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Hi Aviad,

It depends.

I recently managed a full eCommerce re-platform where URLS changed due to a new site structure. I mapped thousands of old urls to new (your option 1) and had minimal ranking fluctuations. Be aware that there will be fluctuations, however if you're meticulous they should be minimal.

In the day to day running of the eCommerce store I actively keep old, well ranking URLs alive, rather than unpublishing them when items sell out (your option 2). When similiar items come into stock I can simply change the image, title etc etc and leave the URL. The slight discrepancies in URL to page content has not been an issue for usability at all.

So depending on your situation both options could work. Send through some more information and the community will be better placed to recommend the best way forward.

Jake

Hi team,

I noticed that when I request a desktop rendering in GWT using fetch and render, pages render as the mobile version. Screenshot attached.

It's related to the VHS units in our CSS (as far as I'm aware).

Does anyone know what the implications of this may be? Does it mean googlebot can only see the mobile version of our website?

Any help is appreciated.

Jake

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Just checked my GA data and you're right. Referral data from mountainjade.co.nz is there. Thanks for the heads up.

I've decided to make the switch to https, so will be organising that with dev in the coming few weeks. I'll keep you posted!

Cheers for the help again Logan,

I owe ya.

Great!

I've decided to make the full switch to https now, rather than wait to do it.

I will report back and let you know how it all goes!

Thanks for your help Laura.

Hey Bas,

My developers share your sentiment!

Both versions of the website can be accessed by both the customer and the bots, but because we use relative urls, it can switch between http and https is a single session. This is one example:

1. Land on the homepage from a google search (http homepage is indexed).

2. Browse site on http. Add something to cart. Go to cart.

3. Cart switches to https. Navigate out of cart back into website.

4. Now urls are all https because the links on our site are relative and don't specify a protocol (e.g customer is in cart and then wants to check contact us page, it's link when clicked is as follows [Contact](/contact us). So it pulls the https protocol as there is not http protocol specified in that contact us link.

Hmmm, it definitely could be effecting UX and conversion.

Hi Laura,

Wow, when I said we have self referencing canonicals in place (through Drupal Yoast) I hadn't even thought that it could be applying a canonical to the https version of the site aswell.

I just crawled both http and https and as you're right, the following is happening:

http://example.com is canonicalized to http://example.com

https://example.com is canonicalized to https://example.com

But I'm a little confused. In my first post I was looking for help because google was indexing both http and https pages. Are you saying that it's because of these canonicals that google is indexing both? Would it index both even if I didn't have the canonicals in place but still had SSL?

Just to confirm, canonicalizing the http URLs to the https URLs will tell google to fold the http URLs into the https and only index the https version of the site? Would I need to follow the https migration guide by Cyrus when doing this, or is this not really a 'migration' to https as we're not forcing the customer to browse in https?

Bear with me!

Good morning Laura,

Thanks for the advice.

I've replied below to Logan giving a little context. If you could take a look and let me know your thoughts it would be a huge help.

Hi again Logan,

I've tossed up whether or not to make the full switch to https for a while now. I'll give you a little background so you understand my position:

When our new website launched, our organic search traffic took a dip of around 15%. It has taken around two months for it to recover (almost). We changed site structure out of necessity but followed best practise to ensure we didn't undo alot of the work we had done with the old website. With the 15% organic rankings dip we saw a corresponding dip in revenue, so what I don't want to do is muddy the waters anymore than they already are by adding more moving parts to the mix (migration / redesign / http to https). And we cannot risk another dip in revenue so close to the first which may come with a full https migration (do you think?).

This is why I'm leaning toward replicating what we had in place on the old website and only forcing https on the necessary pages.

Now that you understand my position, would you still recommend the switch to https? I would love to know your thoughts.

The catch with all of this is I'm not sure exactly how the http https was implemented on the old website. At that point in time I had no need to know.

We currently have self referencing canonicals which you know we need to maintain, particularly on product pages which use URL parameters. We are also using relative links across the entire website.

Therefore, what would be the best solution here? Down the rabbit hole we go...

Thanks for your time,

One last question,

How exactly would I remove /shop/necklaces/necklace/?

Sorry if that's a stupid question. I just want to know a bit more before I take it to our dev.

Thanks.

Hi team,

Our new e-commerce website has launched and I've noticed both http and https protocols are being indexed.

www.mountainjade.co.nz

Our old website was http with only the necessary pages running https (cart, checkout etc). No https pages were indexed and you couldn't access a https page if you manually typed it into the browser.

We outrank our competition by a mile, so I'm treading carefully here and don't want to undo the progress we made on the old site, so I have a few questions:

1. How exactly do we remove one protocol from the index? We are running on Drupal. We tried a hard redirect from https to http and excluded the relevant pages (cart, login etc from the redirect), but found that you could still access https pages if you we're in the cart (https) and then pressed back on the browser button for example. At that point you could browse the entire site on https.

2. Is the safer option to emulate what we had in place on the old website e.g http with only the necessary pages being https, rather than making the switch to sitewide https?

I've been struggling with this one, so any help would be much appreciated.

Jake S

Thanks for this Logan!

I really appreciate the help.

Hi Logan,

Thanks for looking into the canonicals for me. I'm glad to hear they appear to be configured correctly.

There are alot of duplicate page issues, with 109 in total at the moment.

Some are similar to the above example, some are URLS that contain refined search parameters (price, design etc), but most are just products which are almost identical. I think this is because most product pages have thin generic content, so for those examples we're in the process of writing unique product descriptions and adding unique imagery.

