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Thanks for the detailed answer Jonathan. What you suggested was definitely in line with my thinking - indexing just the single topics at most and trying to either noindex or canonicalize all the thousands of possible variations. I definitely agree that all those random combinations of topics/objects hold no real value and at best will eat up crawl budget unnecessarily.

I can make sure Google treats these parameters as URLs via Search Console, they're unique to this piece of content; and I think I can noindex all the random combinations of filters (hopefully).

I'm still waiting to hear more from the dev team but I have a feeling that I won't be able to change the format to subdirectories instead of differentiating everything with query parameters - not the ideal situation but I'll have to make do.

Anyways, thanks again for your thoughtful reply!

Josh

Hello,

We're putting together a large piece of content that will have some interactive filtering elements. There are two types of filters, topics and object types.

The architecture under the hood constrains us so that everything needs to be in URL parameters. If someone selects a single filter, this can look pretty clean:

www.domain.com/project?topic=firstTopic
or
www.domain.com/project?object=typeOne

The problems arise when people select multiple topics, potentially across two different filter types:

www.domain.com/project?topic=firstTopic-secondTopic-thirdTopic&object=typeOne-typeTwo

I've raised concerns around the structure in general, but it seems to be too late at this point so now I'm scratching my head thinking of how best to get these indexed. I have two main concerns:

1. A ton of near-duplicate content and hundreds of URLs being created and indexed with various filter combinations added
2. Over-reacting to the first point above and over-canonicalizing/no-indexing combination pages to the detriment of the content as a whole

Would the best approach be to index each single topic filter individually, and canonicalize any combinations to the 'view all' page? I don't have much experience with e-commerce SEO (which this problem seems to have the most in common with) so any advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Hi Andy,

The "right" layout is going to be pretty specific to your business - a marine conservation nonprofit is going to have a much different homepage than an online sunglasses store (for example). In terms of the technical SEO elements, 99.9% of Wordpress sites will have them already: title/meta tags, H1/2/3s, proper use of markup, etc. - the 'optimization' part usually comes from updating/revising these, not adding them from scratch. I know the Yoast SEO plugin is a pretty popular WP plugin that gets recommended a lot, that will give you more granular control over some the the elements listed above. You'll definitely want to put some thought into your site structure/architecture as well as that will affect both crawling and your internal linking structure.

A little more detail about the field you're in will help narrow in on some good examples. Good luck!

Josh

Due to CMS constraints, there may be some nodes in our site tree that are inaccessible and will automatically redirect to their parent folder.

Here's an example: www.site.com/folder1/folder2/content, /folder2 redirects to /folder1. This would only be for the single URL itself, not the subpages (i.e. /folder1/folder2/content and anything below that would be accessible).

Is there any real risk in this approach from a technical SEO perspective? I'm thinking this is likely a non-issue but I'm hoping someone with more experience can confirm.

Another potential option is to have /folder2 accessible (it would be 100% identical to /folder1, long story) and use a canonical tag to point back to /folder1. I'm still waiting to hear if this is possible.

Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone,

We're in the process of finding someone who will be able to help set up Google Custom Search on our site and are having some trouble - most agencies we were hoping could help solely focus on Google Search Appliance, a hardware-specific approach that doesn't suit our needs. Specifically, we'd like to replace our current site search engine with Google Custom search, as well as configure it as deeply as possible for the best search experience

I'm hoping people could give me some ideas on who might be able to help, or the best places to look.

Thanks in advance!

Thanks guys, those are really useful - just what I was looking for. Appreciate the help!

I work for a bilingual organization and we've recently started more hands-on training for staff and content creators for SEO and content creation. We've put together a good guide in English but I'm hoping we can provide the French speakers with some solid French SEO articles that can help fill in the gaps that we don't get translated. We're looking for a basic guide to SEO, similar to Moz's guide to on-page SEO (in content, doesn't need to be as fancy).

Thanks in advance!

