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Hi

I would not do it. Main Google bot is using a California IP address - so depending on the languages you are targeting you risk that the bot is only crawling one version of the site.  There are bots that use foreign IP addresses - but they don't guarantee that these bots crawl 100% of your site. Apart from that, it can be annoying for your visitors if you get it wrong. Check also this article on international SEO https://moz.com/blog/5-dos-and-donts-of-international-seo

Better to allow the user to make the choice of language on first visit and store the preference in a cookie. Set hreflang to indicate the alternative versions in other languages. Here is a tool that helps you to generate the Hreflang tags: http://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool and here you can test if the implementation was correct flang.dejanseo.com.au

Hope this helps,

Dirk

You could block the site for all bots except rogerbot (

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; rogerBot/1.0; http://www.seomoz.org/dp/rogerbot).

Alternative would be to use a local crawler like Screaming Frog (and modify the spider settings so that it ignores the robots.txt)

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Jac,

If you keep the content on your homepage quite similar to the existing homepage, you should normally be able to keep the rankings for the keywords that are currently generating traffic to your homepage. If everything goes well, Google should be able to figure out that for some keywords, other landing pages on your site are a better choice than just the home (although it's never a guarantee - just browse the q&a section and you'll find plenty of questions wondering why Google seems to prefer the home page rather than the skilfully crafted landing pages on the site)

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Benjamin,

Not sure that it's the slider which is causing your issues.

1. Your site has performance issues - especially linked to time to first byte. Check the results from http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150510_ZZ_QZY/ & https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=www.shatterbuggy.com. You might want to read this thread on how you could improve this https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-reduce-time-to-first-byte-on-my-wordpress-site You should consider to combine & minify the css & js files (you have an awful lot of them - 27 each for the homepage) and modify your caching settings (see advice pagespeed insights)

2. You have 366 HTML pages on your site - 121 pages are redirected. You should update your internal links so that the links point directly to the final destination. Example: the homepage links to http://www.shatterbuggy.com/plymouth/ - but this page doesn't exist and is redirected to http://www.shatterbuggy.com/service-areas/plymouth/. Screaming frog can help you to identify which links need to be updated.

3. 128 pages have no meta-description / 38 pages have no H1 title (example http://www.shatterbuggy.com/service-areas/cherry-creek/ipad-repair/)

4. The images you use on site are quite heavy (almost 50% is over 100KB) - some of them extremely heavy (http://www.shatterbuggy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/waiting-in-line.jpeg) - 123 have no alt text

5. Due to the large slider which always is dominating the page - you push the text out of the visible area. Your regional pages are very similar and could almost be considered duplicates. The region specific content is not visible without scrolling. Google prefers important content to be visible - not hidden at the bottom of the page.

6. You might want to check this article on local SEO: https://moz.com/blog/everybody-needs-local-seo - it contains a lot of tips & tricks on how to make your locations more visible for Google.

7. A lot of specific pages have http://www.shatterbuggy.com/repairs/ as canonical - example http://www.shatterbuggy.com/repairs/iphone-repair/gold-iphone-6-issue/ - not sure if for this specific page the /repairs/ page is the best option as canonical - you might want to point to an iphone repair page.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi Craig,

In general - the structure looks ok - just wondering how you going to manage to keep 1mio products a reasonable number of clicks from the homepage.

rgds

Dirk

Hi Craig,

Personally I would prefer folders because it's easier for reporting purposes

Cat tier 1:
http://example.com/category-one/

Cat tier 2:
http://example.com/category-one/category-two/

Cat tier 3:
http://example.com/category-one/category-two/category-three

Cat tier 4:
http://example.com/category-one/category-two/category-three/category-four/

It seems to go against the rule of a flat site structure, but in fact for that, it's more the number of links to the category that counts rather than the number of folders.
For the product url I wouldn't use all these folders. If one product belongs two multiple categories / subcategories you'll end up with duplicate urls - here I would rather go for

http://example.com/xxx/product-name-12345.htm. xxx could stand for the main category (if each product belongs to only one main category) or something generic like "products"

Some additional info can be found here: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/structured-urls/

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi Justin

As Luis indicates - the hreflang is not properly implemented - which you can also test here: http://flang.dejanseo.com.au/

As mentioned in this post - https://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool you can generate the hreflang here: http://www.internationalseomap.com/hreflang-tags-generator/

Long story just to confirm that the suggestion of Luis is correct - update the hreflang to

should do the trick. If you want to have one as default for all other languages (suppose you want to show zenory.com as default when the language is not one of the three options, you add:

See example on http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.html

Important: the tagging needs to be identical on all three sites and needs to be present on all pages (with the correct url of course).

