nav item and scroll through each "sub-page" without having to click other links.

Vaguely similar to Google's "How Search Works" page if each sector of that page had it's own URL, only without the heavy design elements and slow load time.

In this process, scrolling down to each new "sub-page" changes the URL in the address bar and is treated as a new page as far as referencing the page, adding page titles, meta descriptions, backlinks etc. From my research this also means search engines don't see the entire page, they see each sub-page as their own separate item like a normal site.

My Reservations I'm worried about this for several reasons, the largest of them being that you're essentially presenting the user with something different to the search engines. The other big one being that I just don't know if search engines really can render this type of formatting correctly or if there's anything I need to look out for here.

Since they're so close to launching their new site, I don't have time to set up a test environment and I'm not going to gamble with a new corporate website but they're also going to be very resistant to the advice of "start the design over, it's too dangerous".

The Positives
For this client in particular, the design actually works very well. Each of these long pages is essentially about a different service they offer and the continuous scrolling through the "sub-pages" acts as almost a workflow through the process, covering each step in order.

It also looks fantastic, loads quickly and has a very simple nav so the overall user experience is great. Since the majority of my focus in SEO is on UX, this is my confusion. Part of me thinks that obscuring the other content on these pages and only showing each individual "sub-page" to search engines is an obvious no-no, the other part of me feels that this kind of user experience and the reasonable prevalence of AJAX/Paralax etc means search engines should be more capable of understanding what's going on here.

Can anyone possibly shed some light on this with either some further reading or first-hand experience?

Matt Cutts answered a very similar question some time back in this video response.

In short, it's not a problem having these date/category pages, provided you've got them formatted correctly. Basically, just make sure that on each of these pages, you're only showing the heading and a small snippet; usually a paragraph or two and maybe an accompanying image.

If you're doing this, search engines have no issue understanding that it's essentially an aggregation page rather than duplicate content. If you're unlucky enough to be working with a CMS that just dumps then entire posts onto each category/tag page then you're definitely playing with fire!

If you're using Wordpress, often the simplest way to go about doing this is using the "more" tag which you'll find at the top of the text area when writing a post. Clicking that button will add into the HTML which cuts the snippet off at that point and provides a "read more" link to the full article. Here is a link to more info about it, note that current versions of wordpress do look different to these screenshots; you're looking for a button that just says "more", rather than the icon they use here.

The best way to deal with it is to update your template to automatically cut it off at a certain length for you, it just depends on whether you have access to a dev to make this change.

I completely agree with Bryan on this one on all counts.

As for how you go about structuring this content process, it really depends on just how limited your time is. If you go through each landing page and write a sufficient amount of content (my recommendation is always 1500+ words per primary landing page), is it going to take you weeks to get this done or are we talking more like 6 months?

Also, don't neglect the user experience in your planning process. If the vast majority of your users are arriving on the site looking for one particular thing, make sure they're going to land on a page rich in value; don't just give it an arbitrary 100 words to stave off the search engine Gods and move on!

Thankfully these days search engines (or at least Google) do a pretty good job of understanding both what your content is about and the intent of people searching for your service.

In this context, what that means is you don't have to try jamming both keywords everywhere you can. I would suggest having both in the content a handful of times for that little extra targeting but if your other quality signals (link profile, load speed, content quality, anchor profile etc) are stronger than your competition, it's entirely possible you could rank for "attorney" without ever mentioning the word.

The most recent example of this I've seen in action is a car hire company who ranked for some "car rental" terms without ever using any variation of the word "rental".

As for how you go about having both words in there a couple of times without it seeming awkward, it can be as simple as either switching back and forth between the terms (perhaps not the best idea in this vertical) or maybe even having a small section of content with a heading something like "Attorney or Lawyer, Is There a Difference?"

Embarrassingly, until I started working at a major law firm in my previous role, I didn't realise lawyer and solicitor were the same thing here in Australia so it's entirely possible this content will actually help others too, though this may be a regional thing.

It's not possible to give you specific instructions here with so little information but if you click on the errors, you will see some more information in there that will point you in the right direction.

As you can see in the screenshot attached, there's a "Linked From" tab. If you click that tab, you'll see a list of URLs you can find the broken link on, then it's just a case of looking at each of those pages and either fixing or removing the link(s).

Hope that helps!

