According to the updated Google webmaster guidelines (Jan 2016), tabbed or not immediately visible content will have even less value than previously.

"Make your site's important content visible by default. Google is able to crawl HTML content hidden inside navigational elements such as tabs or expanding sections, however we consider this content less accessible to users, and believe that you should make your most important information visible in the default page view."

Summary of changes here: https://www.seroundtable.com/changes-in-the-google-webmaster-guidelines-21551.html

Firstly, use a website crawler (e.g. Screaming Frog) and check that every page on the website has Google Analytics tag, and also make sure it's implemented correctly.

Then I recommend reading this article, which explains the difference in more details: http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2015/08/05/google-search-console-clicks-vs-google-analytics-sessions/

Three common reasons when there are more clicks than sessions (copied from the article):

1. Non-HTML pages like PDFs or Word docs are not counted in Google Analytics but are counted as Google Search Console clicks
2. The few users who do not have JavaScript enabled will go unnoticed by Google Analytics. (this can be SPAM bots too!)
3. The few users that click on a search result but bounce off the site before the GA snippet can be loaded will also go unnoticed by GA. (This number may be higher if the code snippet takes an unusually long time to execute – if it is at the bottom of the source code, for example.)

Hope it helps.

Google is pretty "smart" and will understand that it is an e-commerce site with thousands of products and it won't penalize your site for keyword stuffing, but make sure you follow Google's guidelines, such as: category and product pages have unique page titles, H1 headings, image ALT tags, meta descriptions and all the other basic on-site elements make sense.

Also, it's recommended to use structured data for breadcrumbs, so the search robot will understand the information architecture of your website.

Sometimes it's difficult, but it's also a good practice to add a few sentences to at least the major category and sub-category pages. E.g. some intro text about the wide range of shirt, brands, etc, so this on-page content will make the category pages more unique and more relevant.

Your link goes to a login page. I think you meant this: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/search-engine-optimization-help/hidden-text-in-websites/

Google is most likely smart enough to know these tricks, so I wouldn't waste time by implementing various CSS layer tricks. Try to follow the webmaster guidelines as much as possible.

I agree with Logan.

If the ratio of redirected or broken URLs is too high in your sitemap XML, there is a chance that Google won't crawl it as frequently as it should because the search robot doesn't want to waste resources on these URLs.

The only time when redirected URLs are useful in the sitemap XML is when you're migrating the domain or make IA changes and you want to make sure that the search engine discovers the 301 redirections as quickly as possible.

Hi Rand

What can non-US Moz customers use until you add UK or AU search volumes? We use the keyword difficulty tool's score and search volume reports quite often.

Would you keep the keyword difficulty tool live until you fix the keyword explorer's search volume?

I suppose your top priority keywords are the head terms (e.g. used car) and brand related searches that are targeted by category pages, e.g. used mazda cx 5. The "duplicate" pages are the actual car pages that change on a daily basis, every time they sell or add a new car.

Your priorities are the head terms and category related searches, so having duplicate content on a few dozen mazda cx 5 pages shouldn't be an issue. The website duplicates product descriptions, not articles or blog posts and I'm pretty sure Google is smart enough to understand the concept.

It's unlikely that the actual product pages will rank in Google, because they are changed too frequently and don't have time to build up page authority.

Make sure you don't have thousands of duplicate page titles, by using unique identifiers and even ID numbers in the page titles. E.g. Used [colour] [year] [brand] [model] [mileage]

Hope it helps.

Hi Joshua

subcategory.htm pages will perform just as well as subcategory/ and having .htm in the URL doesn't affect link juice flow at all. .htm or .html are perfectly valid HTML files; however, some prefer having shorter, "nicer" looking URLs. If this is the case and the website is still in the early stages of SEO, then 301 redirect the .htm URLs and make sure every navigation elements links to the non-htm URLs in the future.

In some cases, the slash ending URLs can be considered duplicate pages (even though I'm pretty sure Google will understand the honest mistake), so it's one of the basic SEO recommendations to set redirections and make sure the website navigation doesn't mix the two. Also, SEO tools will keep sending you duplicate page title warnings, so it's better to clean it up as soon as possible.

Hope it helps.

Perfect, I can survive that. Thank you!

PS: the kw difficulty search volume is closer to AdWords than the explorer's US search volume. In a Q&A post I mentioned a head term search volume which has 6-9k searches in AdWords and the kw difficulty tool but 118-300k in kw explorer

I vote for #2. Having brand and model category pages with all the product listings can be more beneficial for SEO, and they can use breadcrumbs with schema markup, which will look nicely in the SERP.

• brand

• model 1

• product 1

• product 2

• ...

• model 2

• ...

I was referring to the navigation breadcrumbs that use can mark up with structured data. Like this: https://developers.google.com/structured-data/breadcrumbs?hl=en