Sounds like you're on .NET (or something case-sensitive). The best way to deal with this in my opinion is at the server level, by only allowing lowercase URLs. This is how you would implement this in .NET:

  <match url="[A-Z]" ignorecase="false"></match>

<action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}" appendquerystring="true"></action>

Canonical tags are technically an option, but you will have to manually add them each and every time this issue occurs (and stay on top of it as an ongoing action item). It's almost always preferable to have each page accessible from a single URL if at all possible. Automatically adding self-referencing canonicals would probably just exacerbate the problem since they uppercase pages would still be pointing to the uppercase pages, lowercase to lowercase, etc.

I would strongly suggest defaulting to lowercase over uppercase URLs to stay consistent with other sites on the internet (also, most linking sites will assume lowercase when linking to your site).

The good news is this a fairly common, fixable problem

If your site is in fact using .NET, this article is a good starting point (#2 is where I got the above code snippet from).

I think this one will probably boil down to personal preference as much as anything, but I would go with the first option for two reasons:

1. It will more likely reflect your navigation, and will be more consistent with what your users are seeing on other sites (hopefully making your site slightly more intuitive to navigate).
2. From a UX point of view, there may be certain visitors whose mental schemas don't really think of sub-disciplines (SEO, PPC, etc.) as digital marketing, and instead think of them as stand-alone services. If you bucket everything under digital marketing, you risk confusing these people.

Curious to hear others' thoughts, as I don't really think there's a "wrong" choice. I wouldn't worry too much about having the keyword in the URL, that concern should be a distant second to usability and UX considerations IMHO.

It will fully depend on the purpose of each page. In the example case you mentioned, that will be the best solution, but canonical tags =/= noindex tags. I would only suggest using canonical tags if there's a large amount of similar content between pages.

For noindex, I generally don't use them unless I specifically don't want a certain page to be indexed (highly-targeted PPC landing pages are a good example) - you usually don't want to deindex pages without a reason/goal.

If there's lots of duplicate content issues on your site, here are two possible options for cleaning them up, from most ideal to least:

1. Identify duplicate pages and revise the content itself so that it's sufficiently unique. Remove all noindex and canonical tags unless they were already in place for another reason.
2. Use canonical tags to consolidate two or more pages. This will essentially act as a 301 redirect while still allowing users to view the canonicalized pages if they come across them. Your 'best' page of the group shouldn't have any canonical tag on it. This approach should only be used for duplicate content-related issues, not as a substitute for proper redirects if that's what the situation calls for.

Either way, I would remove the noindex tags from your pages unless they were specifically put there for a reason. If you've noticed a bunch, make sure there isn't a toggle or checkbox in you CMS' admin panel that is adding it by default to new pages.

Good luck!

Have you uploaded any photos to your Google+ Business page? That would be the primary source they'd pull from. Also, you could be seeing different keywords trigger different SERP types. If you get a photo carousel at the top of the SERP, then Google maps doesn't contain pictures.

More info on how they pull the pictures (specifically for the carousel): https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/business/need-advice/Ba5X59aWwQI

It will fully depend on the purpose of each page. In the example case you mentioned, that will be the best solution, but canonical tags =/= noindex tags. I would only suggest using canonical tags if there's a large amount of similar content between pages.

For noindex, I generally don't use them unless I specifically don't want a certain page to be indexed (highly-targeted PPC landing pages are a good example) - you usually don't want to deindex pages without a reason/goal.

If there's lots of duplicate content issues on your site, here are two possible options for cleaning them up, from most ideal to least:

1. Identify duplicate pages and revise the content itself so that it's sufficiently unique. Remove all noindex and canonical tags unless they were already in place for another reason.
2. Use canonical tags to consolidate two or more pages. This will essentially act as a 301 redirect while still allowing users to view the canonicalized pages if they come across them. Your 'best' page of the group shouldn't have any canonical tag on it. This approach should only be used for duplicate content-related issues, not as a substitute for proper redirects if that's what the situation calls for.

