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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

I'm glad that worked. I'm not familiar with Weebly, but I'm happy to take a look if you want to send me some examples.

Hi,

This looks like a copy paste error to me. If you look at the cource code of your site compared to another site with a canonical that you know works, you'll see that the quotes around the canonical and the URL are blue. They should be a different colour. If you look at the image I've shared, you'll see the other links in the source code have different colours for the quotation marks.

My guess is you pasted this from a rich formatting document like MS word or something or the quotes are the wrong order. To fix it, open up a plain text editor like the basic notepad and write it out again. Then add it to the site without formatting. This should fix it.

If you want to double check the HTML, I recommend downloading a free text editor like Visual Studio Code which makes it a bit easier to see the formatting is correct as you're writing HTML. See the attached image as an example.

Let me know if this solves your problem.

Osmxtzs Ykwv3hu

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

Hi,

I don't see a redirect either. I tried fetching from the UK and the USA and neither redirected me. Are you still having this problem?

Craig

Great! I'll mark this as resolved then.

Craig

Hi Mark,

What have you done with all the old content on the sub-domain? Is the plan to move everything to a sub-folder or are you going to have some in both places? Also, is the content on the sub-folder different to the sub-domain or are you just moving content?

Craig

Hi June,

Can you share the URLs so I can take a look? I won't be able to help other than just link to the standard hreflang guidelines unless I can look at the specific site.

Craig

As Thomas said, 50k is the max but you can also have an index file with multiple sitemaps within it so you can have lots more if needed. A couple of things I would add.

• Manual crawling is fine but remember, that also means that pages that can't be crawled will be excluded from the sitemap which defeats the purpose of the sitemap
• As for why the indexation levels are so low, the first thing I would check is if everything in the sitemap is a 200 response. Make sure there aren't any redirects or 404s otherwise Google may decide not to trust the sitemap.

I hope this helps

Hi Adam,

It depends on the product but I would suggest only having one page if the products are so similar. For example, if you are talking about widgets of different colours, i would suggest having one widget page that allows users to select the colour that they want from a drop-down menu. By doing this, you should have one stronger page with unique content and several reviews instead of several, largely similar, pages.

Does that help?

Just a side note Jake, if it gets really bad for any pages and you don't feel that's an option you can always use the:

Hope this helps

I have to say I agree with Sha on this one.

If you are not confident in using .htaccess then I wouldn't bother. I think there is a much easier solution:

1- As Sha said, use webmaster tools to tell Google how to handle these parameters, this should slowly start to take them out of the index.

2- Add rel=canonical to all your pages, this way even if parameters are added, the rel=canonical will always point back to the original and remove any risk of duplicate content.

I hope this helps.

Craig

Great! I'll mark this as resolved then.

Craig

Hi Isaak,

Have you done anything to the site recently? That's the mot obvious place to start, what could it be? I checked the backlinks to the site and noticed there are a lot of other domains redirecting to the site, for example":

<colgroup><col style="mso-width-source: userset; mso-width-alt: 11562; width: 271pt;" width="361"></colgroup>
| http://www.woodfurniture.co.uk/ |
| http://www.thefurnitureemporium.com/ |
| http://www.lightoakfurniture.co.uk/ |
| http://www.mattresssolutions.co.uk/ |
| http://www.darkoakfurniture.co.uk/ |
| http://www.bedroomfurnituresolutions.co.uk/ |
| http://www.bedroom-oak-furniture.co.uk/ |
| http://www.tresoakfurniture.co.uk/ |
| http://www.thefurnitureemporium.co.uk/ |

Were any of these (or other sites) recently redirected?

Craig

Hi,

This looks like a copy paste error to me. If you look at the cource code of your site compared to another site with a canonical that you know works, you'll see that the quotes around the canonical and the URL are blue. They should be a different colour. If you look at the image I've shared, you'll see the other links in the source code have different colours for the quotation marks.

My guess is you pasted this from a rich formatting document like MS word or something or the quotes are the wrong order. To fix it, open up a plain text editor like the basic notepad and write it out again. Then add it to the site without formatting. This should fix it.

If you want to double check the HTML, I recommend downloading a free text editor like Visual Studio Code which makes it a bit easier to see the formatting is correct as you're writing HTML. See the attached image as an example.

Let me know if this solves your problem.

Osmxtzs Ykwv3hu

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

Hi Prime,

I don't see there being a problem with this at all, as you said it's helpful for users, however, make sure that it makes sense from a grammar point of view as well, for example, "see all TV's" makes sense, but "see all car insurance" does not. Don't try to shoehorn a keyword in just for the sake of it.

I agree with Karl that breadcrumbs are a good idea both from an SEO point of view and a user point of view.

I hope this helps.

Hi Omar,

The option is still there. Next the the search box that you used to put the RegEx in, click on the advanced tab and select "Exclude" , "Keyword" "matching RegEx"

See the attached image. I hope this helps.

Craig

@CraigBradford

CkkTO

Hey Adam,

I've never seen any conclusive evidence as to what the order is, I've heard some people say that it could be the order in which the pages were first crawled, the order of importance etc but to be honest I wouldn't worry about it, or use that as you basis for what pages Google think are most important.

Spend time creating a good clear navigational structure when the site is built and submit a site map, between those two you should be able to let Google and other search engines know exactly what pages are the most important.

If the first page isn't your home page, try making sure that Google isn't showing any personalised results, a good way to check is to use chrome and open an 'incognito' window and do the same search. Whatever the result I would worry unless the home page isn't indexed at all.

Hi Even, this is quite a common problem. There are a couple of things to consider when deciding if Noindex is the solution rather than robots.txt.

Unless there is a reason the pages need to be crawled (like there are pages on the site that are only linked to from those pages) I would use robots.txt. Noindex doesn't stop search engines crawling those pages, only from putting them in the index. So in theory, search engines could spend all there time crawling pages that you don't want to be in the index.

Here's what I'd do:

Decide on a reasonable number of facets, for example, if you're selling TVs people might search for:

1. Sony TV (Brand search)
2. 50 inch sony tv (size + brand)
3. Sony 50 inch HD TV (brand + size + specification)

But past 3 facets tends to get very little search volume (do keyword research for your own market)

In this case I'd create a rule that appends something to the URL after 3 facets hat would make it easy to block in robots.txt. For example I might make my structure:

1. example.com/tv/sony
2. example.com/tv/sony/50
3. example.com/tv/sony/50/HD

But as soon as I add a 4th facet, for example 'colour'- I add in the filter subfolder

• example.com**/filter/**tv/sony/50/HD/white

I can then easily block all these pages in robots.txt using:

Disallow: /filter/

I hope this helps.