Currently the x-default is different on all three sites which is confusing for Google.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

You can find a good checklist here: https://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos and you can find a bunch of other useful links here: https://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic - the lists are for migration of domains, but big chunks are also valid if you are just changing design/url structure.

The process described in the first list is (more or less) the one I use for site and/or design migrations.

If your current homepage is currently your principal landing page - I would try to make sure that it's doesn't change to much in terms of content & links to other sections. Also make sure that you check the performance of your homepage (it's also mentioned in the migration checklist) - I prefer to use webpagetest.org rather than pingdom.com - also check the page with Google page speed analyser.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Kim

Unfortunately that's not going to work. I removed the tracking code yesterday and guess what - I had 30 visits & 3 events measured today. These false measures are not generated on the site so blocking them in htaccess is not going to work.

Rgds

Dirk

Hi,

First about the city added to the title. Google does this on mobile so that it's easier for the searcher to see if the business is nearby. If I search for "bakery" on my PC - it shows the normal titles, if I do the same thing on my mobile, it's adding the city.

About the wrong location: to be very honest I am not really an expert in local SEO. When I check your site however, it's seems to me that you're not really making it very clear to Google that you have two locations, and what your primary location is. You mention the two addresses on your home page, one with Alberta office, the other one with B.C. (and you assume that Google will know that B.C. stands for British Columbia).

Check this article on local SEO: https://moz.com/blog/everybody-needs-local-seo - it contains a lot of tips & tricks on how to make it very obvious to Google what your location is.

Hope this gets you started & maybe that other Moz members with more "local search" experience could add some additional tips.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Sanjay,

The fact that they are still shown in Webmaster tools doesn't necessarily imply that they have not been disavowed.

To quote Google (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en (I added the Bold)

"It may take some time for Google to process the information you’ve uploaded. In particular, this information will be incorporated into our index as we recrawl the web and reprocess the pages that we see, which can take a number of weeks. These links will continue to be shown in the Webmaster Tools inbound links section."

If you added them 4 months ago they should have been processed by now so you should be ok. To be sure, you could check if the file you send was ok in terms of syntax (see the example on the same link) - if it is, you don't have to do anything.

Hope this clarifies,

Dirk

Hi,

Both redirects & leaving as 404 (or 410) are valid options.

If you are removing this entire category & corresponding products because you stop selling them - you could put a custom 404 (or 410), explaining the visitor that the products are no longer available and you could indicate the alternative products you can offer them.

According to Google (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2409439?hl=en)

"When you remove a page from your site, think about whether that content is moving somewhere else, or whether you no longer plan to have that type of content on your site.

• When moving content to a new URL, redirect the old URL to the new URL—that way when users come to the old URL looking for that content, they’ll be automatically redirected to something relevant to what they were looking for.
• _When you permanently remove content without intending to replace it with newer, related content, let the old URL return a 404 or 410. Currently Google treats 410s (Gone) the same as 404s (Not found). _

Returning a code other than 404 or 410 for a non-existent page (or redirecting users to another page, such as the homepage, instead of returning a 404) can be problematic. Such pages are called soft 404s, and can be confusing to both users and search engines."

You also might want to check this article http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-seo-advice-unavailable-e-commerce-products-186882

If you still sell the products - but you moved them to another category, or if you don't sell these products anymore, but you offer very similar products, you could consider putting a 301 to the alternative categories/products. As example you stop selling white tulips "Amsterdam" - but you still have white tulips "Utrecht" - you could redirect the first to the second. They are not identical, but an acceptable alternative for most visitors.

In your specific case - I guess that you removed the category, but that it will be coming back next year. In that case, it's maybe better to keep the pages, but only remove the links to these pages. On the products themselves, you mention something like 'pre-ordering start in Jan. 2017. Check out of fall offers" and you mark them als "out-of-stock". You then just remove the links on your site to this subcategory. (this is quite similar to e-commerce shops with specific Christmas pages - these remain online all year long, but are online made visible as of September)

The reason why Webmaster tools is sending you the message that these pages are not found is just to inform you. It could well be that these 404 are unintentional, and by informing you you can take the necessary measures. If the 404 is intentional, you don't really have to do anything.

