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Thanks for your answer and the link, that's actually very useful.
What I mainly struggle with is to understand what I can prune/not and based on what criterias. And the article you've linked is helping a fair bit on that aspect.

I'm thinking to start on multiple filter pages with a rule such as "block product listing pages from being indexed if at least 2 filters have been selected". And then see how it impacts the site and my crawl budget.

A product page is a page speaking about a selected product.
Example: a page about the smartphone Samguns Supernova 30

A product category is a page speaking about the category, or the type of product it falls into.
Example: smartphone or, if it is too broad, the Supernova line

A product listing is a page listing all the product refined with available criterias such as a product line.
Example: a page listing all the Samguns Supernova phones
Or a page listing all the Samguns Supernova phones with more than 128GB of HD.
Etc.

Does it make more sense?

Hi,

I've an ecommerce website with more than 50k urls and only 10% or so are getting crawled regularly by Google.
Product listing pages represent roughly 80% of these 50k pages.

Trying to improve this, I was thinking to remove altogether all (most?) of my product listing from search (via Robot.txt) to keep only the product pages themselves and the product categories.

My organic situation since Jan 2019:
Users: 2,300,000 (of which 9% are visiting product listing pages)
Page views:  8,000,000 (of which 5% are product listing pages).

Am I about to unleash armageddon (or more like harakiri) on my website by doing so or actually get Google to crawl much more relevant resources (product pages, product categories, blog content and so on)?

Thanks,
G

Hi Robert.

I will get the code checked and most probably set that redirect rule indeed.
Many thanks for the advice!

Hi,

I've seen a fair amount of topics speaking about the difference between domain names ending with or without trailing slashes, the impact on crawlers and how it behaves with canonical links.
However, it sticks to domain names only.
What about subfolders and pages then? How does it behaves with those?

Say I've a site structured like this:
https://www.domain.com
https://www.domain.com/page1

And for each of my pages, I've an automatic canonical link ending with a slash.
Eg. rel="canonical" href="https://www.domain.com/page1/" /> for the above page. SEM Rush flags this as a canonical error. But is it exactly?
Are all my canonical links wrong because of that slash?

And as subsidiary question, both domain.com/page1 and domain.com/page1/ are accessible. Is it this a mistake or it doesn't make any difference (I've read that those are considered different pages)?

Thanks!
G

That helps a lot indeed!
Thank you so much for your reply. I'll get on with this asap

It doesn't rank well at all no. But there is a myriad of other problems making it tricky to understand the impact of that one.

<1% is not keyword stuffing indeed but if the keyword targeted and the "noise" created by the prompts and call to actions all over the place is of a comparable volume, what does it tell Google?

Hi,

As everyone knows, lots of generic terms we use everyday (depends from one country to another obviously) are trademark terms and technically protected.
Some examples here  and there.

So my question is ... are we free to rank (or try to at least!) for some of these keywords?
Some of these keywords vastly outranked their original generic terms and there is little to no value trying to get traffic from the latter.

More specifically what about the keywords such as spin, spinning etc.?

Thanks!
G

Hi,

It might be a stupid question but I prefer to clear things out if it's not a problem:

Today I've seen a website where visitors are prompted no less than 5 times per page to "call [their] consultants".
This appears twice on the header, once on the side bar (mouse over pop up), once in the body of most of the pages and once in the footer.

So obviously, besides the body of the pages, it appears at least 4 times on every single pages as it's part of the website template.

In the past, I never really wondered re the menu, the footer etc as it's usually not hammering the same stuff repeatedly everywhere.

Anyway, I then had a look at their blog and, given the average length of their articles, the keyword density around these prompts is about 0.5% to 0.8% for each page. This is huge!

So basically my question is as follow: is Google's algorithm smart enough to understand what this is and make abstraction of this "content" to focus on the body of the pages (probably simply focusing on the tags)?

Or does it send wrong signals and confuse search engine more than anything else?

Reading stuff such as this, I wonder how does it work when this is not navigational or links elements.

Thanks,
G

Note: I’m purposely not speaking about the UX which is obviously impacted by such a hammering process.

Apologies for the delay coming back to you - Christmas didn't help.

And thanks for your answer; I will give this specific use of canonical a shot starting with small subsets of the site and monitor the impact on my ranking first.

