Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi community,

Let's say I have a men's/women's clothing website. Would it be better to do clothing.com/mens and clothing.com/womens OR mens.clothing.com and womens.clothing.com?

I understand Moz's stance on blogs that it should be clothing.com/blog, but wanted to ask for this different circumstance.

Thanks for your help!

Hi Sheena, sorry I didn't respond sooner, I wasn't receiving any notifications.

Thank you very much for your answer though, this was extremely helpful and helped verify that what I was thinking was correct, with some added help from you.

I didn't think taking away the 301 was the best approach, but from a bosses standpoint he sees it as them getting clicks that shouldn't be theirs, I just have to do my best job of explaining why it's better for long term.

The hreflang is in place and I think the best approach would be to consolidate international domains to the .com ccTLD's

Thanks again, very helpful.
-Reed

Hi Moz Community,

Weird/confusing question so I'll try my best. The company I work for also has an Australian retail website. When you do a site:ourbrand.com search the second result that pops up is au.brand.com, which redirects to the actual brand.com.au website.

The Australian site owner removed this redirect per my bosses request and now it leads to a an unavailable webpage.

I'm confused as to best approach, is there a way to noindex the au.brand.com URL from US based searches? My only problem is that the au.brand.com URL is ranking higher than all of the actual US based sub-cat pages when using a site search.

Is this an appropriate place for an hreflang tag? Let me know how I can help clarify the issue.

Thanks,
-Reed

Thanks for your help Travis, that was a really solid answer.

Hi, I'm not too sure what to do about this or what to think of it.

This magically appeared in my companies robots.txt file (literally magically appeared/text is below)

User-agent: Baiduspider
User-agent: Baiduspider-video
User-agent: Baiduspider-image
Disallow: /

I know that Baidu is the Google of China, but I'm not sure why this would appear in our robots.txt all of a sudden. Should I be worried about a hack? Also, would I want to disallow Baidu from crawling my companies website?

Thanks for your help,
-Reed

Hi Jeff,

Exactly what I was looking for. I don't think we'd need to change the way titles are displayed, just wanted to be sure it wouldn't count it as duplicate or see it as a keyword hiding technique.

Thanks for your help

Hi Bruce,

Thanks for your response, really helpful.

Cheers.

Hi Moz Community,

I know that hiding h1 tags isn't a good practice for SEO and google, but we have banners that look much nicer than the stock text Magento uses for its titles.

The banners have the same text and the h1 is in the source code, just not visible on front end. The option Magento gives is "hide title on the page." So I'm not sure if this is actually the bad way to hide it or if it's fine for search engines.

Thanks,
-Reed

Thanks Marcus,

Your Answer is really helpful. I have read a few of the pagination articles and agree they all say you don't need it 100%, but I needed some extra help understanding the issue.

I think in this case no following secondary pages would be best because the content might look duplicated. When I do a inurl:dir site search I get back searchers indexing "high/low price" "most/least reviewed" etc. for products so that could be the issue there.

Again thanks for your in depth response to help clear up my issue.

-Reed

Hi Moz Community, I've recently started helping a new site with their overall health and I have some pagination issues.

It's an ecommerce site and they currently don't have any pagination in place except for these tags:

1. Prev

2. 1

3. 2

4. 3

5. ...

6. 66

7. Next

I understand what these are doing (leading visitors to the previous, next or last page, but do these do anything for search crawlers or does the site need to have an option of:
1.rel=next/rel=prev
2.canonical leading to the view all page (the view all page takes a long time to load)

Thanks for your help.

-Reed

Thanks Dana, checked out the blog and video...pinned to my RSS feed.

Hi Sheena, sorry I didn't respond sooner, I wasn't receiving any notifications.

Thank you very much for your answer though, this was extremely helpful and helped verify that what I was thinking was correct, with some added help from you.

I didn't think taking away the 301 was the best approach, but from a bosses standpoint he sees it as them getting clicks that shouldn't be theirs, I just have to do my best job of explaining why it's better for long term.

The hreflang is in place and I think the best approach would be to consolidate international domains to the .com ccTLD's

Thanks again, very helpful.
-Reed

Thanks for helping out Bryan and Donford, it's been about a month and a half since migration so I'll definitely wait it out another month, implement some good marketing/content and see what it looks like after that.

Ahh, the waiting game of organic traffic.

Hey Ryan, I actually have another question if you wouldn't mind helping out.

Before our migration, our old team was creating all URLS with underscores as separators and ending in .jsp. I changed this to not have .jsp and to only use "-" as word separators in URLs.

However, we have a lot of backlinks with content linking to those .jsp URLs (and our old blog posts all link to those pages), which are 404 product pages. (I can redirect, but there are thousands of them). I could probably develop a script to automatically rewrite too.

My question: could this be a contributing factor to our organic downfall too?

Haha yeah I tend to get OCD on a lot of things. Awesome, thanks for taking the time to get back to me on this. I have learned to love the Moz community these days.

And that's a good answer, that's what I was hoping, but I guess anytime I see a traffic dip I immediately panic rather than take into mind what you just said.

Thanks again,

-Reed