I've attached a few screenshot if you'd like to take a look.  Your thoughts would be much appreciated

JHN2H

Thanks so much for the reply Yossi.

Great tip about using GSC URL parameter tools. I'll definitely implement that.

Appreciate it.

Jake

Hi team,

We've recently redesigned our website.

Originally we had separate product listings for every product. Even if there was one design in two colours, each colour had its own listing.

With the redesign we merged all of these identical products to help with duplicate content. Customers can now browse the different stone colours available in that design from a single product listing (bottom left of screen under 'select a stone' on a product page)

When the customer changes the stone colour, the product images change to the new colour and its product code is appended to the end of the existing URL. eg:

http://www.mountainjade.co.nz/necklaces/assorted-jades-open-koru-necklace-jc1725/ (original listing)

http://www.mountainjade.co.nz/necklaces/assorted-jades-open-koru-necklace-jc1725/?sku=JC1725BL (black selected)

We have the following self referencing canonicals on all product pages [current-page:url:absolute], yet MOZ is telling me I have alot of duplicate content on pages with the above example.

Have I implemented the canonicals correctly? Is this why Moz is flagging the listings as duplicate?

Thanks Chris.

Everything you've said makes complete sense!

Best,

Jake

Hi guys,

I'm trying to understand the SEO behind our websites header.

www.mountainjade.co.nz

As you can see we have a paragraph of relevant introductory text that is also SEO friendly in our header. What I would like some help with is understanding how google views and assigns 'juice' to information like this in the header or footer of a website.

Usually certain pages have content specific to a given topic, and google ranks these pages accordingly. But with a websites header / footer its content appears on every page as the header is always at the top and footer at the bottom.

1. In what way does my website benefit from the paragraph of text in the header? e.g at the domain level? Just the home page? etc etc

2. How does google assign 'juice' to the paragraph of text? (similiar to Q1).

3. How would my website be effected if I moved the text to the footer? (Aesthetic change)

4. When I 'inspect element' on the paragraph, it is labelled 'div id=site description.' Can someone please explain the relevance of a sites description to SEO for me.

This paragraph of text was in the websites header before I came onboard, and I've been too concerned to change / move it as I don't know enough about it.

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks team,

Jake

Thanks for this Travis,

I took your advice and tracked the appropriate pages in Crazy Egg. The results confirmed my thinking, a very small number of visitors use the social links. Around 1%.

Regardless however, i've decided to keep them in the header for that 1%.

Best,

Hi Jane

Thanks for letting me know that the move won't affect our rankings. I've decided to keep the social profiles in the header, but strip them of color to make them more discrete.

Great point re: expected drop in visits to the social profiles, however with Crazy Egg I noticed that only around 1% of visitors click the social links, so it's rather minor in the scheme of things.

Take care!

Hi there,

As I understand it, you can benefit from redirecting related domains to your main site in a few ways:

1. Purchasing domains that are similar to your own can be a tactical decision to help reduce competition.

If you own them, no one else can use them. Also, if these 'similar domains' possess keywords your main site ranks for, it will be harder for copycat businesses to register these domains, pop up and compete with you directly at the domain level.

2. There is SEO value if you are purchasing the domain from an established website that has established relevant content.

As I understand it, simply purchasing an unused domain that's similar to your own won't have any inherent SEO value (except for country specific domains which I touch on below). A primary factor in determining how much 'google juice' google allocates a domain in the search results is content. So in order to really benefit from additional domains, you would need to flesh out relevant content on these domains and link through to your main site. Ideally these domains would then rank alongside your main domain and push your competitors down a few spots in the search ranking. Your main site would then benefit from the network of links from the 'outlier' sites which feed back to your main site. The major con here is the time and effort involved.

Alternately, you could keep your eyes peeled and when the opportunity arises, acquire a similar domain from an established competitor who is trying to sell up. In the latter case, (if his DA is high enough and content is relevant) by creating redirects from his pages to your main domain, google will pass his 'google juice' to your main domain, and that's beneficial. The major limitation here is that it's not often you can buy out a competitor, and when you can, they often have a skewed view of how valuable their domain actually is.

3. Purchasing similar domains that are country specific could be beneficial.

If you have an international audience it can be beneficial to purchase country specific domains and link these back to your main site. For example, you main sites domain is http://www.theatermania.com/. Purchasing the .co.uk version would be a good idea if you wanted to help customers in the UK find you in the search engines when they search from the UK. As far as i'm aware, more weight is lended to a .co.uk domain when searching from the UK, so this domain may appear higher in the search results than your .com when appropriate phrases are entered into the engines.

This is my understanding of it all! I hope it helps you in some way. And to the other readers, correct me on any point if I'm wrong / slightly off, missed anything.

Jake

Hi team,

I'm in the process of making some aesthetic changes to my website. Its getting quite cluttered so the main purpose is to clean up its look.

I currently have 3x social links in the header, right at the top, and i would really like to move these to the footer to remove some clutter in the header. My concern is that moving them may have an impact on the domains ranking in google.

Website: www.mountainjade.co.nz

We've made some huge gains against our competitors over the past 6 months and I don't want to jeopardise that.

Any help would be much appreciated as i'm self taught in SEO and have learnt through making mistakes. This time however, with Moz, i'd rather get some advice before I make any decisions!

Thanks is advance,

Jake S