RgqbInz

To be honest, this type of thing is definitely a weak point in my knowledge but if it were my site, I wouldn't be heading in this direction with it.

What you're essentially doing is obscuring duplicate content from search engines but presenting it to users which we know is a no-no. It may well be that search engines can't "see" that duplicate content just yet but that doesn't mean they won't in the next update.

More importantly, users aren't particularly engaged by seeing the same block of content over and over so it's kind of a waste of valuable screen real estate.

One other question to consider with this scenario: do users actually want to know about this manufacture process? This isn't a leading question. What I'm getting at is that content should always cover what the user wants to know, not what the business wants them to read about.

If this process is really just a sidenote for most users, risking content duplication to push it directly in front of them is a large and unnecessary risk.

Of course, if the process is a unique selling point that may actually persuade sales and/or build that rapport, disregard this point

Hi Jay,

Your first example is the best way to go about it. It makes for clear categorisation and, less importantly, it does have that keyword relevance as well.

In my opinion, your URL structure and nav structure should always be the same. It gives a clear, concise and logical path to follow and makes breadcrumbs easier to manage as well.

Hi Steven,

It's very hard to find definitive info about this update since, to my understanding, Google is yet to even confirm that it happened but from what I can gather, it was another revision of onsite quality. Search Engine Land has about the most helpful article I've managed to find on it yet.

To save you some legwork, one of Search Engine Land's previous posts on the topic (linked to in the one above) also provides a link to two Google resources on this topic. Note that they're old links more related to Panda but it does talk about what Google views as "quality" which is what this Phantom update is focussed on.

More guidance on building high-quality sites

Search Console Help: Create Valuable Content

There's a bit of reading there but hopefully it's helpful.

Hi Gayane,

It really comes down to a question of budget. Having a site for each location will allow you to be the most geo-targeted but if you have 5 different locations, that essentially means 5 SEO budgets. 5 lots of content (all having to be completely unique), 5x the link profiles and 5x the monitoring, planning and general campaign management.

In reality, the best option for most of us is to use a single site for all areas. Since Google looks at a lot of domain-wide metrics these days, it means if you're boosting content and links to your Las Vegas page, your LA page is going to benefit from that to an extent as well.

Rather than go into detail with ideas on how to do it, check out Rand's Whiteboard Friday on the topic.

I hope that helps!

Yep, you're on the right track Jason.

Since search engines view a subdomain as a separate entity, building valuable content and natural traffic/links to it means you're essentially driving all that referral traffic and strength to another website.

Interesting Giorgio, I hadn't seen that WBF before.

Absolutely no disrespect to Ruth but that's the first WBF I've disagreed with. The scraper risk is something I'm willing to take a gamble on for the benefits of relative links and the other points are moot if your website is setup correctly (htaccess deals with the potential for different versions of your domain and IMO canonicalization should always be used).

Going by that WBF, if your site is set up correctly with redirects and canonicalization, the only benefit here is if a scraper copies your site and there's a very slim chance of this actually happening.

It's a frustrating problem to have,  huh?

Rand did do a Whiteboard Friday on this general topic a while back which is fairly relevant here. As Dmitrii mentioned, option 1 is definitely the best option since the others mean content duplication of some form.

My best suggestion on this one would be to add a very short and enticing intro (I'm talking 1 or 2 lines) about that manufacture process and if they're interested, they can follow the link to the page all about it. Just make sure this link uses target="_blank" so it opens in a new tab for them. At least this way when they close that tab, they're right back to the product page they were on.

It is a risk but far safer than duplicating that same content across a bunch of products!

So, using Rand's advice from that WBF, you can pad out the content of your products very well and very uniquely and that line or 2 of text used as a "hook" to draw them to the other page is insignificant. Duplicate content is all about a ratio so if you have 2 lines of duplication amongst 500 words of unique and valuable text, it's not likely to be an issue.

Probably not the solution you were looking for but I hope it helps!

Exactly how to implement it will depend on your CMS but basically, all you need to do is update the hyperlinks from showing the entire link path to a simple, relative one like the examples below.

Absolute Anchor Text

Relative Anchor Text

With hyperlinks, if you don't specify the full address path including http://www then the current website path will be added to the beginning. In this example, since there is no full and complete path before /contact, it's correctly assumed that the link is to point to http://www.example.com/contact.

