Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello Ben,

Have you already made the change? Every product I looked at from that page had only one size/color/material, etc... What is the purpose of the change? Will the simple products AND the grouped products to which they belong all be indexable on their own URLs?

Grouping products is one way to reduce the amount of product pages on the site by allowing shoppers to choose options from a single product page (e.g. size, color, material...) that would otherwise be listed as its own sku. If your goal is to allow shoppers to view each as its own product then that's fine as long as you're willing to write 100% unique, useful copy/descriptions for each of those pages. If not, it would be better to keep them grouped.

As for the category page, I don't think it matters much what products are being featured there in terms of how the category page will rank. It will affect the pagerank being distributed to product pages though, so rankings could drop for your grouped product pages if you are only linking/showing simple products on category pages.

Without a little more detail about how you group products and what you're trying to accomplish it's hard to provide a great answer.

Hello,

The plugin creates a new CSS file, which you can access and control to make the data appear any way you like:
http://historyofmormonism.com/wp-content/plugins/schema-creator/lib/css/schema-style.css?ver=1.050

Yes, the data that you are marking up needs to appear on the page, but you can mark up existing data instead of using a plugin that adds new data to the page. Or you can use the plugin to add the data to the page and customize the look by adjusting the CSS file.

My advice would be to learn how to add the markup yourself so you can just apply it to whatever it is on the page that you're trying to mark-up instead of relying on the plugin. This way you don't get the ugly box. It isn't that difficult if you can already do basic HTML. For example:

Here is what the plugin is doing:

Alex Baugh
Brigham Young University
Professor

The Div ID for "Schema_block" is what is creating that container. In the CSS file I linked to above it reads as follows (bolding is mine):

#schema_block {
    clear:both;
    margin:0 auto 10px auto;
   ** background: #EEEEEE;**
**    border: 1px solid #CCCCCC;**
    padding: 1em;
    overflow: hidden;
}

You can make that look like whatever you want it to look like. For instance, you could completely remove the margin, background, border and padding. It's not the "box" that Google needs to see, it's the content (e.g. Alex Baugh, Brigham Young University, Professor) on the page and the markup in the code that surrounds it.

I hope this clarifies the issue for you. A good designer/developer should be able to provide further assistance if you are not comfortable editing code or CSS files.

Hello David,

This is an issue for many sites at the moment, I think. I just finished diving really deep into another site having the same problem, and we ended up - after fixing everything that "could" be wrong - deciding that Google has probably tightened the reigns on rich snippets displaying for product pages. Whether this is based on page-level authority metrics, number of reviews, trustworthiness of the reviews, etc... I do not know.

It is not guaranteed that a page will display snippets in the SERPs even if the code is implemented correctly. That is about all we can know at the moment. The same goes for rel author thumbs and other enhanced SERPs.

Hello Santaur,

I'm afraid this question isn't as easy as you may have thought at first. It really depends on what is on the pages in those two directories, what they're being used for, who visits them, etc... Certainly removing them altogether wouldn't be as terrible as some people might think IF those pages are of poor quality, have no external links, and very few - if any - visitors. It sounds to me that you might need a "Content Audit" wherein the entire site is crawled, using a tool like Screaming Frog, and then relevant metrics are pulled for those pages (e.g. Google Analytics visits, Moz Page Authority and external links...) so you can look at them and make informed decisions about which pages to improve, remove or leave as-is.

Any page that gets "removed" will leave you with another choice: Allow to 404/410 or 301 redirect. That decision should be easy to make on a page-by-page basis after the content audit because you will be able to see which ones have external links and/or visitors within the time period specified (e.g. 90 days). Pages that you have decided to "Remove" which have no external links and no visits in 90 days can probably just be deleted. The others can be 301 redirected to a more appropriate page, such as the blog home page, top level category page, similar page or - if all else fails - the site home page.

Of course any page that gets removed, whether it redirects or 404s/410s should have all internal links updated as soon as possible. The scan you did with Screaming Frog during the content audit will provide you with all internal links pointing to each URL, which should speed up that process for you considerably.

