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Hi all!

For a healthcare website we have setup AMP. Google Search Console suggests to use article markup for several pages and I am not sure if this is correct.

There are two kind of pages:
1. News pages
2. Information pages, for example: symptoms alcohol addiction  or Binge Eating Disorder

There's no doubt the article markup will be correct for the news pages but I am not sure about the information pages. Do you guys suggest to implement article markup on these pages as well or only use this for real news/blog posts?

Hope you can help me out.

Thank you in advance and happy holidays!

Regards,

Anouk van de Velde

Thank you Anthony

Hi Mozzers,

We have a website that has both http as well as https indexed. I proposed the solution of implementing a canonical link tag on all pages (including the login/secure ones).

Any disadvantages I could expect?

Thanks!

Hi Fabrizo,

How long would it take for a PHP programmer to write this code approximately? Since we would have to outsource this I would like an indication to oversee costs involved.

Thanks!

Another way we found helpful is:

1. adding the meta robots=noindex tag to these pages

2. submitting those URLs + sitemap.xml in Google Webmaster Tools

Hope this helps

From now on we want to store all our sitemap.xml over the next years. Its a nice archive to have that allows us to analyse how many pages we have on our website and which ones were removed/redirected.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

Thanks again. I hope Google will come out with some real guidelines on this subject. It  saves us time arguing with third parties.

For now I will get the canonicals fixed.

Allright, maybe a good question for the Google Webmaster Help Forum right?

Hi Andy,

I agree, it does not seem like a logical solution. Do you know of any documentation on this, maybe even from Google? I would like to give some guidelines to my web developer based on a source.

My web developer has pointed the "good" URLs that I use in my internal link structure (top-nav/footer) to another duplicate version of my pages. Now the URLs that receive all the canonical link value are not the ones I use on my website. is this a problem and why???

In theory the implementation is good because both have equal content. But does it harm my link equity if it directs to a URL which is not included in my internal link architecture.

Hi Konstantin,

A rel=canonical in the head section of a html page will not redirect users to another site. The canonical link tag tells google (or other search engines) where the 'original' version of a page can be found and what the preferrred url is. This canonical version is most likely to show up in search engines (although search engines do not always follow the rel=canonical).

If you want users to end up at site2.com/page1 when they type site1.com/page1 in their browser, you need to use a 301 redirect.

Kind regards,

Sven Witteveen
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Yes it can. Whether or not this will in fact hurt your SEO position depends on the backlinks these websites are receiving.

All the links that point to your domains pass linkjuice. This linkjuice is sent to you primary domain because of the redirects. This means that you will lose all backlinks currently pointing at these domains. My advice is to try and figure out how many links we are talking about, and how much link juice they pass to your current site. You could use opensiteexplorer.org or your webmaster tools for that.

However, If you really don´t mind the cost of keeping the domains at all, i´d say just keep it like it is.

Good luck!

Sven Witteveen
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I did a quick check on both pages:

http://www.deporvillage.com/ciclismo/zapatillas-shimano
and
http://www.deporvillage.com/shimano

Both get an A for on-page optimization for the word: shimano. Also on the page /shimano there are 41 instances of the word ciclismo. You might want to avoid this word on the general /shimano page if you have a separate landing page for 'zapatillas ciclismo shimano'.

However, generally speaking there isn't much to worry about if you do not in fact rank with both pages for one keyword.

Sven Witteveen
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If for example a page title contains a ë the .csv created by the SEOmoz Crawl Test is already split into columns on that point, even though I haven't used Excel's text to columns yet.

When I try to do the latter, Excel warns me that I'm overwriting non-empty cells, which of course is something I would rather not do since that would make me lose valuable data.

My question is: is this something caused by opening the .csv in Excel, or earlier in the process when this .csv is created?

Hi!

Google will only spend 'so much time' on any new domain. The more traffic and links and page authority you get, the more time Google will dedicate to crawling your website. You should also make sure that the site is not slow, as this will reduce the crawling speed even more! See Google page speed for tips on speeding up the load time of your site

Good Luck,

Sven Witteveen
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Google Page Speed provides very helpfull information on what factors are import for your site. It determines what is slowing your pages down, and what you can do to fix it. It also distinguishes between various degrees of importance. You can check out the speed test at: https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/.

Good luck!

Hi,

I would definately go for merging both of them together. Allthough WMT recently  significantly increased the number of backlinks shown, any extra information you can gather is great. I guess together they provide a pretty good overview of your backlink profile.

Btw, it's ofcourse very interesting how many of the links reported in WMT and OSE overlap, and how many are unique for each one. So if you're going for option 3, please share some of the results with us!

Greets,

Sven Witteveen
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Although users might not go to the sitemap very often, it is usually a very easy way to make sure some linkjuice is passed to all pages. Especially if the sitemap is linked to from a lot of pages, it usually has quite some juice to pass on. However, the sitemap should never be the only way you link to deeper pages.

Thanks Ryan, that's really helpful. Regarding #3: could you still make the anchor text link appear below the image for users, but have it come first in the source code for search engines? Any suggestion for how that would look like in terms of code?

Could you also do this with a block of text that appears at the bottom of the page, but is placed on top in the code? As having static text on the category page is important for SEO, but you might want to have users seeing the products before the text.

Hi Justin,

I think you raise a very good point. It is known that nofollow links 'leak' linkjuice, because the linkjuice is not passed through the link, but it isn't distributed to other links on the same page either. The juice that would have been passed through a follow link simply vanishes when you add a nofollow tag.

As you said it is also suggested that Google does not count multiple instances of one link on one page. So the question that remains is: Are the second, third etc. instances of links treated as nofollow links (leaking linkjuice), or are they simply ignored (not leaking linkjuice)?

If they are treated as nofollow links and leak linkjuice anyway, you might as well add a nofollow-tag and make sure you don't get penalized for them either. On the other hand, if they are normally simply ignored by Google, but start leaking linkjuice with a nofollow tag, you might be doing some serious damage to your site.

Quite frankly, I don't know which is the case. However, my gut feeling says that the pagerank sculpting days are over so the above reasoning might not be the way to think about this.

I would simply try not to 'overdo' anything to much. Don't have pages with 200+ links all linking to perfectly optimised pages with perfectly optimised anchors. I suspect that internal linking is not the driving factor behind Penguin penalties anyway, but backlinks are.

Looking forward to see what other people think!

Greets,

Sven Witteveen
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