Another interrogation on top of its impact on the site is to know whether it's worth the effort.
But I guess I'll only know it by trying directly.

Great, thanks for your reply!

How should I use canonical tags though?
I assume that blindly canonicalising parts of the site would be pretty silly.
As in, I've pulled out analytics reviewing the volume of page views for an entire sub-folder against a potential sub-folder it could be canonicalised to.

I.e. site.com/fr/ gets 100k visits
Site.com/be/fr/ gets 1k visits.
Therefore it should be canonicalised as it receives very low traffic (1% of /fr/)

Site.com/de/ gets 100k visits
Site.com/ch/de gets 50k visits
Therefore it should not be canonicalised as it receives a fair bit of traffic (50% of /de/).

Or it doesn't matter and both sub-folders should be canonicalised no matter what?

Hi,

A follow up question from another one  I had a couple of months ago:

It has been almost 2 months now that my hreflangs are in place. Google recognises them well and GSC is cleaned (no hreflang errors).

Though I've seen some positive changes, I'm quite far from sorting that duplicate content issue completely and some entire sub-folders remain hidden from the SERP.
I believe it happens for two reasons:

1. Fully mirrored content - as per the link to my previous question above, some parts of the site I'm working on are 100% similar. Quite a "gravity issue" here as there is nothing I can do to fix the site architecture nor to get bespoke content in place.

2. Sub-folders "authority". I'm guessing that Google prefers sub-folders over others due to their legacy traffic/history. Meaning that even with hreflangs in place, the older sub-folder would rank over the right one because Google believes it provides better results to its users.

Two questions from these reasons:
1. Is the latter correct? Am I guessing correctly re "sub-folders" authority (if such thing exists) or am I simply wrong?

2. Can I solve this using canonical tags?
Instead of trying to fix and "promote" hidden sub-folders, I'm thinking to actually reinforce the results I'm getting from stronger sub-folders.
I.e: if a user based in belgium is Googling something relating to my site, the site.com/fr/ subfolder shows up instead of the site.com/be/fr/ sub-sub-folder.
Or if someone is based in Belgium using Dutch, he would get site.com/nl/ results instead of the site.com/be/nl/ sub-sub-folder.

Therefore, I could canonicalise /be/fr/ to /fr/ and do something similar for that second one.

I'd prefer traffic coming to the right part of the site for tracking and analytic reasons. However, instead of trying to move mountain by changing Google's behaviour (if ever I could do this?), I'm thinking to encourage the current flow (also because it's not completely wrong as it brings traffic to pages featuring the correct language no matter what).

That second question is the main reason why I'm looking out for MoZ's community advice: am I going to damage the site badly by using canonical tags that way?

Thank you so much!
G

Great, thanks for your note Paul, I will filter through as you suggest!

Thanks both.
Though I do believe that I get a good enough understanding of the canonical tag structure.
What I don't understand is why some SEO tools are returning an error with few of these tags.

Here is the page URL:
https://www.domain.com/ae/products/shopby/product-type-accessories.html?___store=en_ae

And here is the canonical tag that returns the error:

As per your comment, I want the URL without the query string to rank and the traffic associated to the URL above to benefit "accessories.html".

At first I thought it was due to "itemprop" which technically should not be combined with a rel attribute (source: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31621308/itemprop-and-rel-attributes-on-same-element)
But since all the pages of the website I'm working on contains canonical tags with both elements and only a handful of them returns a canonical tag error, I guess it comes from something else.

Hello,

Several tools I'm using are returning errors due to "broken canonical links". However, I'm not too sure why is that.

Eg.
Page URL: domain.com/page.html?xxxx
Canonical link URL: domain.com/page.html
Returns an error.

Any idea why? Am I doing it wrong?

Thanks,
G

Thanks Kate, will do the best I can in the light of your answers.
But as you've probably understood by now, with quite limited resources.

Hi Kate,

Thank you so much for your answer. Some clarifications on your points:

On the competition part, there is a fair bit of competition indeed. But is an interim solution possible whilst more resources get eventually unlocked next year? And by an interim solution, I'm referring to that page title rule I mentioned in my question.
Or am I chasing ghost and this rule won't change much in the eyes of Google and my ranking?

