Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I would not suggest working to get all of your facets indexed unless you can take steps to ensure quality and unique content is presented.  For example, the facet you provided shows the products filtered by load capacity, lift, etc.  If all of your facets were crawled and indexed, you would end up with a large number of pages that simply have a single product listed, which would in turn compete with your single product page.

Additionally, as you are not adding any additional unique content onto the page to further highlight the facets that are selected.. for example "These lift tables are rated with lift capacity for 300kg and 500kg with a 480mm width." .. I doubt you would see any improved rankings or traffic as a result of indexing these facets.

Lastly, I'm not aware that the URL structure you have provided for the facets is actually navigable by search engines at this point.  the # in the url typically creates a "break" in the url, with the crawlers parsing the content before, but after.  This isn't to say that it isn't a work in progress or that crawler behavior would change  (read: spiders get js now, flash, etc.).  But if you want those urls to get crawled, I would suggest implementing pushstate to force seo friendly urls for each facet..  alternatively you could look at a solution leveraging the ? instead of #  and = instead of : so the facets appear as query parameters.

Is it worth your time?  Depends on whether you think you faceted pages have enough value and weighting that they could rank alone.  It is also worth considering whether or not your faceted navigation is allowing for crawling of the paginated pages, therefore allowing full crawl/index of all of your products vs. only those available on the first page.

Good luck!

Jake Bohall

Hi Anders,

If you are going to use the widget, it needs to have a very strong and justifiable purpose to be linked to..   You might consider the relevance of the page/site that will be linking to you, and no-following all placement except those you feel are highly relevant .. just to try and minimize risks.

Cheers,

Jake

They are likely trying to help you out by getting OFN and Venturize into the meta description, as your default does not contain any of those terms.   If you feel those terms are more heavily associated with your brand, you might consider updating your description to reference and see if that fixes the behavior.

Typically Google does this to help you out, and pulls from the content of the pages, and your footer is the only element referencing the OFN keywords.

Cheers,

Jake Bohall

This sounds like a stereotypical badge linking campaign, and certainly carries some risk.  You are correct to assume you shouldn't use target keywords, etc.. in anchor text less you draw even more unwanted attention.   The "safe" practice would be to no-follow those links.

With the latest penguin update, the assumption is that these types of links, upon being identified, would simply be devalued, but the verdict is certainly not in at this point.

You might be better served, from a risk management standpoint, to consider giving your customers a js script code they can place on the site that shows off their badge, much similar to the way Google does this for their partners program, BBB does this for the live ratings updates, etc..     Then if you want to help your customers craft a blog post, or provide some additional information/resource they can write about in a blog/news section on their site, you might consider that in addition to the JS.

Cheers,

Jake Bohall

For your "main question":  I think the chances of this are slim if you maintain a quality site. Content review and moderation should be enforced in the forum to avoid any types of issues with low quality UGC... the migration is a good time to review the content you are copying over.

Regarding what your developer says, yes there is some risk of issues because of the forum, but if you do a good job moderating this shouldn't be any type of issue.  Lastly, I wouldn't expect any type of "penalty" carrying over to the other sections of your site as G has gotten pretty decent lately at separating wheat from chaff when assessing site quality.

As a suggestion: I would set-up each of those subfolders independently within GSC so you can monitor for any traffic/impression fluctuations, higher profile pages, etc. independently.

-Jake Bohall

Are you referring to having a page like this -- http://www.selectequipment.net/brands/Cutler-Hammer and simply adding a facet/filter for product type?

The individual product pages Should be optimized for Brand+Product+Model.

The faceted navigation within the site alludes to the fact that you can "drill down" onto a specific brand, but clicking the link takes to the general brand page vs. a page filtered for that brand...  or allowing you to filter product type when viewing by brand..

In this case, I would create the navigable heirarchy within the site to view all of the brands and filter by product type within the brand pages, essentially creating all of these "combos" you are talking about.  Further, I would create limits so pages with fewer than say 5 unique items (you determine appropriate #) are noindex,follow.   Lastly, I would make sure all product pages are also optimized to include the brand, product type, and part number as part of the optimization goals for each product page.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Jake Bohall

Have you tried re-applying for inclusion?