Either way, I would remove the noindex tags from your pages unless they were specifically put there for a reason. If you've noticed a bunch, make sure there isn't a toggle or checkbox in you CMS' admin panel that is adding it by default to new pages.

Good luck!

Hi everyone,

We're in the process of finding someone who will be able to help set up Google Custom Search on our site and are having some trouble - most agencies we were hoping could help solely focus on Google Search Appliance, a hardware-specific approach that doesn't suit our needs. Specifically, we'd like to replace our current site search engine with Google Custom search, as well as configure it as deeply as possible for the best search experience

I'm hoping people could give me some ideas on who might be able to help, or the best places to look.

Thanks in advance!

Hi Andy,

The "right" layout is going to be pretty specific to your business - a marine conservation nonprofit is going to have a much different homepage than an online sunglasses store (for example). In terms of the technical SEO elements, 99.9% of Wordpress sites will have them already: title/meta tags, H1/2/3s, proper use of markup, etc. - the 'optimization' part usually comes from updating/revising these, not adding them from scratch. I know the Yoast SEO plugin is a pretty popular WP plugin that gets recommended a lot, that will give you more granular control over some the the elements listed above. You'll definitely want to put some thought into your site structure/architecture as well as that will affect both crawling and your internal linking structure.

A little more detail about the field you're in will help narrow in on some good examples. Good luck!

Josh

I'm not sure if I understand the question, but the reason the Graves Amendment page isn't being indexed isn't due to duplicate content, it's because of the meta noindex tag on there:

Removing that from the page should get it indexed. If the pages have very similar copy, with slight nuances, I would use a canonical tag to consolidate all of the equity into the 'primary' page to help avoid any duplicate content issues. Hope that helps!

I work for a bilingual organization and we've recently started more hands-on training for staff and content creators for SEO and content creation. We've put together a good guide in English but I'm hoping we can provide the French speakers with some solid French SEO articles that can help fill in the gaps that we don't get translated. We're looking for a basic guide to SEO, similar to Moz's guide to on-page SEO (in content, doesn't need to be as fancy).

Thanks in advance!

Sounds like you're on .NET (or something case-sensitive). The best way to deal with this in my opinion is at the server level, by only allowing lowercase URLs. This is how you would implement this in .NET:

  <match url="[A-Z]" ignorecase="false"></match>

<action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}" appendquerystring="true"></action>

Canonical tags are technically an option, but you will have to manually add them each and every time this issue occurs (and stay on top of it as an ongoing action item). It's almost always preferable to have each page accessible from a single URL if at all possible. Automatically adding self-referencing canonicals would probably just exacerbate the problem since they uppercase pages would still be pointing to the uppercase pages, lowercase to lowercase, etc.

I would strongly suggest defaulting to lowercase over uppercase URLs to stay consistent with other sites on the internet (also, most linking sites will assume lowercase when linking to your site).

The good news is this a fairly common, fixable problem

If your site is in fact using .NET, this article is a good starting point (#2 is where I got the above code snippet from).

You should be relatively safe from duplicate content issues at the moment, however you're leaving some 'link juice' on the table since whatever equity is in the noindexed page is remaining with it.

If you want to consolidate the pages from a search engine point of view, but still have them both accessible on your site, then you should remove the noindex from the page and add a canonical tag on the less-important page (pointing to the other page). The more important page won't need any additional tags.

The page with the canonical tag won't be accessible from search engines if you do this, so another route is to develop the content on each page a bit more so that they're more dissimilar; you wouldn't need any tags in this case.

Thanks guys, those are really useful - just what I was looking for. Appreciate the help!

Two I've used/explored in the past have been Brafton and Contently. Brafton's good at handling volume, and reasonably priced, but you'll have a harder time getting 'premium' content (still not bad though, just not journalist quality). Contently matches you with already-vetted journalists and writers and have their own proprietary software to help with the entire content creation and review process. There's a base monthly fee though, which may be an issue for some.

You could always take a shot on freelancer.com as well, but that will be a mixed bag.

Good luck!