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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?

Hi Etna,

I don't have anything official from Google that I can point you to but I think this is fine. There are lots of examples of this in the wild, for examples: http://www.sainsburysenergy.com/products-and-services/reviews.html

Your intent also isn't manipulative so I don't see what Google could be upset with you about. Just make sure to attribute the reviews appropriately and to show a balance.

Sorry, I don't have anything more concrete to point you to.

Craig

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 Garrett, I'm not sure I understand the question completely. The screenshot example you shared was a YouTube result.

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 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 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

The only thing I'd add to this is to that nofollow isn't secure enough. I would recommend blocking the individual product pages that you don't want search engines to find. Thanks Donford for the detailed response.

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 Laurean, are you able to share the site that you're looking at? It would be much easier to give you an answer if I could take a look. Alternatively, if you know any similar sites that have the same issue, I can look at that example to begin with.

Craig

Hi Dan,

I depends on the model, I would recommend all the obvious stuff like:

• Branch information like opening times and addresses for individual agents
• Individual property information like area, price etc

Some of the more interesting/new things are actions. You could potentially use:

• Ask question action: https://schema.org/AskAction
• Rent Action: https://schema.org/RentAction

On the sitemap question, you want to make sure your sitemaps are "clean" meaning there are only pages that return a 200 response. There shouldn't be any redirects or 404s. Only put pages you want to show up in the index in the sitemap.

Hope that helps.

https://schema.org/RentAction

You might consider doing a disavow to be on the safe side.

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 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 Peter, quite a history you have.

It looks like you have a lot of good advice above, but I want to add a little to what Josh said. I think you are correct to clean up the site, these things will bite you eventually, but it would probably make sense to do it in a staged approach. By cutting off a bunch of pages that rank, you are unfortunately going to lose a lot of traffic, that doesn't mean it isn't the correct long term solution, but the situation you've found yourself in now is as bad as a penalty.

If you are not getting a lot of traffic from the redirected domains I would recommend removing the 301s too, eve with the disavow file I would be concerned that it could be causing issues, especially as such scale and such a variety of topics. I don't see how redirecting a generator hire website to a cleaning website is relevant at all, I suspect Google see it the same way.

To summarise, if this change is costing you money, I'd reverse it, but start planning to get to the point where you can remove the pages asap without the same level of drop, at the moment you've essentially given yourself a penalty.

Best of luck

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

Hi,

Can you just confirm the language.

Search query - do you mean Google Webmaster tools/search console

Search analytics - are you using Google analytics?

I would expect most of the keywords data in GA to be missing due to not provided. Can you give me some more details?

Craig

Sorry you didn't get a response to this Matt. I'm closing it down since it was so long ago.

Craig

Sorry you didn't get much of a response to this question Neil. I'm closing it down since it was so long ago.

Craig

I agree with Matt that there can probably be a reduction of pages, but that aside, how much of an issue this is comes down to what pages aren't being indexed. It's hard to advise without the site, are you able to share the domain? If the site has been around for a long time, that seems a low level of indexation. Is this a site where the age of the content matters? For example Craigslist?

Craig

It looks like there is a canonical tag on the Facebook version of the site but it's still not a great idea. Unless there is a really good reason I'd remove the site.

Craig

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

Hi Lewis,

Can you share an example? Am I correct in thinking you mean external links from your blog posts (trackbacks) are going through 302 redirects?

Craig

Hi Adul,

Just to follow up on this in case you're wondering why the answer is being downvoted. Blocking the pages that 404 in robots.txt will only stop Google getting a 404 because they can't reach the page. Users will still get a 404 so this isn't ideal. Also, if you don't 301 redirect the old pages to the new one, you lose any equity that those pages built up over the years.

Hope that helps,

Craig

Hi Jon, can you share the details of the site or a screenshot of the report that you're looking at.

Craig

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 Kasy, sorry to check the obvious first...

1. Have there been any updates to your robots.txt file?
2. Have you updated sitemaps? In Robots.txt or Google webmaster tools?
3. Have you changed any meta information like canonical tags, noindex tags
4. Have you changed any internal links from no-follow to follow?
5. Have you got any tools regularly set up to crawl your site as Googlebot? Moz, Screaming Frog, DeepCrawl, Xenu etc.

Did you ever find the solution to this Evan?

Hi INU,

I always like avoid using things like 503s as a general rule. There is almost certainly a better way to do it.

What about just using Google webmaster tools and Bing webmaster tools? Regarding HREFs it depends how much you rely on that tool. If you don't use it, then I'd more more likely to just block that bot in robots.txt and make sure Google and Bing are controlled using the appropriate tools in the respective webmaster tools.

To answer your specific point about whether or not 503 can hurt rankings. In general no as long as they are only short-term. A 503 like 404s or any other response code is a natural part of the web, however, Google has said in the past that repetitive 503s can be treated as permanent rather than temporary and in some cases can result in the pages being removed from the index.

I hope this helps,

Craig

Sorry for the slow reply on this, Rmoov is good and there's a bunch of others in the blog post that you might find useful:

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

Hope this helps,

Craig

Hi Alan, I understand that, but the problem Evan is describing seems to be related to duplicate content and crawl allowance. There's no perfect answer but in my experience the types of pages that Evan is describing aren't often linked to. Taking that into consideration, IMO robots.txt is the correct solution.

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.

Hi Quang, I was looking at the actual page and the event is firing, see the screenshot here: http://screencast.com/t/LrWJzTmpt

I'm not sure what's going on but it's strange that you can't even get the event label to fire on it's own - that rules out anything wrong with the regex.

So when you go into the events report, are there events being logged?

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 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,

Webmaster tools will normally tell you what the problem is if you click through to the details. I've also tried to access it and it seems fine. I've used a couple of different useragents on websniffer: http://web-sniffer.net/ and I've checked robots.txt for anything funny. All looks good.

My advice would be to try and fetch as Googlebot in WMT - if that works, I wouldn't worry about it. You could also check the server logs to see what the response code is when Googlebot requests the sitemap.

I hope this helps, seems like a bug to me.

Craig