This is important because it means no matter what changes you make to your domain (www to non-wwww, moving to https, moving the site to a new domain etc) the links will always work perfectly. If you use an absolute path, the minute your change anything about your domain, all the links break because they're manually pointed to the old one.

Here's a bit more info on the topic if the above is a little confusing. It's not a link to my site, just the first I found in a Google search

No problem, happy to help.

If you actually sell the various types of shoes as well and the repairs/cleaning are almost a side-service then yes, your original example is ok since the "dress shoes" nav item would presumably take you to a landing page about dress shoes.

Unless you're getting a large volume of targetted searches for things like "dress shoe repairs", I'd probably just have "Repairs" and "Cleaning" as their own top-level nav items that lead to a single landing page each that covers all 3 types of shoes.

This would be sufficient for the more general terms like "shoe repairs".

The nav would look more like:

Shoes   |   Boots   |   Sandals   |   Shoe Cleaning   |   Repairs

With the relevant drop-downs under the first 3 items only.

No problem Cesar.

With 1500 pages, the most time-efficient thing to do right now is to keep and/or write your own for the most important landing pages and use a different template format for the others.

It's not reasonable to go writing 1500 page titles and meta descriptions right now but for at least your primary landing pages (if it's ecommerce then your category and subcategory pages), you should be writing them manually.

As for the other pages, using a templated approach is your best bet for the time being but the breadcrumb style will still give you quite a lot of duplication which is a bit of a worry. If you have 200 products under a single subcategory, that's 202 pages that all have the same keyword(s) in the title:

Category
     Category - Subcategory
     Category - Subcategory - Product 1
     Category - Subcategory - Product 2
     Category - Subcategory - Product 3
etc

A better-templated approach for an ecommerce site is to use basic product info and your brand as the page title.

For example, _iPhone 6s Replacement Screen - VX902 | FoneScreenz _

In this example it includes the name of the product on that page, and a product code which would both be variables, as well as the business name (FYI the product code and business are fabricated). This covers users searching by either product name or the specific code and is descriptive enough that it will do just fine.

Basically, the template would look something like:

[Product Name] - [Product Code] | Business Name

If by "content pages" you mean blog posts on your site, I'd suggest not doing this at all. It's not great for your SEO but it won't directly hurt your rankings.

What EGOL said is correct in that providing helpful links in your articles is an excellent idea and something you should definitely be doing, but there's a very big difference between helpful links and self-promotion. Blog posts are meant to be informative and that's why the good ones get shared but dropping a sales pitch in there changes the tone from "here is helpful information you're looking for, share it around" to "here's my product, you should buy it". A link to your products is usually going to feel like a sales pitch, no matter what anchor text you use.

To put yourself in your readers' shoes, imagine if I started dropping links to my product pages here - suddenly my entire comment would feel pretty shady, right?

Linking to your other posts and external sources is a great idea but in most instances, linking to your own products is reason enough for me to stop reading. Of course, there are exceptions to this - the question to ask if whether or not that link is genuinely helpful.

Absolutely. Unique or stock, all images should be treated exactly the same way

It's always hard to say for certain without inspecting to the two domains but it may be that your client is optimised for that one city while the other site is more broad and suggests they have or regularly deal with multiple locations.

Local SEO won't inherently hurt your national search results but if you only have a single location and the entire site seems to focus around that and surrounding suburbs, it would make little sense for search engines to rank you for locations in other areas, especially other states.

Even if the client is limited to a single office, there are plenty of ways to spread their digital presence and begin pushing them up for other locations.

I was going to describe in more detail until I remembered that Rand did a great Whiteboard Friday on this topic about 12 months ago that does a better job of explaining it than I could in a comment. Hope that helps!

Updating them all at once isn't inherently bad, it's more about the quality of the updated ones that may see a negative impact.

When you say a breadcrumb structure, I immediately think of something like this: "Letterboxes - Steel - Small | Site Name" - is that what they're looking to move to? Handcrafted ones can be made far more compelling and often less spammy but it depends on the context of your site really and how many pages you're talking about.

Regardless of the number of pages, you should at least be writing them manually for the key landing pages - remember, the main reason for a page title is to attract that click from the right type of user in the SERPs.