Just make sure that you also update your internal linking - to be sure that no internal links go to the pages you removed. Screaming Frog can help you to check this.

Hope this clarifies,

Dirk

For the examples you gave I would certainly not use a 301 or use a canonical tag. The content is unique - and only a relatively small part is common (the list)

To explain the difference:

A canonical tag is used if you have pages that are identical (or almost identical) and which are accessible under different url's. A good example is an e-commerce site with a list of articles like mysite.com/umbrellas - if by sorting the products the url is changing like mysite.com/umbrellas&sort=high it's best to put a canonical so that google will not index all the variations. If you use a canonical on the second url -pointing to the first. A visitor can however still access the pages. Google bot normally respects the canonical - but is not obliged to do so.

A 301 is different - in fact you give the message to the browser: this page is no longer available on this location but has moved to a new location. It's no longer possible to visit the original page (not for humans & not for bots). Google bot has to respect this directive.

A last option you can use is the "noindex/follow". This you normally use for pages that have very little value for search engines, but where you still would like the bots to follow and index the pages which are listed. This you can use for pages of type blog.com/tag/subject - that are generating lists with all the articles marked with subject. In general pages like this are good for cross linking, however have low value for search engines so it's better to not have them indexed.

Hope this clarifies,

Dirk

Hi Craig,

Getting quite late here in Belgium (already past midnight) - will get back to you tomorrow (with a fresher mind...)

Dirk

Hi Craig,

A. The logic seems ok - but doesn't say much about the depth of the site. Questions for me are:

• can one product belong to more than one category?
• are we talking about 100 products or 10.000?

Suppose worst case

• each product belongs to only one subcategory & each subcategory belongs to one category
• you have 500 products in this subcategory
  If there is pagination - with 50 products/page the last 50 products will be >10 clicks from the homepage
  If there a 'show as one page - there would be too many links on the page so you cannot be certain that the ones at the bottom of the pages will get followed.

If a product can belong to more subcategories or categories and/or there are fewer products, it's more likely that it will be closer to the homepage.

B. No - the products would not be removed from the index. However, if there are no links to these pages, they will not be shown in the results (google wants that each part of your content should be reachable by at least 1 link). No (internal) links = no value is the way Google thinks. The more links & the fewer clicks from the homepage the more value a page gets. You should put the new navigation in place as soon as possible - ideally it should have been done at the same time.

Hope this clarifies,

Dirk

Hi Craig,

Not sure where you would put the nofollow:

• the links to the search pages on the articles need to be of type "follow" - if Google is never allowed to follow the links to the search pages it will take a lot of time before the bot discovers that all the search pages became "noindex"

• the links on the search pages themselves- here you can do what you want. As the final goal is to remove the search pages from the index - once they're not longer indexed it becomes irrelevant if the links on these pages are nofollow or not. I would keep these links of type "follow" - allowing the bots to easily access all the pages - find the links on them that go the other search pages and take them out of the index.

One thing that you should also check and that I didn't mention before - it is probably a good idea to crawl your site now with Screaming Frog and check the depth of the site (%of articles at 1/2/3... clicks from the homepage). It could be possible that if you remove the "search" pages a larger part of your content moves deeper in the site - this could have a potential negative impact on the ranking of these articles. If this is the case - you could decide

• to keep some of the search pages (but noindex/follow)
• to increase cross linking between normal articles
• to add some new index pages (again noindex/follow)

(or a mix of these)

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

For these type of questions - I fear you will only get very generic answers.

Good starting points would be to study:

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

https://moz.com/blog/how-to-rank

& implement what is listed there.

Other useful resources are listed here: https://moz.com/academy

In general, put yourself in the mind of your target audience:

• what are they looking for
• what is the information they need
• how can your content / product help them in fulfilling that need

Check the competition: who are your competitors - what are they doing? How can you improve what they are doing?