Good luck!

I completely agree. 1 URL is by far the better choice.

Hello WMCA,

Does BV want you to add that rel ="canonical" tag to the main product page, or just the paginated review pages. If the former, I say no way. If the latter, we should discuss further. It could be advantageous, but I'd rather send the authority to the main product page instead.

Hello Yusuf,

If you have a link to Jon Mueller saying that, instead of someone else saying he did, I would love to go check it out because the statement is in direct opposition to the one on Google's website here, which says:

"Consolidating link signals for the duplicate or similar content. It helps search engines to be able to consolidate the information they have for the individual URLs (such as links to them) on a single, preferred URL. This means that links from other sites to http://example.com/dresses/cocktail?gclid=ABCD get consolidated with links to http://www.example.com/dresses/green/greendress.html."

Notice is says "helps" though. As always, the directive is a "hint" to Google, which has the right to ignore the hint if they want to.

Yusuf,

I do believe rel canonical tags merge the link profile of all non-canonical URLs to the one canonical URL.

Also, relying on redirects in this case could be problematic for breadcrumbs.

Hello Marty,

If you have the opportunity to use only ONE URL, to which you will link from all categories - and which will be the one and only canonical for that product - I would use site.com/product/product1. Note the use of a /product/ directory instead of being off the root. I find that having products in a product directory makes diagnoses of issues (i.e. index count, site:domain.com inurl:product searches, Analytics segmentation...) a lot easier. However, if you want to keep it site.com/product1 then that would be fine as well. It would be preferable to using multiple URLs and relying on 301 redirects or rel canonicals, which are effective band-aids, but band-aids nevertheless. It is better to actually fix the problem, which is products living on multiple URLs.

Of course you're going to still want to either 301 redirect or rel canonical the old ones to your canonical version since the URLs are likely already in Google's system and possibly have external links.

And you should think about what happens to breadcrumbs as well. If a user gets to /product1 from one category vs another, will their breadcrumb change and how will that be done? Is it ok for usability for the breadcrumb on that product page to always reference the canonical category (i.e. Home ---> category 2 ---> category2 ---> product1)? I tend to think so, and this also may help your internal linking be more consistent when Googlebot visits the page.

Andrew,

I wouldn't put crawlable versions of reviews found on other sites on my product pages for the same reason you are concerned.

You could put them in an iFrame, which should take care of the issue. However, in order to get the star ratings in the SERPs the Schema markup for aggregate ratings should be outside of that iframe. An aggregate rating doesn't include the review copy since it is including all of the reviews (e.g. 4 out of 5 stars based on 320 reviews).

Meanwhile, I would be working on getting your own unique, real reviews up on your site so you benefit from the user-generated content that nobody else has.

Hello Carl,

I tried to access those pages but didn't find anything on those URLs even after fixing them.

The rel next/prev is being used properly for the issue you're having.

I think the bigger issue is that you say all of your product descriptions are duplicates of any other site using the same affiliate feed. That is a big no-no and I don't think relying on category pages to rank for product searches is a good business plan. I hate to say it, but these types of sites really just don't do very well these days.

Nevertheless, your question was about the paginated URLs and I think the rel next/prev has you covered there. If you are more worried about it you can use a rel = canonical tag to ensure the first page in the series is seen as the canonical version.

The only thing I might add is that, depending on the business, it might be worth building a "Red Widgets" category (as an example). However, you would treat this like a sub-category and write its own category description. You would give it its own rel canonical tag, treating it as the root of the "Red Widgets" category root.

Nine times out of ten it isn't necessary to give sorting and filtering options their own category page though, and a rel canonical tag to the canonical version of that page is the second best option. The first best option would be to not change the URL at all, only re-order the items, hiding some and featuring others. Most eCommerce platforms don't have this functionality at present, however. Rel Canonical was made to span the gap until they do.

Hello Carsten,

I am not a developer, but hopefully I can be of some assistance. If not, we'll leave the question open to see if anyone else can be more specific for you.

