Hi,

That sounds like a very standard set up so you shouldn't have much to worry about. The only thing to be aware of if whether you really need tags and categories as opposed to just having one of the other. If you do, for instance, you might decide to keep tags for navigational purposes, I'd consider noindexing the tag pages. By not indexing them, they won't cannibalise your category pages, but you still get the benefit of the user experience of having tags that visitors can use for navigation.

Craig

Hi,

I think it depends on the site, but my initial thoughts are that there probably isn't a lot of value to having those pages at all. Imagine the site grew to 50X the size it is now, would it make sense to have those pages? By that point, the site would have more thin/no indexed pages than new useful ones.

I think it's important to think from a user point of view. Just because you add noindex doesn't mean Google will take the page out of the index in a hurry. That means there is a lot of potential for people to still find you in Google, arrive on an expired ad, have a bad experience and leave. What about trying to do something a bit more useful like redirecting them to a closely matched product category above? Even doing that might be confusing to users unless you have an overlay explaining that the product is no longer available, so you are redirecting them to a different page.

Craig

I've had a look at this in a fair amount of depth but I still can't get it working. I think there are a few things at play here:

• Google documentation and Schema.org documentation disagree. Google says that location must be a place, Schema.org say it can be place, address or text. So your HTML could technically be correct according to schema.org docs and still show an error in the Google tool.
• I think on some level event probably isn't the right property. The documentation says: "An event happening at a certain time and location...". I know that doesn't help you, just thinking out loud.
• This might be worth thinking about: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/53885/which-schema-org-type-should-be-used-for-webinars - but I don't think it will help with rich snippets if that's what you're after.
• This page gets rich snippets despite not having location, maybe just try the same approach and ignore the testing tool if it works in the SERPS

Sorry I couldn't be more help. I'll add this reply to the Moz page too for the benefits of others.

It's more likely that you've made a typo than the name is wrong. The property name doesn't matter, you can name an event anything you want. My guess, without seeing it, is that the formatting is wrong in some way. I'd recommend starting off with one of the examples in the schema.org documentation and doing a find-and-replace for your equivalent details. Happy to take a look at the code if you're comfortable sharing it.

Craig

Hi Jonathan, I think this blog post will help: http://help.analyticsedge.com/googleanalytics/misunderstood-metrics-next-page-path/

The summary is this:

"Back in 2009, Nick Mihailovski of Google explained that you should not use ga:pagePath (Page) with ga:nextPagePath (Next Page Path) together — while it works in some situations, the system was not designed with these combinations in mind. It was designed so Previous Page Path and Next Page Path would be used in combination to show how traffic moved from one page (previous) to another (next) — for the navigation reports. The Page dimension was to be used with other page-level dimensions and metrics."

I hope this helps.

<address style="margin: 0px 0px 1.71429rem; padding: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 24px; color: #444444; font-family: 'Open Sans', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"> </address>

http://help.analyticsedge.com/googleanalytics/misunderstood-metrics-next-page-path/

Hi Cole,

1 - When you say this business operates as bowling alley/restaurant/entertainment venue do you mean these are three different venues?

2 - Can you give me an example of the query that is showing the result you're trying to replicate.

3 - The schema.org website has lots of examples in the areas you mentioned. Scroll to the bottom of the page and you'll see different examples that you should be able to just do a find and replace on.

Craig

Hi, the higher up the architecture the links are pointing to, the more pages the authority has the potential to influence if. For example building links to the homepage will also help any pages that it links to. Building links to one page only will have a larger impact on that particular page but won't benefit others as much. Does this make sense?

I hope this answers your question, unfortunately I don't know of any case studies since it can't really be compared. I'm still not 100% sure of the question if I'm honest.

Craig

Hi, do you have any examples?

Generally speaking, it is a good idea to get links to a wide range of pages as you said. A basic example of this would be getting links to a wide variety of product pages or product category pages. There are several case studies on Moz blog were link building hs shown a positive impact, is there something specific that you would like to see? The question seems very generic so I'm struggling to give you concrete examples or help.

Craig

Hi Kristen,

I did this recently and it worked. The important part is that you need to block the pages in robots.txt or add a noindex tag to the pages to stop them from being indexed again.

I hope this helps.

Hi all, Google Webmaster Tools has a great tool for this. If you go into WMT and select "Google index", then "remove URLs". You can use regex to remove a large batch of URLs then block them in robots.txt to make sure they stay out of the index.

I hope this helps.

Hi,

I think it depends on the site, but my initial thoughts are that there probably isn't a lot of value to having those pages at all. Imagine the site grew to 50X the size it is now, would it make sense to have those pages? By that point, the site would have more thin/no indexed pages than new useful ones.

I think it's important to think from a user point of view. Just because you add noindex doesn't mean Google will take the page out of the index in a hurry. That means there is a lot of potential for people to still find you in Google, arrive on an expired ad, have a bad experience and leave. What about trying to do something a bit more useful like redirecting them to a closely matched product category above? Even doing that might be confusing to users unless you have an overlay explaining that the product is no longer available, so you are redirecting them to a different page.

Craig

I've had a look at this in a fair amount of depth but I still can't get it working. I think there are a few things at play here:

• Google documentation and Schema.org documentation disagree. Google says that location must be a place, Schema.org say it can be place, address or text. So your HTML could technically be correct according to schema.org docs and still show an error in the Google tool.
• I think on some level event probably isn't the right property. The documentation says: "An event happening at a certain time and location...". I know that doesn't help you, just thinking out loud.
• This might be worth thinking about: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/53885/which-schema-org-type-should-be-used-for-webinars - but I don't think it will help with rich snippets if that's what you're after.
• This page gets rich snippets despite not having location, maybe just try the same approach and ignore the testing tool if it works in the SERPS

Sorry I couldn't be more help. I'll add this reply to the Moz page too for the benefits of others.

Hi Landon,

The "site:" operator is probably what you're looking for. To use Bob's example of finding questions about SEO on Yahoo answers, it would be:

"site:uk.answers.yahoo.com SEO"

I hope this helps.

Hi, the higher up the architecture the links are pointing to, the more pages the authority has the potential to influence if. For example building links to the homepage will also help any pages that it links to. Building links to one page only will have a larger impact on that particular page but won't benefit others as much. Does this make sense?

I hope this answers your question, unfortunately I don't know of any case studies since it can't really be compared. I'm still not 100% sure of the question if I'm honest.

Craig

Hi Mike, just to be clear on what Thomas is suggesting, as I think he might be getting mixed up between noindex and robots.txt.

If you simply add noindex,nofollow to a bunch of pages, this could still get you in trouble. Noindex doesn't mean DO NOT CRAWL, it means DO NOT INDEX. There's a big difference.

If something has noindex, Google can still crawl that content but they won't put it in the search results.

The only way to completely make sure that Google won't crawl content is by blocking it in robots.txt or in your case putting it behind a username and password.

So to answer your question, yes it's fine as long as it's behind a login, Google can't punish you for it since they can't see it.

I hope this helps,

Craig