If you encounter specific questions or issues you can post them here - the more specific the question is the better the answer (in general)

Good luck,
Dirk

Analia,

It seems to be a new kind of analytics spam - just checked an analytics account for a site which is under construction (only one page -  no real visitors & no events set-up).
I saw the same event appearing in my stats. Others see the same thing as well: http://www.redcardinal.ie/general/07-05-2015/just-when-you-thought-ga-referrer-spam-was-bad/

Not sure how these clean these events from the reporting.

rgds

Dirk

Edit: also 2 mentions in Google Analytics forum: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/analytics/to$20use$20this$20feature$20visit$3A$20EVENT-TRACKING.COM

Hi Sam,

To clarify - for me the correct spelling is the spelling using the accents. For the foreign characters I meant to encode them. In the example above: not use référencement in the HTML but rather référencement

rgds

Dirk

As Linda mentioned, adding a canonical url to the version without parameter is the best solution as it gives you control on which pages should be in the index.

For the sake of completeness - in webmaster tools you also have the option to tell the Google bot how it should deal with parameters (under Crawl > URL parameters). Note however that Google itself doesn't really recommend using this option.

rgds

Dirk

Just to add to the answer of Luis - in most cases Google is quite capable of guessing the intention of the searcher.

Even in countries that traditionally have a lot of accents, a lot of people are searching for the words without the accents. This is probably partially due to the fact that on mobile it's not always easy to get the accents right, but also due to laziness (it's generally faster to just type the word without the accents).

If you search on google.fr for référencement (correct spelling) or referencement - the results are identical. All the results however use the correct spelling in the meta description & title.(if you check Google trends for this keyword you'll notice that the wrong spelling is even slightly more popular than the correct version) 
If you take the example given in the question Luis is referencing - the results for Google.es for cursos de inglés & cursos de ingles are now identical as well

So my advice would be to use the correct spelling on your page - Google should normally be able to figure it out. 
Just make sure that you escape the foreign characters in your HTML.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Martin,

This should not have an impact. Google is focussed on providing the best user experience, providing relevant content to its visitors, adapted to the device they are using & served in an efficient way (performance). How you organise your technical architecture behind it should have no importance. You would certainly not be the first to have a website running on different servers for different parts of the site. Typical example is a shop using Magento or some other e-commerce application on 1 host, and a blog on Wordpress on another host.

That said - there are still some points you need to take into consideration:

1. Server location - while probably not as important as it's used to - it's probably better to keep the location closer to your main audience (mainly because it can have an impact on performance. Quote from http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.es/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html on location as ranking factor

Server location (through the IP address of the server) is frequently near your users. However, some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so we try not to rely on the server location alone.

If both servers are in the same location it should not be a problem.

2. You might consider to shift the subdomain to a directory as Google seem to prefer all content on one subdomain. You might want to check this WBF on subdomains vs directories: https://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday

Even when using a directory - it is still possible to use two different servers.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Joost

You might want to open a new question (on how to filter) - this question is too deep down the list & marked as answered so I fear nobody is going to see your additional question.

rgds,

Dirk

The code seems correct - so normally data should be identical.

Some things you could check:

1. Are you sure you are comparing the same timeframes & that the time frame you selected starts at earliest the day after you implemented the tracking code.

2. Install the Chrome Analytics extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/page-analytics-by-google/fnbdnhhicmebfgdgglcdacdapkcihcoh?hl=en)

Take some sample pages & see if the both codes are tracking the pageviews.

3. Check the setup of both accounts - make sure that filters etc are identical for both accounts.

4. Use screaming frog to check if both codes are present on all pages. You find a step-by-step how to do that here

5. Check if the codes are present on all domains (if the codes are used on multiple domains)

6. Download for both accounts the top 1000 most popular pages - put them in xls & check which one are missing - this could help you identify the pages that cause troubles.

If by following these steps you don't find the source of the differences, I fear I can't help you further;

Good luck,

Dirk

I don't think there is an easy route here - you will have to get rid of these indexed search pages in any case. Keeping this low quality pages will continue to hurt your site.

If you currently don't have the resources to do the 'ideal' scenario - I would go for the short pain: cut out these pages now, it will probably cost you traffic on the short term, but at least you have a clean base to build upon. Keeping the pages is probably better on the short term, but the longer you keep them, the more your site's reputation is going to be affected and put's you in danger for future algorithm updates.