First, I came across a good list of eCommerce sites using Isotope: http://isotope.metafizzy.co/ . If you scroll down to "Isotope in use" you'll see examples from Anthropologie, Rimmel London, Lexus, Biodroid, etc... Perhaps looking at how they handle things will help. For example, it looks like Anthropologie uses unique identifying URL for each product that is its own .jps file (e.g. 4130265414412.jsp), or is meant to appear that way.

A lot of AJAX sites will use a hashbang (#!) to enable crawling of dynamically created content on the same URL each time. Here is more information about that.

The solution you provided above sounds good, but I'd want to see it in action first. Be sure to view the page as Googlebot, and to see how it looks in Google's Cache Preview in the SERPs to make sure they are treating it the way you want them to.

Good luck with this, and please let us know how it turns out so we can be more informed on the issue in the future.

That would be correct. What you have are "self referencing" canonical tags. That does the exact opposite of what you need it to do. It tells Google all of those pages are valid, where you need it to tell Google all of those pages are just copies of only ONE valid page.

Hello David,

In the case of http://www.godirectappliance.com/ajax/product/quickview/id/734/ I would simply add a disallow statement for the/ ajax/product/quickview/ directory in the robots.txt file.

I'm assuming the URLs to these pages are contained in javascript instead of href tags since they are hover-over pages so you don't have to worry about wasting pagerank by linking to pages that are being blocked.

I'm not recommending a block at the /ajax/  or /ajax/product/ level at this point because I don't know what else is in those directories. It could be something you need Google to have access to in order to fully index a page.

I have seen this happen with sites that have been redirected. For example, I redirected site A to site B once - including all of the content from site A - and site B inherited the Titles and descriptions from site A for several months. It was very irritating because I didn't use the words anywhere on the page, and I was using NOODP and NOYDIR tags. I even told Google the site had moved in GWT.

Eventually it sorted itself out, but it made me see how difficult it must be fore Google to keep everything straight on so many sites with so many different site elements, especially when redirects are involved.

Both sites had content and were in the the same niche. Site A had stronger signals, and was a year older than site B. However, I wanted to redirect to site B for branding reasons.

I suggest you do some digging around to find out if any other site has been 301 redirected to your site. If so, did that content ever appear on it?

Good luck and let us know what you find out!

Helen,

I know people who have had success in reducing the number of links within mega menus by turning some of them (after the first two levels, for instance, but you could get much more sophisticated if you wanted) into javascript links. If the javascript is not too complex Google will still have no trouble getting to those pages, but the links won't be "hrefs" and therefore won't waste pagerank on pages that are not as important relative to the others. The upside to this is that the links are still there for users, assuming that is a good thing.

As someone else mentioned, consider whether having those links there really is good for the users, or if they'd rather see a simpler menu. The search engines are beside the point in that case.

Any time an eCommerce site experiences slow, steady traffic drops I always look into the uniqueness of their product copy. That is often a sign that they are sharing product copy with other sites, either due to manufacturer description use, or by publishing feeds to 3rd party sites like Amazon, eBay or price comparison shopping engines.

Good luck!

As I said before, a 301 redirect will pass pagerank. Even if it goes to a blocked folder, that's still domain-level benefit coming into your site from "paid" links.

The best solution, in my opinion, is for sites to run their affiliate program through another domain first, and 302 (temporary) redirect the user to the main site.

Affiliate links to www.YourAffiliateDomain.com/?afflink-id=123, which has a domain-wide robots.txt disallow.  The ?afflink-id=123 part tells the system where to redirect the user to on the primary domain. The user goes from that URL through a 302 redirect to the appropriate URL on your primary domain.

No pagerank is passed and you can kill off the domain if you ever need to and those redirects will stop coming into the site.

If you are unable to do all of this you can submit a disavow file for all non-compliant affiliate domains after asking them to nofollow their links. I think the limit is supposed to be 2,000 domains, but I've heard of people doing as much as 4,000 with no problem. Just give it a try and see what happens.

Sometimes catalog businesses have customers who feel more comfortable with an online version of their printed catalog than an eCommerce site. In such cases it can be a good user experience to have those available online.