Have you read this - https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787?hl=en

Cheers,

Jake Bohall

Are you looking for information aside from having the site properly associated with a Google My Business page, using the local business markup, and incorporating references/content on the page to the Geo you are targeting?

Maybe you can provide some detail as to what you have already done, and what specifically you are running into?

Have you read this - https://moz.com/blog/local-seo-checklist

Cheers,

Jake Bohall

Hi Becky,

You don't need "product listing" schema.. you just simply markup each product on the page using the product schema - https://schema.org/Product...

I don't see any glaring issues with your pagination.

I do however, see the issue with displaying the products on the page continues..  Google most recently cached this page on 9/30 - http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches - and it still is only displaying a single product in the cache.   You might be able to get some insight into any JS that is being blocked by looking in GSC...   Using Google's mobile testing tool, it indicates there is some en-gb.js file that is being blocked, but I couldn't find it in the source.. so it must be referenced elsewhere.  I'm not sure if this is the issue, but It's a decent starting point.

Best,

Jake Bohall

A few things to consider:

• Are you sure you haven't built too many "good" links and penalized yourself for those terms?
• Is the site ranking for other terms, or other related terms?
• When you say you are getting nowhere, do you mean that you aren't front page, that your rankings have stayed exactly where they were, or that you continue not to appear in search results for that term?

If you have a solid authority domain laying around, you might try building some content on it related to your term and see if you get any coverage.  If you do, and the coverage is better than with the site you are trying, then odds are you have a tainted domain (either through your actions, or some previous actions), or you simply do not have enough authority to rank.

-Jake Bohall

Hi Becky,

Great question!

For the page - http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches - Google's cache is showing they are only able to load/see a single product on the page.

The same is happening on the cached versions of your paginated pages like http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches?page=3  ...

Google is able to find these paginated versions because you are properly implementing the rel=next and rel=prev in the source of the pages.  I wouldn't worry too much at this point about the jscript loading creating the "anchor" urls with sorting, etc.. though you could consider using pushstate to force the correct canonical URL in the browser.

I would focus on making sure the content is indexable by Google so they can find the links to all of your product pages, etc. You might want to consider a pre-render service for those pages, or as you mentioned, having a page listing all products so they can easily be crawled.  You should double check this by fetching the pages in GSC and seeing how they render.

On a side note, you might want to look into some product schema options for your content

Cheers,

Jake Bohall

Have you tried fetching those URLs as Googlebot within GSC?

-Jake Bohall

Recommending link development would be difficult without knowing more about your specific industry, competitive advantages, etc.

Generally speaking, you want to focus first on ensuring you have valuable assets capable of justifying new links to your site.  This would be a variety of content types depending upon your business, but can range from Free Advice and How To Guides, Data Insights, Tools/Widgets, Detailed comparison/reviews, Interviews and insights from industry through leaders, etc.    You can use methods like broken link building to identify new content opportunities that you can capitalize upon, or look at top linked pages on competitor sites to see the types of content that has earned their links.

Once you have established your linkable assets, you can begin the process of outreach and amplification to bring attention to those assets and earn natural links.  Of course, you can always reach out to other thought leaders, cited sources, etc... to encourage some additional sharing, linking, etc.

You can also do link profile comparisons to see if there are reputable outlets citing your competitors but not mentioning you.

Those are just a few examples off the top of my head.  If you have the resources to do link dev internally and just need strategy guidance, you should check out the Moz recommended list, as many of those agencies (I know ours does) will offer ad-hoc consultation to help your team get the systems in place to be successful with your link dev efforts.

Cheers,

Jake

Generally speaking, having a flatter URL structure is typically a better play for SEO.

To better understand why your network admin may have an issue.. can you provide a few examples of "old url" and "new url"..  You can use anonymous fillers, but I'm just looking to get a better understanding of what you have done.

Cheers,

Jake

Great question..

First... some of your rankings problem may be around this - "Guest Posts, Citations, Media mentions, Profile links etc."... at least 2 of those items carries some decent risk, the consequences of which would be "not ranking".   Have you checked search console to see if any manual actions exist?  Did you have rankings and they disappeared, or have you been unable to secure rankings in general?   Does the site currently get organic traffic, but just maybe on terms that you aren't targeting?