Just my opinion

Dirk

Hi,

Agree with Patrick. Some additional info & resources:

It's better to avoid 'soft 404's' - in fact Google prefers "real" 404 pages (which are are an ok strategy in case of a large number of out of stock products).
You could check this article with the different options according to Matt Cutts (http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2334932/ecommerce-seo-tips-for-unavailable-products-from-googles-matt-cutts

• Small site: show alternative products instead of 404
• Medium site: 404 is ok - best to have custom version
• Large site: consider using 'unavailable after' tag

Are soft 404's going to hurt your site: check this answer from Cyrus Shepard on a similar question (http://moz.com/community/q/soft-404s-for-unpublished-301-d-content#reply_291233

"How much will it hurt you? Probably not much, but it's hard to say.

Let's ask these questions:

• How much traffic goes to these pages? If not much, is it okay to 404 them?
• Are there more relevant pages you could redirect these to? (ideally, something with a similar title as the original page?)
• Have you seen much traffic loss overall? If not, it's likely this isn't hurting you."

Hope this helps

Dirk

I agree with Patrick on the legal aspects.

If you want to do geolocation it still better to have a separate url. Check this link: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6144055?hl=en  - the red box on the page indicates clearly:

"IMPORTANT: We continue to support and recommend using separate locale URL configurations and annotating them with rel=alternate hreflang annotations."

It continues with: "If your website has pages that return different content based on the perceived country or preferred language of the visitor (i.e., you have locale-adaptive pages), Google might not crawl, index, or rank all of your locale-adaptive content. This is because the default IP addresses of the Googlebot crawler appear to be based in the USA. In addition, the crawler sends HTTP requests without setting Accept-Language in the request header."

While the article also states that Google bot can also use foreign IP adresses, so it would be capable to detect the non-us version of the content, based on the remarks above it doesn't guarantee that the full site will be indexed.

To be honest, I don't think this is a risk your client is willing to take (unless non-us sales are not important)

The hreflang would be useless in this case - as you don't have an alternate url in this scenario.

My advice would be to use geolocation but to redirect non us visitors to an international url (like the alternative you mentioned). You could block access to this site for US visitors but then you create the same dependency of the non-US based Googlebots - which doesn't seem to be advisable). In this scenario you do have the risk that the suppliers would find out that an international version exist.

You might want to check this question as well (http://moz.com/community/q/personalization-software-and-seo)- the geo location in this case was on region/citylevel which is impossible to do.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

The answers above remain valid - check this video of Matt Cutts: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-one-page-two-links-page-counted-first-link-192718 - interesting part is at 0:15 - summarising - having multiple links to the same page should be the least of your worries - probably you have more important SEO issues to tackle.

rgds,

Dirk

Why would you put a nofollow on the link to the homepage? Advice is not to use nofollow on internal links -

sources: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2298312/matt-cutts-you-dont-have-to-nofollow-internal-links and https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en

To quote the last link:

Here are some cases in which you might want to consider using nofollow:

• Untrusted content: If you can't or don't want to vouch for the content of pages you link to from your site — for example, untrusted user comments or guestbook entries — you should nofollow those links. This can discourage spammers from targeting your site, and will help keep your site from inadvertently passing PageRank to bad neighborhoods on the web. In particular, comment spammers may decide not to target a specific content management system or blog service if they can see that untrusted links in that service are nofollowed. If you want to recognize and reward trustworthy contributors, you could decide to automatically or manually remove the nofollowattribute on links posted by members or users who have consistently made high-quality contributions over time.
• Paid links: A site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. In order to prevent paid links from influencing search results and negatively impacting users, we urge webmasters usenofollow on such links. Search engine guidelines require machine-readable disclosure of paid links in the same way that consumers online and offline appreciate disclosure of paid relationships (for example, a full-page newspaper ad may be headed by the word "Advertisement"). More information on Google's stance on paid links.
• Crawl prioritization: Search engine robots can't sign in or register as a member on your forum, so there's no reason to invite Googlebot to follow "register here" or "sign in" links. Using nofollow on these links enables Googlebot to crawl other pages you'd prefer to see in Google's index. However, a solid information architecture — intuitive navigation, user- and search-engine-friendly URLs, and so on — is likely to be a far more productive use of resources than focusing on crawl prioritization via nofollowed links.

=> paid liks & untrusted content are not really applicable for internal links - crawl prioritization hardly applies either.