However, I would not allow them to be indexable.

I'm assuming the products are all available on product pages in the eCommerce site, which is where I would focus my efforts. The online version of the printed catalog in PDF (Other formats, such as flash or AJAX work well too) should just be a feature for users, not necessarily for search.

If you can make those links nofollow by updating files within your affiliate software I'd opt for that route over asking affiliates to add a nofollow tag. If you can't update existing links that way you'll have to ask the affiliates to update them.

Don't rely on affiliates to add the nofollow tag for you going forward. Give it to them in the code they copy from the site.

I like to recommend sending all affiliate links through an external redirect first. For example, you might have www.YourAffiliateDomain.com/?afflink=123, which would then 302 redirect to the page they want to link to. This way if anything ever goes wrong you can kill off that domain and get rid of all of those incoming links in a flash. They'd also be going through a 302 prior to hitting your main site so no pagerank would be getting passed and you'd be in good graces with Google whether those links were nofollowed or not.

Here are a few ideas:

1. Create a nice landing page and drive traffic to it from native ad platforms on Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In....

2. Partner with "groups" on Facebook, Linked-In and G+ to offer their members free business cards

3. e.g. https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/104764329569377268904/stream/7596df91-7935-400c-9e8c-479f3b0a403b?hl=en

4. Write guest by-line articles for small business sites about how to go off on your own and start a design business on a budget, and include references to your landing page for free business cards

All of this assumes that the landing page has some sort of pre-qualifying questions since you mentioned "select" graphic designers and illustrators.

I think partnering with design groups to offer their members free cards would be a good way to go. You can find groups of designers on just about very major social media / networking platform on the web. You can even try local groups from Meetup.com and elsewhere. You could partner with a design conference, or a graduate school... You could buy placement in a design-related newsletter, etc...

Hello,

Even though you are blocking that folder the fact remains that you are paying people a commission to place followable links on their site. Since a 301 redirect passes pagerank you are still violating Google's guidelines even if the page two which thy point is blocked in the robots.txt file. This is because, technically, you might still benefit at the domain-level from those links pointing into your domain.

If you turned those links into 302 redirects and/or had the affiliates update them to add nofollow code, it would probably be enough.

Hello Vinay,

Please see Mashable for an example:
http://mashable.com/2013/4/

They have pagination links at the bottom of the page and use lazy loading / infinite scroll.

Adam Sherk has a good post about this:
http://www.adamsherk.com/seo/seo-tips-for-infinite-scrolling/

View the source of the cached page and look toward the bottom. Do all of your products/listings show in the source? If so, you're all good. If not, you may want to add pagination for the spiders, as mentioned above.

Hello,

Where did you read that Google only indexes or reads a maximum of 1,000 links on a page? I think this is outdated information. However, it is best practice not to have that many links on a page even if Google does crawl more than 100 or 1,000 per page.

So to answer your question, yes if you're loading additional product listings via javascript after the user scrolls down it could cause Google to only render part of the page. However, often this does not cause "indexation issues" for your product pages because they have other paths into them from sub-categories, related product links, external links, sitemaps, etc...

If you're curious how much of the page they are rendering just looked at the cached version of the page from the search results. That should answer your question directly from Google.

I usually recommend pagination links be added to the page so Google, or users those without javascrpt enabled, has a path to access more product listings. If you like you can set those paginated category pages to noindex,follow so they do not get indexed, but Google can still crawl them to find deeper products.

Hello Dave,

Overoptimized internal linking text can have a negative impact on your site's rankings in Google. Well-optimized, user-friendly internal linking text that does not go overboard can have a positive impact on your site's rankings in Google.

For example:
If the anchor text of all internal links going into your "Blue Widgets" says "Buy Blue Widgets Online" and you have pages for "Red Widgets" that have hundreds of internal links saying "Buy Red Widgets Online" and the same for Green Widgets, etc... that is probably overoptimized. It would be better if they all just said the name of the category (i.e. Blue Widgets, Red Widgets, Green Widgets) since the "Buy... Online" part is implied.