As far as the development site, this could easily be a separate issue from your rankings, and I would doubt this would cause significant rankings drops if the dev site isn't being indexed by Google.  Would you be lucky enough to have any type of access to this through a CMS login?  If so, you could easily verify the site in search console and see where things stand in terms of indexing.  Additionally, if you could access through the CMS, you might be able to change a few settings, such as canonical tags, "website" or discourage indexing (if wordpress), etc. .that would cause the site to begin redirecting to your clientwebsite.com or at least give the indication that it is a known copy..    Did you check the individual pages of the site to see if a meta tag is in place on the pages blocking robots?

Ultimately the easiest thing regarding the dev site would be to simply ask the dev company to remove the site...

Cheers,

Jake

I'm not aware of any research or detailed reviews, but it is safe to say that if other webmasters are utilizing the content from the firehouse and subsequently linking back to your site, there is an inherent benefit for SEO based on the link acquisition.

Cheers,

Jake

Thanks Ipegiro...  My point exactly on saying "unless they are creating value within the url"...  as obviously "bunny-on-stool" has a completely different meaning than "bunny-stool"..

Cheers

-Jake

So, a series of questions to better understand:

1. Have you asked the affiliate to remove the sitewide link to see if your rankings pop back up?
2. Can we assume you did full troubleshooting to identify this one sitewide affiliate as being the root cause of the problem vs. a potential mass duplication problem from indexing all of the variations of the URL with the affiliate tags?
3. When you say it 302 redirects, is the 302 from  www.yoursite.com/product?afid=someaffiliate to www.yoursite.com/product?
4. How are you handling the query parameter in GSC?
5. Do you have a canonical tag in place pointing to the parameterless URL?
6. Do you noindex,nofollow pages that have the affiliate parameter on them?

For the record, please don't go implement all of these things above, as some would be conflicting ..e.g. the canonical and the noindex both could cause serious problems.

You could certainly disavow that specific affiliate directly in search console, but I would probably hesitate to disavow the entire affiliate network, as that may later have negative consequences on your affiliates (discrediting them, unnatural outbound links penalties, etc.) and would eliminate any authority you could be currently benefiting from... e.g. maybe you only ranked #12 because of your affiliate links?

Cheers,

Jake

This is actually more common than you might think, though you probably don't even realize it sometimes.  I've only seen this with forums, blogs, multi-language/geo sites, etc.. that are hosted with different technologies on different servers (Cart on IIS, Blog on LAMP, etc..) and the SEO/Dev team has agreed this is better than a subdomain path.

The biggest challenge will likely be in ensuring the load times aren't affected, but this can generally be easily overcome by hosting the different servers in the same datacenter, caching elements on the master server, etc..

Cheers,

Jake

Absolutely, I'm glad you got things squared!

I see the homepage in my results - https://www.google.com/#q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.hauteheadquarters.com

Homepage was also cached today: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.hauteheadquarters.com&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.&biw=1920&bih=955&dpr=1&ion=1&ech=1&psi=EYbEV6CLN8aweJDvktgD.1472497162096.3&ei=EYbEV6CLN8aweJDvktgD&emsg=NCSR&noj=1

I would leave this -   .. but remove the meta tag..

The language tag is not required to "rank well"..

I don't believe meta name="language" is even an HTML5 declaration... So you can probably lose that one..   If you are going to set the language you can do it on the html tag, or in the header... though I do believe you can also set the language of a specific div element if there is a section of the page in an alternate language.

If you have multiple language versions of your site, then you can use hreflang tag (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en) to reference those other pages, just be sure they canonical to themselves and not to the x-default version.

Hope this helps,

Jake Bohall

Hi Nizar,

Typically we encourage clients to consolidate subdomains onto the main site whenever possible to help consolidate authority. Subdomains are generally viewed as separate sites with regards to authority, so separating them would require each build its own independent authority.

