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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 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

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.

Although I agree with what some of the others have said, it's not enough to just disavow all links. Google want to see that you have actually tried to remove the links. So make sure you keep record of the sites you tried to contact as proof that you have tried. Google want to make this is hard for you, otherwise there is no incentive to just do the same again. Don't be surprised if you need to try upwards of 5 reinclusion requests.

Some good resources on the process are here:

http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal

http://moz.com/ugc/the-anatomy-of-a-successful-reconsideration-request

Good luck

Thanks,

That’s quite cool to see, I take your point, it would be interesting to test by setting up a brand new site, throw up a few pages and see what happens. Common sense would say Google should always show, home page, contact page etc but it's not always the case as we have seen.

Have you had a look at what your most popular blog posts have been to see if that correlates in anyway?

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.

Hey,

The general rule is to use the most appropriate level above. For example:

Thing > Place > Landform > BodyOfWater > Waterfall

In the waterfall example, if there wasn't a specific entity for waterfall, you would use the level above "BodyofWater"

This isn't ideal, but it's the best you can do without something more specific.

Craig

Hi Lucy,

Getting links from US sites will definitely help your site build authority. I would go after those just as much as UK sites. If you think of how you naturally share things online, the domain that it sits on doesn't matter. Assuming the content is in your primary language, you share it regardless of the TLD. With content spreading faster than it ever has thanks to things like social media, I think the TLD of the domain linking will count less and less.

I hope this helps.

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

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 G,

I wouldn't worry about it from an SEO point of view, changes of that size will have little or no impact. It's strange from a user point of view though to have the main heading of a page below the fold so I might consider doing it anyway.

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

Hi Tommy,

It's good to see you are thinking about Schema.org, it's here to stay.

Anyway to answer your question, it doesn't need to be one or the other. You can add schema to your page and use a video sitemap.

If you just want the video thumbnail to show up in the SERPS, using like Vimeo or Wistia should be sufficient. If you want to go even further, you could mark it up with Schema.org as follows: (this is an example from the website: http://schema.org/VideoObject

<div< span="">itemprop="video" itemscope</div<>

itemtype="http://schema.org/VideoObject">

Video: <span< span="">itemprop="name">Interview with the Foo

Fighters</span<>

<meta< span="">itemprop="duration" content="T1M33S" /></meta<>

<meta< span="">itemprop="thumbnail"</meta<>

content="foo-fighters-interview-thumb.jpg" />

<object< span="">...></object<>

<param< span="">...></param<>

<embed< span="">type="application/x-shockwave-flash" ...></embed<>

<span< span="">itemprop="description">Catch this exclusive interview</span<>

with Dave Grohl and the Food Fighters about their new album,

Rope.

Why not run tests? First you could add the video sitemap using Vimeo, let it get indexed and make sure the thumbnail is showing in the SERPS. You could then add a different title, description etc using schema and see which Google prefers. Alternatively, you could add both, for example, add 5 videos using Vimeo then another 5 using Schema.org markup. It would be interesting to see if Google display the Schema results as video thumbnails.

If that sounds like too much work, I would just go with the Vimeo video sitemap rather than schema because we know it works.

I hope this helps.

Craig

@CraigBradford

Hi Rox,

I think the problem is because of the Doctype of that page. If you select HTML 5 from the doctype dropdown, you won't get any HTML validation errors related the schema.

In summary, it's not worth worrying about.

I hope this helps,

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

Hi Tye,

This is a common problem with GA. Goals in GA simply work by saying how many people reached this page. The pages in between that you specified only work for the funnel visualisation report; they have no impact on the goal conversion rate.

I would recommend creating new funnels in Padditrack, which is a free tool that should do what you need it to.

I hope this helps.

Hi Kasy, did you get to the bottom of this?

Hi Quang, can you share a screenshot of the segment you're trying to create, that way I can see the regex. Also as Sajeet said you'll need to use on click to track people clicking the banners not just viewing.

I'd start trying to debug by simplifying the report. What happens if you just try to see how many times the event label 'view' has been fired? Does that still show as 0%?

Craig

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?

Hi Marty,

To begin with, it's worth noting that the funnel report in GA isn't particularly useful. You're not the only one that finds it confusing. The first thing I'd fix is the funnel steps; there is a mistake in the funnel, remove step 5 as it isn't needed. You already have that page as the final destination in the field marked goal details. Try that nad see how it goes.

It's worth understanding what the "requited step" actually means. It doesn't mean this is a strict funnel, it simply means that people that enter at any other stage of the funnel won't be counted. I recommend this great post on Lunametrics blog: http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2008/06/25/funnel-problems-google-analytics/

From that post:

The “Required First Step” check box on the goal setup causes a lot of confusion. First of all, remember that this affects only the Funnel Visualization report. If you check off this box, here’s what happens: The Funnel Visualization report includes only conversions that passed through the required step. That’s it. Your other reports still include any visit that views the goal page, but the Funnel Visualization report only calls it a conversion if it visits the required funnel page.

The required step can be a way to separately measure multiple goals that have the same ultimate goal page, but start at different places. Simply set up more than one goal with a different required step for each one. (Again, remember that the differences will only be apparent in the Funnel Visualization report.)

Let me know how it goes.

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