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It's because the search engines actually treat every parameter based version of your URL as a separate page, so it really does look like duplicate content to the search engine. So Moz is crawling them in the same way. This is informative for you. In your case, you have canonical tags back to the version with the query string, which would be the fix for you anyway.
I just was able to search on a video that we have on YouTube and also is highly featured on a specific page on www.
Searching the video title shows the video in the carousel at the top from YouTube, and a native link to my www site where the video is featured at the top of the SERP.
Hope that helps.
One additional thought to add extra complexity, adding hierarchy is fine, but try to avoid increasing page depth while doing so.
John Mueller discussed this in a few places in the past year that page depth > URL structure.
You are correct - if you are ending up with duplicate content because you are generating URLs (and probably breadcrumbs) based on the navigational path someone is following, canonicals are your best answer.
We use Screaming Frog and we are about 80k pages.
Do you mean for the referrer in GA? If so, than the referrer will be the original source URL, not the Bit.ly URL. Also for the source, so if you use Bit.ly from Twitter back to your site, in GA the traffic will show under social in the acquisition section.
You have some great responses so far, and I wanted to add one additional thought. Header tags are really important for screen readers. When in doubt about the best way to use page elements, I tend to think to myself about what would be the best case for Accessibility. The answer is usually one of your top options for search optimization also.
Thanks Andy - I am so accustomed to thinking in permanent changes and in 301s and rel=canonical, that the obvious 302 skipped my thinking. While I am unsure if they will be willing to 302 in this interim period, it certainly will be my primary recommendation now.
Thanks for reading though that, it was actually a challenge to try to detail out.
I work for a company that recently acquired another company and we are in the process of merging the brands.
Right now we have two website, lets call them:
We are working with a web development company who is designing our brand new site, which will launch at the end of September, we can call that www.parentacquired.com.
Normally it would be simple enough to just 301 redirect all content from www.parentcompanyalpha.com and www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com to the mapped migrated content on www.parentacquired.com.
But that would be too simple. The reality is that only 30% of www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com will be migrating over, as part of that acquired business is remaining independent of the merged brands, and might be sold off.
So someone over there mirrored the www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com site and created an exact duplicate of www.acquiredcompanybravo.com.
So now we have duplicate content for that site out there (I was unaware they were doing this now, we thought they were waiting until our new site was launched).
Eventually we will want some of the content from acquiredcompanyalpha.com to redirect to acquiredcompanybravo.com and the remainder to parentacquired.com.
What is the best interim solution to maintain as much of the domain values as possible? The new site won't launch until end of September, and it could fall into October. I have two sites that are mirrors of each other, one with a domain value of 67 and the new one a lowly 17. I am concerned about the duplicate site dragging down that 67 score.
I can ask them to use rel=canonical tags temporarily if both sites are going to remain until Sept/Oct timeframe, but which way should they go? I am inclined to think the best result would be to have acquiredcompanybravo.com rel=canonical back to acquiredcompanyalpha.com for now, and when the new site launches, remove those and redirect as appropriate. But will that have long term negative impact on acquiredcomapnybravo.com?
Sorry, if this is convoluted, it is a little crazy with people in different companies doing different things that are not coordinated.
To add to what Miriam said, as I am in the process of handling a merger for a client right now and am dealing with this same issue.
In my client's case, they are building a new website that represents the merged company, migrating the content from both sites into one (in many cases content on both sites is redundant so we eliminate/consolidate some) and then we will use 301 redirects mapped from the old site content to the new site content.
A couple answers are applicable here, because the bucket "social" might be a little broad to answer this.
For G+: Engagement (shares, +1s, etc) does affect rankings for those people who have your G+ page and search relevant content to what you are posting on your G+ page, if they are logged in and getting personalized results. Additionally, if you are logged in and getting personalized results, your network (pages you have in a circle) on G+ who have liked, shared, engaged with content also seems to rank higher on your SERP.
Additionally, there is a strong correlation between high engagement on FB and Twitter posts (comments, likes, shares RTs) and ranking....but there is no definitive causal link that I am aware of. If you create good content that does well in social media, it is probably being linked in other places, and therefore will rank well.
I usually just use the Moz Rank score here using Open Site Explorer. http://moz.com/learn/seo/mozrank
We use Screaming Frog and we are about 80k pages.
It really depends on whether you are looking for a higher CTR or a lower CPA. This will vary depending on what your goal is. If you are just trying to drive any and all traffic, then generally higher bids and first position will almost always result in more raw traffic.
If you are driving to a landing page though, and your goal is to get qualified traffic to not only click on the add but convert through some sort of call to action, often a lower average ad position can pay off quite well for you. Especially if there are a lot of ads and you have 3 ads on top of the organic listing and several more on the right side of the SERP. In those cases, I often find a lot of success in qualified clicks with an average position of 4.5.
Of course it does depend on your vertical, and B2B and B2C often act very differently.
I just was able to search on a video that we have on YouTube and also is highly featured on a specific page on www.
Searching the video title shows the video in the carousel at the top from YouTube, and a native link to my www site where the video is featured at the top of the SERP.
Hope that helps.
Hi, so, I have a website. Let's call it a cooking website with about 300 pieces of content cross-listed among 20 categories.
I want to move my entire site, hook line and sinker, to Facebook. My first thought was to do this with a domain-wide 301, as that would preserve most of the authority and juice my site has built over the years... but would this have a corollary effect of unfocusing my keyword strategy? E.g. is there a risk in doing a sitewide 301 to a single landing page, in that some of the juice I'd be passing to my new home page would be from, say, "recipes for jelly donuts?"
Has anyone had an experience making a large product transition like this, and are there any current best practices?
Thanks!
And in this case, "can't" is not only dev code, but marketing code also. They are so afraid of change here...but I get that, we are successful too.
And just my saying "hey, we have the worst case scenario for SEO right now" is not always enough...they want more opinions. Which is why this Q&A feature of SEOMoz is awesome! Thanks again for your thoughtful responses.
You have some great responses so far, and I wanted to add one additional thought. Header tags are really important for screen readers. When in doubt about the best way to use page elements, I tend to think to myself about what would be the best case for Accessibility. The answer is usually one of your top options for search optimization also.
I was killing time looking at some old posts and came across yours. I just Googled 'construction human resources' and found this site: http://www.clp.com/Construction-Human-Resources
They seem to do a decent job of SEO. Although I did not audit the page, I just spot checked a bunch of those sections from the sidebar and they were first page for many of them.