That being said, there are often technical challenges with hosting everything on the same subdomain..e.g. Having a wordpress blog while running BigCommerce, etc.. when you have multiple platforms across different business aspects.  In those cases, we just encourage clients to interlink heavily when possible with things like shared navigation, consistency in design, etc...  to make sure that any opportunities for G to consider them as one and the same are met.

On the flip side, if you have sections like the forum, that may have a significant number of pages, but do not independently draw new backlinks with enough authority to contribute to overall domain authority, parsing this out can reduce the dispersion of authority on your main site (fewer pages), and eliminate crawl depth on unpopular pages.

To make the decision, I would ask myself the following:

1. Do I need to do this to create a better experience for my users?
2. Do these sections independently have significant authority that my main domain may lose by removing the content?
3. Will may main domain continue to attract new links/citations if these sections are removed?
4. Do those pages currently enjoy high rankings/traffic that contribute to specific KPIs that I wouldn't want to have negatively impacted (e.g. do forum visits often result in a product sale or service inquiry)

You could always take this effort in chunks and monitor the impacts, knowing you can roll back if needed.  For example, you could move a lesser popular section such as the directory to the subdomain and watch aggregate traffic changes over the course of a couple of months and see if any negative impact occurs, and if so, if it is small enough of a drop that you could stomach on other sections.

Hope this helps!

Best,

Jake Bohall

I don't think so.. I would let it be.

Sure thing.. glad to help!

Hi VCJ... I'm guessing someone may need to update that page to show the recent discovery that PageRank is passed...  However, I would suggest the following caveats:

1. It may take longer to pass that authority, as we assume Google has to determine that it is a 302 intended to be a 301 prior to passing it along.
2. John Mueller does specifically mention PageRank by name, but we do not know about other important signals in the algorithm with value that may not be passed along the same way in a 302 vs. a 301.

Cheers,

Jake Bohall

There should be any issue in using multiple methods as long as the data is consistent between them.

Cheers,

Jake Bohall

This will be difficult to troubleshoot without the site/page and an example phrase...  It may just be that Google hasn't mapped the query / answer .. or it may be that you haven't made the answer clear enough.

Best,

Jake Bohall

It looks like the page renders, but sends a 404 header to the browser.    Sounds like the developer may have left some code from a 404 page... don't worry, they are not alone - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4921211/404-header-response-but-page-displays-ok

Cheers,

Jake Bohall

My first thought would be to simply canonical the pages to the preferred version you would want a visitor to find in search results (I'm guessing the mini-site versions b/c of the UX benefit of someone searching a specific procedure/condition)..

This will tell Google that you know it is a copy, and indicate where all authority should be passed.

https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization is a great resource you should check out on the topic.

Cheers,

Jake Bohall

We can assume this link redirects the user to your site through that URL?

If it is a 301 redirect and the original link is followed, then it likely would pass authority along with the redirect.    You can check the redirect type using any of the http headers browser plugins, URI Valet, or similar service.

Cheers,

Jake

Hi Patrick,

Did you recently do the switch from http://www.thepatrick...  to https://thepatrick....    ?   It looks like Google only has some chinese content for the www version of your site - https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=site:www.thepatrickmullin.com/&start=0

If this issue concerns you... I would probably suggest you update your htaccess file to do a redirect from http://www.thepatrick..  to https://thepatrick..  directly vs. letting wordpress push people around.  If you don't suspect having a lot of links to the www version of your site or many people visiting that way, I would just let it be...otherwise for this type of situation, it likely won't have any impact on your rankings.

If you are already doing these redirects in .htaccess, it would be helpful if you posted your htaccess file contents here so I can take a look.

Thanks,

Jake

Glad to help!

Hi Katherine,

If the user only visits a single page, this counts as a bounce.  In order for it to not be a bounce, the user would have to browse to another page on your site, or take some action that loads a new page.

If you are looking to separate bounce rate from engagement, you should set events and goals based on various actions on the page (scroll %, clicking on a link/button that expands a field, etc.)

Cheers,

Jake

Great questions...

If you feel the calls to action you are adding are relevant to the content and add value to the page, then there should not be any problem adding them in.  Do you currently have the sign-up forms in other locations on the page?