I hope this answers your question. Good luck!

Hello DRSMPR,

You don't have any meta descriptions at all on those pages, and the title tag is just one word. Both of these should be optimized for every category page and product page. However, I don't think that has anything to do with the alerts you are receiving from Moz. I think those are related to non-canonical URLs produced by the system whenever sorting parameters are added to the URL. For example:

http://www.bebeautifulboutique.com/Decleor
The page above is the same as the URL below:
http://www.bebeautifulboutique.com/Decleor?sort=p.price&order=ASC

This causes a lot of duplicate content issues, as can be seen with this Google search. You can fix it in several different ways. I will list them below in order of my preference:

#1 Use a rel canonical tagThis URL ---> http://www.bebeautifulboutique.com/Decleor?sort=p.price&order=ASC - should list this URL ---> http://www.bebeautifulboutique.com/Decleor - as the rel="canonical" URL. Learn more here.

#2 Use the robots.txt file
Your site does not currently have a robots.txt file ( http://www.bebeautifulboutique.com/robots.txt ). If you had one you could put this into it to keep those URLs from being crawled and indexed:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /?sort=

#3 Use a robots noindex meta tag
The following would go on all of the pages with ?sort= in the URL:

You could also put a noindex directive in the robots.txt file. This works well, but isn't often used by people because it isn't officially part of the robots.txt protocol, though Google does obey the command.

If you have questions specific to how you should implement them on your CMS (OpenCart) I think the OpenCart help forums would be the best place to go for that information.

PS: This page also uses content that other websites are using. You need to write your own content for every category and product page. Never use the manufacturer or brand description. Always write your own: http://www.bebeautifulboutique.com/Decleor

Hello Christian,

You have three choices here, listed in order of preference in my opinion:

#1 View All Canonical - This may not be a good choice for you, however, because there are hundreds of pages of reviews, which may take too long to load on a single page.

#2 Rel Canonical - You are actually already doing this:

#3 Rel Next Prev - This "would" be the ideal fix, but Google doesn't seem to treat it the way they're supposed to.

In summary: I think you're fine the way things are. No need to be concerned here.

Perhaps those URLs were indexed before you blocked them. If you have them blocked now, either by robots.txt and/or by robots meta noindex tag, you can use Google's URL Removal Tool in GWT to get them out of the index. It may take awhile though.

I see nothing wrong with adding a nofollow tag to those href links. Go for it. If nothing else, it could help you salvage your crawl budget.

More is not always better. If the "more" information they are able to index involves outdated price lists from months or years ago it would likely do more harm than good.

Nofollowing them won't help you conserve any of that pagerank for other links on the page. Instead, you would seek to make those something other than href tags. I'm not a developer, but here is one example that might help explain what I'm trying to say: http://www.quackit.com/javascript/popup_windows.cfm . Notice the javascript for the pop-up window on that page does not contain an href tag.

The javascript you shared would allow Google to fairly easily access the page ending in dtc_inventory_ajax.php?id=29935291. If that's the page you want them to not be able to access, perhaps you'd be better off referencing just the id portion of the URL, which should be enough for the database to take the user to the right page.

Regardless, you "should" be OK with just the robots.txt block, though all of the href tags are sort of diluting the amount of pagerank you can send to other pages from whatever page you're on.

The robots.txt disallow statement you provided might be improved upon.

Disallow: /*?

The one above seems to me like it would only work on URLs that were in the root directory. Try this one instead of, or in addition to, the one above:

Disallow: /?id=*

Also I'd add this one to any Wordpress site, which in itself should take care of the issue if the URL in your script is an example of those that you're concerned about:

Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/

You can use the URL Removal Tool in Google Webmaster Tools to get the ones that have already been crawled out of the index. You can do it at the URL level, or at the directory level.

Lastly, if you're blocking Google and the SERP says unable to display because of the robots.txt file I don't think you need to worry about the content on those pages affecting your site with regard to a Panda penalty or anything like that. However, if Google had already indexed the content on those pages you will want to remove the URLs via Webmaster Tools as described above.

