As MrLeeB said, users may not be able to find what they're looking for and there would likely be some unnecessary wasting of "crawl budget", which could have an negative impact on indexation and rankings.

As Mike R. said, it would probably be terrible for the user-experience, and thus rankings and conversion rates, if you had too many categories.

For many years eCommerce businesses have built out category pages based on internal-searches performed by visitors, as well as the keywords they used to find the site on search engines. When used sparingly, this strategy can help inform the category structure of the site while offering a landing page for high-value keywords.

It can help copywriters understand which pain points and questions are trying to be solved, thus which should be called-out as benefits of the products within the category. It can even inform which products you source or develop to sell.

When abused, like when software, website code or database logic automates the process of creating these pages, the results can be devastating to the business.

After a few months of long-tail growth, the site may experience a major ranking loss across the entire domain for all but clearly branded and hyper-long-tail searches. If you are in the game of burn-n-churn, it might work for you provided you pay for some seed-traffic to build out the keyword lists.

...just in case you were thinking down that path.

Thanks Rhonda! It sounds like this thread will benefit many people then.

As long as you're using the same Schema in both places I don't think it would hurt to have them both - JSON-LD in the HTML header and as structured data markup in the HTML where that entity exists on the page.

You can play around with JSON-LD here to see what it would look like:
http://json-ld.org/playground/

Two servers? The existing one to process the redirects and a new one to handle the reverse proxy. Or vice versa. So the DNS for the old domain would point to a server that does the redirects. However, the server that hosts the site will be set to reverse proxy.

Another way of looking at this concept would be to take down and redirect the old site, and to start a new site, with the exact same files/database, that will be used to serve the content in the subdirectory/folder.

Ask what they think of that idea. I certainly don't have all the answers to every situations, but will do my best to help you find a workable solution.

Great answer Chris!

Manas,

It sounds to me like Google does not consider your brand to be an "entity" worth ranking for it's own brand name. This is why you're getting the "Did You mean?" link or "Search instead for..." in search results for your brand. The stronger your brand becomes - in Google's eye's - the less likely it is that people will see "Did You mean?" for the search.

Of course, without actually knowing the terms, it's difficult to say. If your brand name is "Helocopter" it would need to be VERY strong for Google not to show results for "Helicopter". However, if your brand is "HeelCooper" you could probably resolve that problem, and several of your others, with the suggestions below.

1. Go Through This Presentation and implement what you can, such as:

• Organization Schema with Schema.or Markup in the HTML or with JSON-LD

• Add and Define your brand on WikiData, Wikimedia and other open data sources, or repositories for brand entities

• Work your way up to WikiPedia by doing noteworthy things that generate press

3. Make sure your Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP) are consistent across the web.

• There are many ways to format things:

• (Street, St. | Road Rd. | 1800, 1-800 | 555-999-5555, (555) 999-5555) | ABC, ABZ.

• The important thing is consistency. You need to "Disambiguate" your brand from whatever that other keyword is. This is important for search, but also in reducing the amount of your potential customers who misspell your brand.

6. Drive more searches for your brand, and subsequent clicks to your site by generating positive publicity.

• Use PPC ads for your branded terms, and that other term if possible, to get as much of that traffic as possible to your site, even if you aren't ranking #1. Also, google will be less likely to recommend another search if the one you performed is generating income for them. And they can use the data gained from those real user searches to inform their algorithms, which will - hopefully - eventually result in your site showing up, as it should, for branded searches.

8. If none of this works, consider re-branding.

You need to do both.

The reverse proxy isn't about SEO so much as the ability to use subdirectories instead of subdomains, even though the subdirectories are hosted on different servers. You have to use a reverse proxy for the technological requirements of using a subdirectory (folder) instead of a subdomain when you're hosting sites on different servers but want to combine them on the same domain.

The 301 Redirects will ensure the users (including search engines) that visit the old URL on the subdomain get forwarded on to the new URL in the subdirectory. This is what preserves pagerank, and provides a good user experience. Do not keep the content available at the old URLs; Do not allow those URLs to return a 404 Status. 301 Redirect them.

I hope that clarifies your situation.

I recommend using Shopify for the eCommerce portion of the site, but using Wordpress for the blog. Ask Shopify support if you can install Wordpress in a subdirectory /blog/ instead of a subdomain blog.yoursite.com. To Ruth's point, don't change any of the blog URLs if you don't have to.

I wouldn't use WooCommerce if you're going to have a serious online retail brand. Wordpress is about as good at eCommerce as Shopify is at blogging.