This is definitely something you could easily test by making the change on 1-2 posts and not others, and seeing if there appears to be any negative impact.   Considering this would be "supplemental" content to the page, I would definitely make a point to try and give them a non-intrusive call to action.

Cheers,

Jake

So sorry Cody!!

Sub-directories allow you to consolidate domain authority and often provide ease of maintenance. With the proper markup, you can create a clear signal to Google for the geotargeting.  I understand this isn't an option for you.

With subdomains, you lose some of the shared domain authority that gives sub-directories their advantage, and generally have to maintain separate installs, etc..  You can specify a geo within search console, but it won't be as effective as a ccTLD.

With ccTLDs, you can create a much quicker signal for geotargeting your traffic, but the domain authority for each site is generally wholly independent and will require more substantive effort to build the initial authority of each ccTLD, etc..  ccTLDs tend to earn better CTR from the SERPs in the geo, as they seem more likely to be relevant.

In your case, I would go with the ccTLDs..

-Jake

Hi Cody,

I typically recommend a subdirectory structure unless you foresee that the site/brand will be presented different in each country (e.g. you will have different products or service offerings), or if each site/brand will be managed by different development firms and/or hosted on different platforms.   By maintaining these within subfolders, you can often better manage your SEO by forcing consistency within the platform, and more easily contribute authority back to the parent (default) language at the root domain.

I hope this helps.

-Jake

Many times, you would simply noindex,follow the tag pages to prevent this.   Alternatively, you could look at conditionally noindexing the tag pages unless there is a minimum number of posts applied so as to prevent the tag pages from being indexed when they only have 1-2 blog posts associated, and therefore would be overly similar to the blog page itself.

Also, be sure to use snippets/excerpts on tag pages vs. the entire post.

-Jake

Hi Logan,

It is certainly possible that without actual pricing information, especially if it is an obvious ecom space, that the lack of pricing could be construed as an indicator of a gateway or affiliate site... as it would appear the transaction is unlikely to occur on that site.

The other possibility is that the lack of pricing is causing people doing research to more frequently bounce back to the SERPS and choose a competitor site for the info.... resulting in a signal to Google that while you are a strong candidate (deserving front page), you don't necessarily serve the majority of people performing the query and thus do not deserve #1-2,etc.

Have you tried adding a published price to a category/section and seeing if that has any type of impact?  Maybe you can talk the client into publishing the average retail price for the items and note that wholesale pricing is applied after logging in..  Also, Are there "add to cart" buttons despite not having pricing?

Please keep us posted as I'd love to hear how this plays out.

-Jake

Hi Ben,

For the specific issue you've noted, we simply need to add a snippet of code to your htaccess file to redirect all /index.php traffic to the root...   https://yoast.com/magento-seo/#www  Gives a good tutorial on how to do this depending upon where your base install is located.

If you are worried about duplicate content on product pages, I would definitely recommend you check out some of the SEO modules for magento (like yoast)... and fully check out that article on magento optimization.. they do a great job of covering the common magento issues, and I personally refer back to it quite often - https://yoast.com/magento-seo/

Cheers,

Jake

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/tavissmiley/interviews/human-rights-advocate-mavis-leno/  -- Link is in the external links section with the anchor "Ms. Leno's Bio"

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/20/eric-schmidt-google-alan-rusbridger -- Link is on anchor Jared Cohen

I didn't see the reference to a link from CNN.

-Jake

I would definitely check to make sure the canonical tag is being properly used.   Make sure it is an absolute url vs. a relative url.

That being said, please note that just because a canonical tag is in place, that doesn't prevent Google from crawling and indexing the page, and including the page in search results with the site:domain command.  If you see the canonicalized URLs outranking their canonical, then you can start to question why Google isn't honoring the canonical.

Please note that canonical tags are a recommendation and not a directive.. meaning Google doesn't have to honor them if they do not feel the page is truly a canonical.

-Jake

Consider this:  "The location of a Sitemap file determines the set of URLs that can be included in that Sitemap. A Sitemap file located at http://example.com/catalog/sitemap.xml can include any URLs starting with http://example.com/catalog/ but can not include URLs starting with http://example.com/images/." here: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#location

B would not be an acceptable approach as http://example.com/sitemap/chocolatecakes.xml could only contain a sitemap of content located in http://example.com/sitemap.   For this same reason, you couldn't create sitemaps in subfolder directories...