Hello M,

It all depends on the site. I find most eCommerce sites need substantial copy-editing or writing of unique, useful product descriptions and category page content. That is probably where I would spend my time with regard to on-page. Of course you can't ignore major technical issues either. In terms of building links, asking influencers and brand evangelists to do product reviews has always been good PR, long before Google. Just don't ask for a link (though you will probably get one) and don't request that it be made "followable" if it's not. Just be happy for the traffic and exposure.

There are lots of other link building tactics and content marketing strategies that work for eCommerce sites, but it all depends on the site so it's tough to really say what's best for your client in 2014.

Nine times out of ten what eCommerce sites need the most of is better, more unique, more useful product page copy.

Good luck!

Hello fupfac,

I would go with one evergreen piece of content in this case in order to consolidate ranking signals, develop more trust over time, allow visitors to use their bookmark of the page for more than a month, not have to update existing links, etc...

I would also 301 redirect the old price lists to the new, evergreen one.

Hopefully this will help:

Login to GA and click Acquisition --> All Referrers
This report will show all websites that sent traffic to you in the time period you have set in Analytics.
Click the Ecommerce or Goals tab at the top of the list and it should give you conversion data for your referrers.

Just let us know if we've misunderstood what you're looking to achieve.

As I said, that would be a good second choice, but I'd go with the first option (putting all product variants like size/color on the same page and allowing the user to select which one/s they want to purchase) because the other options still leave a potentially huge amount of product URLs out there for Google to crawl.

Google has to crawl them to see the rel canonical tag. You may only have a certain amount of crawl budget. If you can cut down the amount of URLs on your site that Google has to crawl by as much as half simply by allowing users to select a variant color or size on a product page I think that is best for SEO, as well as for user experience.

Google may have reduced their crawl budget for your site if they found enough pages to be low quality, thin, duplicate, etc... Here are some examples that you can probably apply a noindex tag to in order to reduce crawl budget waste on them.

Google these:

site:howlatthemoon.com/ inurl:tag
1,360 indexed pages that don't need to be in the SERPs

site:howlatthemoon.com/ inurl:tag page
Even if you want the tag pages indexed, you don't need their paginated pages indexed too

site:howlatthemoon.com/ inurl:page inurl:category
A few dozen category pagination pages in the SERPs, many more on the site that have been booted from the index
Example:
http://www.howlatthemoon.com/dueling_piano_bar/category/nightlife/page/2/

I would install the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin, which should fix these in the following ways:
Use rel canonical tags
Use rel Next/Prev tagsNoindex tag pages
etc...

Ian I don't think anyone is going to be able to help you without being able to see your site, do some checking around the SERPs, etc... If you don't want to provide that information, we understand, but I don't think anyone could provide you with a useful answer.

As far as new sites going up and then dropping down in the first few months, we used to call this the "Google Sandbox effect". Nobody talks about it anymore for various reasons, but many of us believe that there is still an amount of time for a new site where Google will give it the benefit of a doubt in order to collect metrics about it from the SERPs, such as user's reactions to it appearing in the search results for different queries. Once that data is crunched the rankings often go down. That's just a theory, but I thought I'd throw it out there. It doesn't seem to make sense in this case though, as it doesn't explain the Moz metric drops, which are not associated with Google at all.

Google recently cleaned house a bit on structured data in the SERPs, which might explain that part of it. Even if your data markup was using the correct syntax it wouldn't help if you don't have the trust metrics necessary for Google to deem the sight worthy of structured data in the SERPs.

As usual, a good answer from Chris Menke.

Santaur, you asked:
"Should I keep the SubCategory page "Men's Ski Clothing" if it helps usability? "

I say "Yes". If it helps usability, as sub-category pages often do in this type of situation, you should keep them.

You can add content to sub-category pages to help them rank better for phrases that will bring in the RIGHT customer from the SERPs, even if they don't know yet what specific product they want. For example: "Overstock Ski Jackets" or "Discount Ski Jackets" would align with your client's value prop, target high-converting keywords, and bring in the right visitor to the right page.