I didn't see anything about these links showing up in GSC. If that's the case, please let us know. I have seen links show up there before that first 302 redirect to another site. In theory, these shouldn't pass pagerank, but historically Google has had some trouble figuring out 302s.

Nicholas, I agree with Matt Antonio as well. If the link the href tag goes to a ShareaSale URL it should not pass pagerank.

However, it looks like instead of just going through a 302 redirect, affiliate links like the one below just go to a 200 (OK) status page, which uses javascript (window.location.replace) to send the user on to the merchant's site. It doesn't surprise me that this could become an issue now that Google is so good at crawling javascript. But they are still pretty terrible about figuring out what it "means" in terms of what should show in the search results.

Are merchants still getting good ROI from programs on massive affiliate networks? It's been awhile since I've seen that work in a brand's favor over the long term.

Thomas,

I agree with everything Kane suggested. Additionally, you might ask GoDaddy if you can add some Google Tag Manager code to the site so you can edit header and body code without messing with Godaddy's website builder. It might be a learning curve for you, but Google has good documentation and courses on how to use GTM.

Thanks Troy!

Let us know how it goes. That does sound very promising.

Don't forget to create a new profile view so you don't sku the data in your default view.

Hello Joey,

While I appreciate your quest for data, I'm not sure you can use the same technique described above unless you can convince Google/Youtube to set a cookie for you.

You'd think you could just look for YouTube's cookie whenever someone visits your site, but that isn't possible:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30637365/how-are-youtube-and-google-accessing-each-others-cookies

Thank you for the update Kavit.

Hello Rebecca,

Screaming Frog is capable of a lot when set up properly. Mike King has a great post about running it on Amazon Web Services (AWS) so it could fit your cloud solution request. Have you checked out Seer's guide to doing almost anything with Screaming Frog? Do you have "Check External Links" checked? Also "Always Follow Redirects" should be checked. And you can set the "Max Redirects to Follow" to whatever you like.

If that doesn't work, have you tried Deep Crawl?

Hello Micromano,

See this thread on Stack Exchange. You can mark up your organization, as well as any organization (or other "entity") that you describe / discuss on your website. Marking up an organization doesn't mean you are necessarily affiliated with them UNLESS you use the "SameAs" tag to connect that data with your own website, wiki page or social profiles...

Also, you may want to look into using JSON-LD instead. You would still base it on the Schema.org hierarchies, but the code is slightly different. The cool thing about JSON is that you don't have to show all of the data you're marking up. It can just be in the source code and not visible on the page, similar to meta descriptions as far as that aspect goes.

Here's what I would do.
1. Put Organization Schema for YOUR business (or your client's) in the HTML header of EVERY page using JSON-LD. Here's a generator I like. Also check out the JSON-LD Playground for testing your code. Don't forget the SameAs tags pointing to other sites/pages that you can verify as "official". This includes Wikipedia pages, Wiki Data pages and social profiles.

2. Also surround information about YOUR business (logo, NAP...) with traditional Schema.org Organization markup.

3. Use traditional Schema.org Organization markup for the business listings, and include a SameAs tag around a link to their official websites.

Here's a good Stack Overflow thread to check out: Mixing Together Schemas.

Hello Kavit,

I would suggest putting unique Title tags, meta descriptions and content on those pages. They are very thin as it is, and all of the content is boilerplate.

There are 57,100,000 results on Bing for: "Search for an Australian Business, Government Department or Person" which is the content on the home page you shared.

There are 60,600 results on Bing for: ""There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it" which is the content on this page: http://wp-seospike-weblbl.naws-sensis.com.au/bing-seo-control/no-metatag.html .

And so on. I can see why Bing wouldn't want to add yet another thin, duplicate, orphan page to their index. My advice would be to build out those test pages with a design template and to put original content, title tags and meta descriptions on all of them. Then repeat your test.

Is there any chance of getting a URL for the domain in question?

Have you read this yet?
https://builtvisible.com/javascript-framework-seo/

What are the URLs like that you're asking Bing to index? Which is closest?

Hashbang
http://www.IWishJSFramworkWebsitesWouldGoAway/#!

Escaped Fragment
http://www.IWishJSFramworkWebsitesWouldGoAway/?escaped_fragment=

Base URL using Angular's $location service to construct URLs without the #! via the HTML5 History API http://www.IWishJSFramworkWebsitesWouldGoAway/

I know this doesn't answer your question, but hopefully it will get the discussion started.