This is the best approach from those options you mentioned...

(a) http://example.com/sitemap.xml 
http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes.xml 
http://example.com/sitemap-spongecakes.xml
http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes-cherryicing.xml

It is worth noting that you can have a sitemap of sitemaps.. so for example.

http://example.com/sitemap.xml could contain links to http://example.com/sitemap-cakes,  http://example.com/sitemap-articles, etc..
http://example.com/sitemap-cakes.xml could contain links to http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes.xml, http://example.com/sitemap-vanilla-cakes.xml, etc..

Try not to over-complicate things by trying to create sub-category sitemaps, etc.. Unless you have an exorbitant amount of sub-category pages, or have directories/sections managed by different cms, etc.

You generally see large sites will have a separate sitemap based on content type (company pages, category pages, product pages, blog pages)

Topical relevance (LDA) has been positively correlated as one of the strongest onsite rankings factors (https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors/correlations)  and as a result has been a driving factor behind sites adding additional contextual content.   In my experience, a well ranking site likely has a higher contextual relevance because it has comprehensive content on the topic demonstrating subject matter expertise...

As SEOs, we typically mimic those strategies that we know high-ranking sites have implemented in an effort to gain higher rankings ourselves.  For business that aren't subject matter experts, and simply add contextually relevant content, the result isn't often improved rankings for the target keyword (e.g.  iphone 5 coupons), but instead is an increase in the overall traffic to the site as a result of a broader set of long-tail keywords with rankings (get discounted iphone 5, best deal on iphone 5, etc.)

Hi Eric,

I understand it can be frustrating and challenging to succeed and manage client expectations when working in a competitive space where business may use tactics that your client is not comfortable with.  It's also unfortunate that links often have such a strong signal that rankings can still be achieved regardless of the quality of onsite SEO.

Typically many of the large publications no-follow their comment links and links on paid advertisements.  It is important to note that Google may still consider those links as part of some other signal and that achieving a placement on those sites can often lead to additional press, citations, etc. on other sites that may place followed links.

...  however, you must also consider that Google's goal is to confidently provide the website it believes searches will find most relevant to their query.  A few facts I quickly dug up on APB

• has been in business for over 50 years compared to your clients 10+ years.
• has a long history representing US Presidents, Foreign Prime Ministers, Martin Luther King, Andy Worhal, Mikhail Gorbachev, Dan Rather, etc. etc..
• has a record in the Guinness World Book as largest lecture agency in the world.
• has been receiving legitimate press with a 10 page feature in the NYT, repeat coverage in Newsweek, etc. since the 1960's

Regardless of the link sources, etc..  this business is in the knowledge graph and Google can reliably and confidently present this business to people searching for competitive terms. Now that I've tooted their horn a little, please don't feel overwhelmed or interpret this to mean you can't compete with large global companies that have a long history of success and are well established in the SERPs... this is why I love SEO.

However, to be successful, you need to change your mindset a little and focus on what you can control:

1. Instead of focusing on those highly competitive terms, you are going to have to "chip away" by finding and establishing your authority within various niches. Is there a specific industry or topic area where your client is more strong?  APB appears to have invested heavily in the civil rights space at one time, and also in the global leaders space.
2. Instead of counting their links and judging their link building practices, ask what you can do to build your own authority?  Can you build press around your clients talent?  Does your client sponsor/donate for charitable events?  Has your client written "the Bible" on various topics within the speaking industry?  Does your client have an internal publicist or PR agency getting their executives international speaking engagements?
3. What can your client do that they can't?  If you want to rank #1, you have to be better than them... make sure that message is clear to every person and machine....

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Jake

Links still appear to carry significant weight in the search results, and as such link building is not dead. The challenge is how your organization can effectively build link using legitimate methods that will not place you on Google's radar for violating their guidelines.

To date, it seems the most effective way to do this is through content and brand building efforts, with links being the positive by-product of generating effective/useful content and relationships.

Essentially... white hat link building is the byproduct of good content building.