You already mentioned what I would do:

"Set-up canonical links on all date specific pages On each /events/event-name/id/date page, set-up the canonical link to point back to the newly created /events/event-name page."

I think that would be the best practice.

Sometimes a site gets a page-level or even a keyword-level algorithmic penalty because of over-optimization. This is often related to having too many keyword-rich links going into a page so as to look unnatural. It is a big problem for exact match domains (EMDs) that have not built up a good brand presence. Since everyone links to them with those keywords (e.g. NJ Hypnotherapy, New Jersey Hypnotherapy) it makes things difficult for Google and the site owner. This used to be a good thing (EMDs getting exact-match links) but now you need to really be a "brand" in order to keep from being labelled as a non-branded EMD with too many exact match links.

Looking at this site in-particular it seems to me that the "brand" is the hypnotist's name (i.e. Mr. Imraaz Rally). It would make sense then if most of your links contained variations of that brand. Instead, most of your links to the home page contain variations of the domain, specifically the two I mentioned earlier. There are also a number of links with anchor text about "Roni R" which may be related to a previous version of the site.

Long story short, I would either rebrand the site as "NJ Hypnotherapy" and work on building that brand in all promotional materials, or keep the hypnotherapist as the brand and work on building links with his name instead of with your keywords.

Another option would be switching to a non-EMD domain, like www.imraazrally.com.

Hello Joni,

One of the solutions from the thread Matt linked to earlier is very interesting. I've never tried it but will definitely give it a shot soon. Read about it here. In short, you would add a line to the htaccess file that would instruct user agents trying to access a secure page on the site that they are disallowed from visiting any page.

Since I've never tried that solutions, and so far haven't talked to anyone who has, my recommendation is going to be the simplest one I know of:

Make sure your rel canonical tag is using the http version of the URL. This should not change when viewing the https version - it should have an http rel canonical tag. That should solve the problem without having to redirect users to a non-secure page, and without having to edit your htaccess file.

Tom,

You can use the Disavow Links tool to do this for existing links, though I would advise updating the way your affiliate program works so as to avoid the issue going forward. For example, when providing the link code to affiliates include the rel nofollow tag, as mentioned above.

Most affiliate programs will send the user through an internal redirect, which can pass on the unique identifying parameter for the affiliate so they get credit for the conversions. I understand you may not want to go that route due to the work involved, but this is really the standard for affiliate programs these days. It allows you complete control on your end without having to bother the affiliates to update their links.

Good luck!

Hello Hamid,

Google stated recently that they were going to be dialing down the rich snippet displays so fewer pages would show them. I think if you have a section that isn't showing rich snippets, and you've tested the code to make sure there is nothing wrong with it, it probably has to do with Google's trust of the page. A page with little traffic and no external links isn't guaranteed a rich snippet just because the markup is there.

However, if this coincided with a design change it could very well have to do with that. My advise would be to go through the markup with a fine-toothed comb to make sure it is still valid.

Michael I don't think you will get anymore benefit from a 301 than you're getting from the cross-domain rel canonical tags that are already in place.

However, I think the fact that you already have these cross-domain rel canonical tags i place, and that the content is identical, will make it much less likely that 301 redirecting those domains would be seen as any type of spam.

If it were me, just so all of my users were on the same domain - and to keep the problem from getting worse over time - I would go ahead and 301 redirect the other domains, but on a page-to-page basis. In other words, each page would link directly to the page it is currently referencing as the rel canonical. This would be much better than redirecting them all to a single landing page, and would send signal that is consistent with the current one you are sending via the cross domain rel canonical.

You might try this one domain at a time. Let the dust settle on that domain and, if all goes well, move on to the next. It may take a year to complete the project, but it might be the safest way to go.

Alternatively, you could just continue to leave the other sites up with the cross domain rel canonical tag - but the problem is likely to just worsen over time as more people link to the other domains, and they develop their own sources of traffic via direct links, social, bookmarks, etc... outside of the SERPs.

I have heard conflicting things from people at Google, including Matt Cutts, throughout the years. I have also seen some first-hand anecdotal evidence that subdomains inherit some benefit from the parent domain, though much less evidence that parent domains gain anything from the subdomains.