Hope this clarifies

Dirk

Hi John;

Internal links should indeed be changed to the url's you keep.
On the duplicates - it's best to put a noindex,follow - that way the value from the external links to the page is still beneficial for your site (if this article is still valid http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts.shtml)

To be honest - for duplicate pages that have incoming external links - I would rather 301 them to the original article (or put a canonical to the original). I

rgds

Dirk

Great! (you can ignore my last answer below - I wrote it before I noticed that you solved it already)

Dirk

Hi Justin,

The redirect should not be:

zenory.co.nz/blog/phone-psychic-reading 301/ to zenory.com/phone-psychic-readings

but

/blog/phone-psychic-reading 301/ to /phone-psychic-readings

If you add the domains it will only be correct for 1 domain & wrong for the 2 others.

Not sure if the plugin can handle this - but it's worth trying.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Justin,

Correct me if I am wrong - but I guess you use the same backoffice for the three sites. So if you redirect the page to an absolute url on the .com domain all these pages will be redirected to the .com domain.

I am not really familiar with the Yoast plugin - but could you try to put the redirect url in relative - replace https://www.zenory.com/pet-psychic-readings by /pet-psychic-readings & check if this works?

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Justin,

Think I found the page you mentioned:

If you want to redirect zenory.co.nz/blog/phone-psychic-readings/ to zenory.co.nz/phone-psychic-readings-at-zenory

your redirect rule should look something like this (both old & new page should be relative or absolute, I guess in your case the old is put as relative while the new is an absolute url on the .com domain)

Redirect 301 /blog/phone-psychic-readings/ /phone-psychic-readings-at-zenory

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Justin,

Could you post an example of the redirect rule you use

Regarding your internal links pointing to the other sites - a possible solution could be to use relative rather than absolute links. This way you will always stay on the same domain. The disadvantage with relative links is that it's quite easy to create eternal loops if you make a mistake in the code somewhere. If you crawl your site regularly with Screaming Frog however you should be able to detect these errors quite fast.

Dirk

Hi,

There is an alternative solution but it would require more work on your side.

The problem with your current situation is that you create thousands of low value pages with little added value (which Google doesn't really like: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-results-in-search-results/) and then you heavily promote these low quality pages by point hundreds of links to them. Principal message to Google - these low quality pages are my most important ones.

What you could do is to check the search pages which are generating traffic (ex. take the top 100) and create "real" pages for them. If we take the example you give: http://oursite.com/Search.html?text=Kitten - rather than having a generic search page with little added value you create a real page with some added value content (yoursite.com/topics/kitten) with links to your most important pages on the subject. As an example of how such a page could look like: http://dogtime.com/dog-breeds/german-shepherd-dog - this page is like a kind of "home" - containing a definition + links to the most important related articles on the subject. If these kinds of pages already exist on your site then of course no need to create them.

On the related search pages  you then put  a canonical url pointing to this page. You also update the links to the search page to the "real" added value page. This way you start promoting new value added content with minimal risk of loosing your current positions & remove the old low value pages from the index. It can take some time however before you see a positive effect.

For the search request where it's not possible to create a version with add value - you point the canonical to the generic search page (or your homepage) and remove all the links to these pages.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi,

I would first put a noindex on all your search result pages and leave the tags on the pages to allow Google to crawl them & "read" the new instructions.

I would also try to block these result pages in the robots.txt - it accepts pattern-matching ( https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062596?hl=en&ref_topic=6061961) - if you try this make sure that you test it properly to avoid unwanted side effects.

You could also try the url removal tool - it's quite easy to delete an entire directory with the tool (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419?hl=en) - you must make sure however that the pages cannot be crawled again (so do it after the modification of the robots.txt). If your search is on the root of your site and not in a separate directory, not sure if it's going to work.

Just removing the links to these pages without other modification is not going to help - they will just remain in the index.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi Joost,

Unfortunately we don't use Wordpress in our company - I know the basics of the Yoast plugin but I am not really an expert in how to configure it. Maybe somebody else on Moz can help you on how to configure it. My guess would be to fill in the full url - you could always try & see if this works.

There are quite a lot of users on the forum who use Yoast - so I guess they should be able to help you with the configuration.

rgds,

Dirk

Probably the easiest way to deal with this is to chose one of these pages as the main page & use canonicals on the other versions to the main one.