I don't care so much if US content shows up in the UK in term of content though are eCommerce experts would be quite pissed off as it would biased reporting. From my point of view, the only issue is around currency if visitors then decide to purchase something.

Lastly, I can't do much when it comes to the duplicated content as I stated in a different question since there are no available resources to solve this from a content perspective nor from a site architecture standpoint.

Thanks Kristina, this is in place now!

Thanks Tim.
I already have hreflang implemented and I wanted to dive more in the details of my international SEO so to speak.

Alternate meta is definitely something I'm considering as per my question. And from my understanding of it, the variants I'm proposing are not enough to differentiate them. Correct?

But what about title tags? Neither you or Roman mention them. They don't matter much?
According to this article, it does.

You would not worry about this at all?
I mean, say I do what you suggested above, then I should still review my titles and meta descriptions as per my initial question right?

Hi,

Dealing with both my duplicated titles and meta descriptions i'm wondering if there's a "quick" win I could potentially implement asap.

A bit of background:
Say I've 4 pages structured that way:

• domain.com/us/productA.html for the US
• domain.com/gb/productA.html the UK
• domain.com/fr/productA.html for France
• domain.com/de/productA.html For Germany

At the moment, both my page titles and meta-descriptions are duplicated all over the place for product A.
Title is reading "Product A - company name"
MD is a bit better, being translated in all 3 languages (En, Fr, DE). Therefore being the same for the US and for the UK.

Ideally, I would get unique page titles and MD all over the place. However, due to time and resource constraints, I can't make it happen overnight.

So my questions are pretty simple:
1. Can I create a rule for page titles to be "Product A - country - company name" or similar? Would that be enough to make the page titles unique? Is there any value doing so?
2. Can I "localize" duplicate MD by simply naming the country? I assume it is not enough in this case as all the rest would be copy/pasted.

Ideally speaking, both my page titles and MD would be completely unique but I can't afford doing so in the short term.

Thanks!

A quick additional question to my initial interrogation though: it seems that there is no difference between HTML tags, HTTP header and XML sitemap to include hreflangs.
But is there any difference when it comes to GCS, SEO tools, Hreflang online cherckers and so on?

E.g. if [random] SEO tools spot duplicated content between two regions for a similar page whilst there is hreflang tags within the sitemap, shall I just ignore this warning (provided that the job has been done correctly) or does it mean that there is something wrong still?

Pretty much the same for GCS, if I find warnings around duplicated content whilst hreflang are in place, what does it mean?

Thanks!

Hi Kristina,

Reading quite a lot of literature on the topic I was confident that hreflang would not help with duplicate content and then I realized they were mainly depreciated and old blog posts.
Out of curiosity, has the hreflang utilization evolved since its introduction or is it just me going crazy?

Anyway, thanks loads for your help, seems much "easier" (so to speak as the hrelang introduction is not an easy one for huge international websites) than I thought.

Hi Kristina,

Thanks for your reply.
But from my understanding of hreflang, it mainly helps Google understand that the content is available in different languages/other regions. It doesn't sort out duplicate content issues if the language remains the same for different regions.

Hello!

Though I browse MoZ resources every day, I've decided to directly ask you a question despite the numerous questions (and answers!) about this topic as there are few specific variants each time:

I've a site serving content (and products) to different countries built using subfolders (1 subfolder per country).

Basically, it looks like this:
site.com/us/
site.com/gb/
site.com/fr/
site.com/it/
etc.

The first problem was fairly easy to solve:
Avoid duplicated content issues across the board considering that both the ecommerce part of the site and the blog bit are being replicated for each subfolders in their own language. Correct me if I'm wrong but using our copywriters to translate the content and adding the right hreflang tags should do.

But then comes the second problem: how to deal with duplicated content when it's written in the same language? E.g. /us/, /gb/, /au/ and so on.
Given the following requirements/constraints, I can't see any positive resolution to this issue:
1. Need for such structure to be maintained (it's not possible to consolidate same language within one single subfolders for example),
2. Articles from one subfolder to another can't be canonicalized as it would mess up with our internal tracking tools,
3. The amount of content being published prevents us to get bespoke content for each region of the world with the same spoken language.

Given those constraints, I can't see a way to solve that out and it seems that I'm cursed to live with those duplicated content red flags right up my nose.
Am I right or can you think about anything to sort that out?

Many thanks,
Ghill