Hi Rodney,

Take a look at this article titled "Large Site SEO Basics: Faceted Navigation" by Serge Stefoglo: https://moz.com/blog/large-site-seo-basics-faceted-navigation

It covers what you want to know in great detail and discusses the various options for handling faceted navigation for SEO.

Cheers,

David

This is what I was trying to say. Thanks, Rand

Hi Monu,

It's most likely because Moz hasn't crawled your shortened URLs before - anything that Moz hasn't crawled will report as PA 1.

But don't be too concerned about PA and how long it takes Moz to crawl your links!

And don't think that going through a URL shortener is going to "boost" the link value because it's reported as a higher DA/PA link - it doesn't quite work like that

Cheers,

David

Hi Meler,

If GA is missing data on what you say are some of your top pages, it sounds like they might be missing GA tracking codes or it may be implemented incorrectly.

First thing I would do here is check that all your pages do in fact have working GA tracking.

You can use Screaming Frog to crawl your site to quickly identify pages that may be missing tracking codes.

Cheers,

David

Hi vtmoz,

Are you saying that you don't have a header/footer on these pages? No main navigation? No breadcrumbs?

To me, that sounds like a terrible user experience. What is a user supposed to do when they get to these pages? Click the back button in the browser or manually edit the URL in the address bar?

If you do have a header/footer with navigation links, then it's not a dead end page

Cheers,

David

Hi Carolyn,

Google won't automatically ignore what's after the ? and these URLs can be indexed if they are not dealt with correctly.

Usually, query string URLs will be canonicalized to the URL without the query string, which is the correct way to handle it if you don't want them to be indexed.

You'll also have to make sure that the canonical URL is not redirecting.

Your issue sounds like a common Woo Commerce issue where it adds this type of query string to every page on the site, canonicalizes back to the non-query string, but the canonical URL redirects to the query string URL - and in the end Google ignores your canonical tags because they redirect and they index your query string URLs (I hope that makes sense).

There is a setting in Woo Commerce where you can turn off 'Default Customer Location' if you don't want the query string URLs used, but you should check with someone who knows more about the site to make sure that doing so won't cause any unwanted issues.

Cheers,

David

Hi Brandon,

It looks like you've changed the original question...

The original question was to do with a drop in the number of internal links. Are you sure it's external links you are talking about?

Cheers,

David

To add to this, you will also probably never get star ratings to appear for your homepage. I've never seen star ratings appear on a homepage but would love to see any proof of it ever happening!

John Mueller said back in 2014 that "review rich snippets should only be used in cases where "the main topic of the page needs to be about a specific product or service." -- using them on your homepage in general wouldn't be like that."

Article on SE Roundtable here.

I'd think you'd have a much better chance of getting them to display in SERPs if you moved the ratings markup to relevant service pages on your site.

Cheers,

David

Hi Green_Web,

It looks like you have the same default title tag for all of your blog posts. The main pages on the site look like they have more suitable title tags.

The blog section looks like it's in WordPress and has a default title tag in place, which hopefully is not hardcoded into the post template.

If you don't have access or have the ability to edit titles, I would suggest talking to the devs and get them to use the post name in the title, but ideally, you would be able to independently modify all page titles through a plugin like Yoast.

The reason you may be seeing a more suitable title tag sometimes is that Google won't always use your specified title tag in SERPs - it can sometimes use your h1 heading (for example) if it thinks that is more relevant to the user's search query.

Cheers,

David

Hi Dreamrealemedia,

I would have absolutely no concerns about losing rankings/traffic from making the changes you've mentioned.

Optimizing image files to improve page load and improving keyword targeting in title/alt text - you can't go wrong with that.

Cheers,

David

Hi Brandon,

Sounds like you might've updated the site template and removed some sitewide links to partner sites or social profiles.

Have you made any template changes (or header/footer changes) recently?

And just FYI, more external links doesn't mean you are doing better than your competition and the drop in external links doesn't necessarily mean you've done something wrong.

Cheers,

David

If you want to leave a legitimate blog comment to engage with the author and the community, go for it!

If you're only leaving blog comments to get links to "help your SEO" - don't do it.

It's spam and it won't help you at all.

No.

Hi Alex,

I worked on a site a while ago that did something like this to get the location of users in order to serve them location-dependent product pricing.

These redirects didn't seem to hurt their organic performance at all, but the devs eventually got around to using some simple JavaScript to obtain location information, and the redirects were scrapped.

Is the site you are talking about using redirects to get location information? If so, I'd suggest speaking with the devs to come up with an alternative.

Cheers,

David

Hi Dustin,

Looks like the problem is that you have two canonical tags on your parameter pages.

eg. on lines 24 and 25 of the source code for this page https://www.stickylife.com/custom/vinyl-decals?limit=30 you'll see:

With more than one canonical tag on a page, Google will ignore both canonical tags - which is why you are getting duplicate issues.

You'll need to remove the second canonical tag to overcome your issues.

Cheers,

David

There was a great case study released by Reboot Online Marketing last week on exactly this topic: https://www.rebootonline.com/blog/hidden-text-experiment/

Basically, sites with visible text performed better; text in a textarea was treated as visible; and sites with text 'hidden' with CSS and JavaScript 'Read More' buttons didn't perform as well.

As Logan says above, Google is looking to give hidden content full weight with the release of the mobile first algorithm, but this algorithm hasn't been released yet and is likely not to be released this year: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-mobile-first-index-2017-23663.html

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

David

Hi NHARRIS1,

If you replace all of your mentions of "Moz" with "Google / search engines" your original post makes more sense.

It doesn't matter if Moz sees your links and it's a waste of your time to try and speed up Moz recognizing your new links - it will not help your organic performance in the slightest.

Also, I believe Moz has a crawl limit of 50,000 pages per site (someone from Moz can confirm / correct this) so it will only ever be scratching the surface of your 2.5m page site.

If you want to do a full crawl of your site to analyse issues, you might want to try Screaming Frog or Deep Crawl.

Cheers,

David