So - suppose you would chose _/?show_products=all _as the main page - than page /?show_products=48 would have /?show_products=all as canonical.
As you also use pagination - the option of the canonical offers the advantage that you can put the /?show_products_all as canonical url on all the pages  (check also this page: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en)

Another option would be to put a nofollow on the other display options. So by default people would arrive on /?show_products=24 - the links on show 48 - all would be of type "nofollow'

You might want to check this article: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2014/02/faceted-navigation-best-and-5-of-worst.html - the scope of the article is a bit larger than the question you as here but some of the points are applicable.

Hope this helps;

Dirk

Hi

1 if you choose scenario 1 you will still have the duplicated content. This could be solved by adding a canonical url on the duplicates pointing to the original version.

2 if you want to remove the duplicates it is best to do a 301 to the original version, not to your homepage

3 scenario 3 is valid if you are sure that you have no external links pointing to the duplicates.

with the modifications above all 3 scenarios will be a valid approach

regards

Dirk

If you want to speed up the process a bit you could do a fetch as Google for both urls and submit them to the index. This should normally updated the cached versions as well.

rgds

Dirk

Hi Oliver,

It seems that there is something wrong with the way you have implemented the hreflang.

If I test the hreflang with http://flang.dejanseo.com.au/ it indicates a problem with the AU version.

I would try to generate the tags with this tools http://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool and test again. You could also read this article about common mistakes: http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Forgot to mention: don't forget to change it on all three sites.

The new site looks really nice compared to the old one - and speed seems to have improved. However still some work to do:

• time to first byte takes ages - could be related to the configuration of the server or related to some plugin causing delay.
• ask your programmer to use gzip to compress HTML
• minify your css & js
• optimise your images
• modify your caching (time is too short)

The detailed result from webpage test is here: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150503_A2_BZ7/

Also check https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ - your score is not too bad but check the improvements that are suggest.

Good luck!

Dirk

Hi Justin,

Normally everything should return to normal after a few days. You could try to speed up the process a bit by taking your key landing pages from Analytics. Fetch these pages in Webmaster tools (Fetch like Google) - when they are fetched submit them to the index (off course you first have to remove the noindex tag).

It's a quite common mistake - we had a similar case with a test robots.txt which was put in production. I was on holiday at the time and only noticed the error when I returned (3 days after go live). Everything returned to normal within a day.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Justin

I fear that you have migrated your test settings to production - you have 196 HTML pages on your site - 115 pages have a content='noindex, follow' name='robots'> in the head section  - this is also the case for your homepage and several other pages that seem important for SEO. Removing the tag will certainly help

Dirk

Hi

If you seriously want to start building links I would advice you to start learn the basics. No pain - no gain. Nobody is just going to link you because you need some links.

Interesting resources from Moz include:

The beginners guide: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

All the resources that are referenced on this page: http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building

Adding 2 links to your site on this blog won't help you - all the links in the Moz Q&A are nofollow. You might want to check the configuration of your site - when I click on the link is get the message: "Resource limit reached". When I was able to visit - the site looked like a spam site with very low quality content - if you don't improve the quality of the site nobody with sense is going to link to you.

Dirk

Oliver,

Would it be possible to give the actual url - without this info it's very difficult to guess what could be causing the problem.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

You might want to check the performance of your pages. As an example I tested your homepage with webpagetest.org (result here: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150502_9K_HMR/1/details/ ) - it's weight is a whopping 8.375KB & it 47sec to download... - so certainly room for improvement. I would reduce the number of images & compress them. Also check if you really need to load these audiofiles - most users find audio quite annoying & it making your page a lot heavier.

Second thing you might look at is your linkprofile - checking Open Site Explorer shower quite a high number of links coming from linkdirectories. I Sampled a few of them and these were quite low quality.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Dan,

I do agree with you that design is a ranking factor - but it can only be indirect. Google is unable to judge if the quality of the design is good or bad. The only way it can judge this is by analysing the behaviour of the visitors on the site. Nechemia did indicate however that after migration user engagement improved rather than decreased.

Dirk

Adam,

Did the same check with Firefox (with a Mobile user agent) & still get the desktop version. Don't think the problem is with the redirect but with the detection.

I guess if you search for User Agent sniffer Wordpress you should be able to find some tools. Afraid I can't help you with that (this is the point where I handle it over to the technical department myself...)

Dirk