It is my opinion that the devil is in the details here. If, for instance, you have a site with dramatically different topics on various subdomains, as if they were completely different websites, I think it is more likely that Google will treat them as such. However, if you have a site with a subdomain for a certain section, such as a forum or blog that is of the same, or very similar topic, with lots of interlinking between the two - as if they were different parts of the same site - I think it is more likely that Google will treat them as such.

So I don't think the answer is as cut-and-dry as people often like to think, which is why it is so difficult to find consistent proof of one theory or the other.

In the end, do what's best for your users and developers. Most of the time that means a subdirectory, but every once in awhile it means a subdomain.

I'll leave this open for other opinions. Maybe someone has some empirical proof that we can look at.

Hello Erick,

According to this article on S.E.W. it is best practice to optimize the product description in your PLA feed, but they do not provide any "proof" of the efficacy of this practice. This CPC Strategy post says the same thing, and this YouMoz post has a comments section with several experienced marketers corroborating the best practice:

"However after looking at the descriptions in the feed, the max CPC pricing and the keywords that triggered the ads I started to understand that PLAs require as much SEO attention as a regular organic page does to work well."

"We tend to make sure all product titles and descriptions are keyword optimised in the first place but you are right, this is very often overlooked."

Unfortunately I do not have, nor can I find, any "proof" that Google uses the product description play a large factor in the ranking of product listing ads. I will leave this open as a discussion in hopes that someone else can update if it is ever proved. Until then, I recommend writing product description text that uses your top keywords - typically the product name/model - while focusing on how it is going to entice the shopper to click on your result.

Hello no6thgear,

Generally speaking, product detail pages have a much more difficult time ranking for anything other than the specific product name/model. Even then, eCommerce sites are often going up against juggernauts like Amazon, Target, Walmart, eBay, or whoever the leaders are in your niche. If you're using any manufacturer/distributor product descriptions that are shared on other websites, or have a lot of products with "thin" content it will make ranking these pages much more difficult, if not nearly impossible.

That said, it IS best practice to link directly to the page instead of relying on rel canonical tags or 301 redirects, which treat them symptom and not the cause. If you can find a way to do this in Shopify I recommend it, though I'm not sure if it would be worth changing eCommerce platforms for if there are no other strong issues supporting the change.

Hello KTW...,

I would not make these two pages have the same rel canonical tag, as they are not the same page, nor the same product:

http://wagavenue.com/what-happens-in-the-dog-park-pet-id-tag-for-dogs

http://wagavenue.com/very-important-pooch-custom-pet-id-tag-for-dogs

Yes, they are the same "shape" and made out of the same material, but that would be like an eCommerce site for clothes that was being told they should add a rel canonical tag for all of their cotton T-shirts to combine them on one product page for "cotton T-shirts". That's not a product page. That's a category page.

You can have some shared content on product pages about shipping, returns, etc... but if I were you I would invest in as much unique content as you can on each page. Talk about the sayings. The colors. The material. There are a million ways to say the same thing if you're creative. Failing that, you can put the shipping and returns information, and similar templated info, in an iframe or a javascript pop-up window, or some other way of keeping from being duplicate content on every page.

Long story short, if you want to rank for 100 different sayings (e.g. "what happens in the dog park dog tag", "very important pooch dog tag") you need to write unique descriptions for each of those. There is no way around it without risking your traffic from Google.

Generally most sites that rank on page 1 or 2 of Google for searches like "online coupons" and "online coupon codes" are going to allow merchants to submit deals. If you're part of an affiliate network like Commission Junction, Share-A-Sale, etc... those should automatically go out in your feeds if you create the offer from there.

Otherwise this should get you headed in the right direction...

Go to Google and search for inurl:submit coupon codes which should bring up pages like this one on Coupon Sherpa. You could even specify the type of offer by searching for things like inurl:submit "cyber monday" coupons or offers or deals - or any other combination you want to play with. The search took me to this page on Retail Me Not.