If you'd like to share some examples of the proposed ones I can probably be much more helpful

Search engines do quite a good job of understanding what your site/pages/content is about these days so forcing the exact-match everywhere isn't really necessary. Rather than focussing on the H1s for the minute, I think a revision of your nav/site structure may be a better solution; apologies for going almost immediately off topic but it does still answer your question.

A great nav is going to be as "flat" as practical and designed to take the user from page-load to conversion in as fewer steps as possible.

Likewise, if these are core services that you offer, the closer those pages are to the top of your nav the better, no need to bury them several layers deep and miss out on some of that internal strength.

You'll know your target audience better than me but I'd be more inclined to structure it like this:

Shoe Cleaning
     Dress Shoes
     Work Shoes
     Play Shoes

Shoe Repair
    Dress Shoes
    Work Shoes
    Play Shoes

In most cases you'd even be better off dropping the "shoes" from these sub-items but a menu item of "dress" or "work" is a little confusing in this context.

The reason I'd suggest doing it this way is to satisfy user intent. I'd expect that most of your users have come to your site looking for one particular thing - either shoe repairs or shoe cleaning. It's entirely likely that if they're getting their shoes repaired, they may also be interested in getting them cleaned at the same time, but they arrive on your site with the intent of gathering information on your repairs so getting these should be as clear as possible.

It can depend on the type of site you're running I suppose but generally I see too many benefits to fresh user generated content to go closing them.

If you had topics that were particularly seasonal and no benefit could be had from yourself or users after a certain date (maybe an obsolete product that you don't want new buyers to confuse with the latest version) it may be worth closing comments and providing a link to a discussion on the new product.

You're on the right track in that user-generated content is a great thing for your brand/product, user engagement and SEO in general so the more legitimate interaction you have the better. Fresh content is what search engines look for and genuine discussion gives users a reason to frequently return to your site, allowing you to build that rapport.

As far as quantity of unique text, Oleg is right in that this becomes almost a pure UX question. Whatever works best for user intent is what you should be doing in this case. I personally prefer minimal pagination, especially on mobile but I'm just 1 user and may not even be your target audience.

Interesting. Literally none of the crawler tools I've just tried using give me anything more than a 404 for your  home page and that's where they stop.

I can see the 301 from the non-www version so the domain itself is crawlable - I'm wondering if maybe it's a htaccess issue?

The best I can work out from the outside is that something is wrong with your htaccess file, maybe it's pointing to an invalid path and this is generating the 404.

Since the site currently just gives a soft 404, taking users to a page that looks like the homepage, it may be that what actually happens when you go to www.schoppnutritionclinic.com is that you're being handed the soft-404 and just thinking it's your home page.

It's impossible to test further without access to these things but hopefully this points you in the right direction. I'd be interested to see the outcome here regardless; it's bugging me now!

As the other replies mentioned, this is very normal. Anecdotally, it seems this happens most commonly if the brand name is more relevant for that search. Essentially they've decided for one reason or another that putting your brand first is likely to give you more SERP clicks.

I don't think we've ever had a concise explanation from Google as to exactly why this happens but either way, it's not something to be stressed about. If your page titles were being completely dropped in place of Google-generated ones this may be an indication that yours need some serious revision (depending on context) but in this instance it's fine.

Basically it's to do with the way the tools you're using gather this data.

The short answer here is that none of these tools can possibly give you real-time data - there will be a delay of anywhere from days to months depending on a number of factors so a fresh link built today may not show up in Moz (Open Site Explorer), Majestic, Ahrefs etc until some time early next year. It's a similar story if a new domain isn't showing up in the tool at all - if no backlinks have been "found" yet, it has no data to show you.

Since Google doesn't provide any of these tools with access to the citations they've "seen", each of them have their own way of collecting this data and trying to emulate what Google does as best they can.

What this means is that these tools have to recrawl a site before they can detect any new/lost backlinks and list them for you. This obviously takes time and a lot of resources given how many websites are live at any one moment so it will be done using some kind of algorithm and/or schedule.

Because each tool has their own way of doing this, you may even see one tool show you a fresh citation faster than others. Unfortunately this is the best indication we have of a backlink profile. Frustrating since we'd all love to report to our clients/managers exactly how a link building campaign is progressing in real-time but it just means that part of our job is understanding roughly how these tools work and communicating realistic expectations around them.

I hope that helps!