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Personally, I view appending the name at the end of the title to be more for branding than for SEO. If you are trying to build a brand, it can be very useful to reinforce it by placing it at the end of all of your title tags. This works great if you have a unique brand and your brand name is short enough to actually fit within the character limitation of the title tag while still giving you room to describe what's on the page.

Regarding whether or not to use ".com" - I think it depends on your business and your intent with the site. If the majority of your business is taking place online, then the .com might be very appropriate. Or, if whatever action you are hoping the visitor takes is an online action, then again, the .com would be very appropriate. If, on the other hand, you are a plumber and what you really want is for them to call you, then maybe leave the ".com" off...for example "Roto-Rooter"....if you search "roto-rooter Seattle" you'll see they append "Roto-Rooter Plumbing" at the end of their title tag, not "Roto-Rooter.com"

Hope that helps!

For those unaware of the news, here is a link to the Wall Street Journal article:

http://online.wsj.com/articles/google-to-boost-encrypted-websites-in-rankings-1407384244?mod=WSJ_hps_sections_tech

First off, welcome!

Second, I would say don't worry at all about your call to action button. Every eCommerce site has call to action buttons on every page (i.e. "Add to Cart"). The pages that happen after that don't matter to search engines with one caveat...just make sure you have a properly configured Robots.txt file.

Third. If all of your product pages are indeed trying to capitalize on the same key terms....yes, you have a duplicate content problem. Don't wait for a tool to tell you what you already know in your heart!

Take some time, and prioritize and start to re-write you product pages to use a wider variety of keywords (particularly long-tail) that better describe the products you offer.

I hope this helps!

Hi Marissa,

Here's an example:

name="description" content="Your awesome meta description content goes inside the quotes, here">

Hope that helps!

I think this could be happening because of the way Google interprets the - I tried it with the opening quote, but not the closing quote and it worked. Notice too that the text that's highlighted (or bolded) in the search result is everything up to the

Hi. Interesting question. You had me at "log files."  So before I give a longer, more detailed answer, I have a follow up question: Does your site really have 17+ million pages?

I believe the problem here is being caused by the fact that you are using relative, rather than absolute URLs for your canonical tag. I've seen this happen before on a site I was working on.  Thanks to awesome suggestions from Moz Q & A from community member George Andrews (endorsed by Dr. Pete Meyers), we updated all of our canonical tags to be absolute URLs instead of relative URLs. This completely solved the exact problem you are describing.

Here's a link to that thread: http://moz.com/community/q/what-is-the-proper-syntax-for-rel-canonical

The best news is, it's a very easy, inexpensive and quick SEO win. I love those!

Dana

Hi inhouseSEO,

The canonical tag would be an appropriate solution to these duplicate content issues. Another solution, depending on your CMS, would be to incorporate those variation pages into one hub page that allowed customers to select size and color without providing an individual page for each variation to search engines or users. There are a number of ways to accomplish depending upon what CMS your are using. It also depends on whether or not your site is using faceted navigation, which opens up a whole additional can of worms.

That's a very high level answer. If you want something more granular based on your type of navigation and CMS I encourage you to respond because a lot of other site owners here could probably benefit from the discussion.

Cheers,

Dana

Hi! Can you clarify your question a little bit please? You said "dropped domain." What do you mean by that? It sounds like what I'm hearing you say is that you had an old domain that was dropped from Google, but you are concerned that actual visitors to that old domain are able to find your new domain, without inheriting the bad link profile that may ahve cause the old domain to get dropped.

Honestly, you may not be able to accomplish what you are wanting. But I need to know more first so that's why I asked for clarification. I'd be glad to help if possible.

Cheers,

Dana

Hi All! What constitutes a normal crawl rate for daily bingbot server requests for large sites? Are any of you noticing spikes in Bingbot crawl activity?

I did find a "mildly" useful thread at Black Hat World containing this quote: "The reason BingBot seems to be terrorizing your site is because of your site's architecture; it has to be misaligned. If you are like most people, you paid no attention to setting up your website to avoid this glitch. In the article referenced by Oxonbeef, the author's issue was that he was engaging in dynamic linking, which pretty much put the BingBot in a constant loop.

You may have the same type or similar issue particularly if you set up a WP blog without setting the parameters for noindex from the get go."

However, my gut instinct says this isn't it and that it's more likely that someone or something is spoofing bingbot.

I'd love to hear what you guys think!

Dana

Hi Manuel,

You did exactly the right thing. Now the problem is that those pages with the parameters will stay in Google's index for sometimes a long time before they drop off. Since there's only a handful, I'd recommend using the "Remove URL" tool in Google Webmaster Tools to remove the versions of the URL with the parameters from the index. I've done this before and Google can be pretty quick at getting them removed (as little as a couple of days). You don't really have to do this. It will happen eventually, but if you want to be proactive you can take this approach. Hope that helps!

Dana

Hi Inevo,

David and Jake's comments and recommendations are spot on correct. You need to update your robots.txt file. Jake is correct when he said "just because a canonical tag is in place, that doesn't prevent Google from crawling and indexing the page."

Sincerely,

Dana

Hi again Bob,

Take a look at this thread on how to remove query strings from static parameters...I believe your answer is there.

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-remove-query-strings-from-static-resources

Dana

P.S. Why is this a problem for SEO? A couple of reasons:

1. It's highly likely your content will get shared without the query parameter AND with the query parameter. This will effectively split your link equity between two versions of the same page.

2.Google Search Console is very bad at understanding that the page without the query string is the same as it is with the query string...you'll likely get a lot of duplicate content notifications.

3. From an end-user standpoint, it's just plain ugly....and end user experience matters to SEO right? - I understand that's somewhat facetious....but it's your business right? You want it to look a good, solid, high-quality, professional site. Ugly query parameters scream "I hired my 21 year old nephew to b build me a WordPress site."