Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Aleyda,  this is super useful , thanks a lot for this excellent advice. 
I will still need to do some research on how to best compile a comprehensive list of incoming links, as moz and search console data is still kind of limited for this purpose.

thanks Kristen. Good article. We will try to identify now what kind of CSS is absolutely necessary to put inline. I think the google apache module should help us to idntify this.

To optimize for googles page speed, our developer has moved the 72KB CSS code directly in the page header (not in external CCS file). This way the above the fold loading time was reduced. But may this affect indexing of the page or have any other negative side effects on rankings?

I made a quick test and google cache seems to have our full pages cached, but may it affect somehow negatively our rankings or that google indexes fewer of our pages (here we have some problems with google ignoring about 30% of our pages in our sitemap".)

The problem is: It is delaying server response time to 1,5 seconds on average and is increasing significantly server load. We are talking here about more than 19.ooo rows with hundreds of rewrite rules based on URL patterns. So we have a pressing need to take action.

Is there a way to easily identify those URLs that triggered a 301 in the last 2 months? Doing it based on the apache logs seems a bit daunting as I did not find a tool that filters from the apache logs the 301s. Can I get this information from analytics or any other way easily?

We have a huge httaccess file over several MB which seems to be the cause for slow server response time.

There are lots of 301 redirects related to site migration from 9 months ago where all old URLs were redirected to new URL and also lots of 301 redirects from URL changes accumulated over the last 15 years.

1. Is it safe to delete all 301 redirects which did not receive any traffic in last 2 months ?
2. Or would you apply another criteria for identifying those 301 that can be safely deleted?
3. Any way to get in google analytics or webmaster tools all 301 that received traffic in the last 2 months or any other easy way to identify those, apart from checking the apache log files ?

Capitalization of first letter of each word in meta description. Catches more attention, but may this lead to google ignoring the meta description then more frequently? Same for an occasional capitalized FREE in meta description.

Anybody had experience with this?

Currently I have a 301 redirect from 
https://www.mysite.com/
to 
https://www.mysite.com

And in my canonical and hreflang and also insite links I use consistently https://www.mysite.com without trailing slash. Is this OK? Or do I need to add a trailing slash?

Is it likely that google uses bookmarks(favorites) in chrome as a ranking signal?

genius

Peter, thanks a lot.

How did you get the 3 decimal ratings of the apps in itunes?

How does decimal rounding of reviews  to stars work in ios appstore?
Starting from which average review score to get full 5 star rating?

Duolingo has a 5 star rating, but I doubt that they really have an all time  review average larger than 4,75. In the google playstore their average of the android version is 4,6. Does anybody know how apple calculates the star ratings or has an URL reference where this is explained?

Hi Christy, not yet.

Thanks. Will post an update once we figured out this riddle.

No.

But in theroy it should not make a difference.
hreflang can be either implemented in sitemap or in page.

Thanks for checking. Yes, rich snippets are frequently not showing currently, however this is a different issue and it may be temporary.

My primary concern is rather that google does not index our sitemap for this domain according to search console and related that they show the .com page as cached version of the .uk page.

Happens already for many months.

Good idea to test with VPN. I just gave it a try with a UK proxy  and same result.

Sure, click on cached version of the first result in the following google search. Also you see here the rich snippets in USD instead of GBP:

https://www.google.es/search?q=site%3Ahumidordiscount.co.uk&oq=site%3Ahumidordiscount.co.uk&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.6216j0j1&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8#q=site:humidordiscount.co.uk+firenze

everything looks fine  in google search console.

no hreflang errors, no sitemap errors and google crawls every day basically all our pages for many months already.

Webmaster tools indicates that only 25% of pages on our UK domain with GBP prices is indexed.
We have another US domain with identical content but USD prices which is indexed fine.

When I search in google for site:mydomain I see that most of my pages seem to appear, but then in the rich snippets google shows USD prices instead of the GBP prices which we publish on this page (USD price is not published on the page and I tested with an US proxy and US price is nowhere in the source code).

Then I clicked on the result in google to see cached version of page and google shows me as cached version of the UK product page the US product page.

I use the following hreflang code: rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="https://www.domain.com/product" />
rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="https://www.domain.co.uk/product" />

canonical of UK page is correctly referring to UK page.

Any ideas? Do I need to remove the hreflang for en-US to get the UK domain properly indexed in google?

Hi Joe, thanks. I had the same thoughts and already talked to them. It is only offered to enterprise clients of cloudflare and requires an ICP number which in turn requires a company located in China.

Everett, thanks a lot. 
Finally there was an update of the module we used for generating the code that resolved the problem. Cant say what they changed.

thanks a lot. Makes sense.

Just in our case a bit difficult to implement since all our language versions are based on same template and it would not be worth the effort to make a complete new design/CSS/javascript for the Chinese web version. Site is already mobile optimized.

Anybody has experience with fast and affordable caching services from HongKong?

I made some speed tests and noticed that our website loads 10 times slower for visitors from China mainland.
Did anybody have experience with speeding up loading time for visitors from China?

We operate the Chinese version of our website in a subdirectory and we have no interest in registering a company in China in order to get the ICP number.
Currently using cloudflare who should have a node in HK and serving static content via rackspace.

Does disabling google analytics and facebook widgets really make a difference? (ideally would like to avoid this)

Thanks Cyrus.

Thanks Tom.
I will move now one of my main domains and will use their PRO plan. Noticed they have quite a number of settings to address the false positives. Our problem with cloudflare error pages may have been a temporary one while they where building the cache of the site. Anyway it is easy to enable/disable the cloudflare protection. So not much risk here. Could save us of a lot of potential headache in the future if it works as advertised.

google updated the page. 
Unfortunately it did not have the desired effect.
Rating snippets now disappeared completely. 
Price and stock are still showing in the snippet.

Thanks.

I have unmarked the individual reviews according to your suggestion and I am waiting now for google to update the page.

I am considering using cloudflare for a couple of my sites.
What is your experience?

I researched a bit and there are 3 issues I am concerned about:

1. google may consider site bad neighbourhood in case other sites on same DNS/IP are spammy.
   Any way to prevent this? Anybody had a problem?

2. ddos attack on site on same DNS could affect our sites stability.

3. blocking false positives. Legitimate users may be forced to answer captchas etc. to be able to see the page. 1-2% of legit visitor were reported by other moz member to be identified as false positive. 
   Can I effectively prevent this by reducing cloudflare basic security level?

Also did you experience that cloudflare really helped with uptime of site? In our case whenever our server was down for seconds also cloudflare showed error page and sometimes cloudflare showed error page that they could not connect even when our server response time was just slow but pages on other domains were still loading fine.

the product pages of my ecommerce site contain schema markup. 
according to rich snippet tool from google all looks fine and properly formatted
however in the SERP google shows the last rating in the snippet instead of the aggregate rating.

any idea how to show the aggregate ratings?

URL: https://www.humidordiscount.co.uk/adorini-triest-deluxe-rosewood-humidor

below extract of schema code as recognized by the rich snippet tool:

• Product

• name:adorini Triest Deluxe Rosewood Humidor

• image:https://www.humidordiscount.co.uk/952-large_atch/adorini-triest-deluxe-rosewood-humidor.jpg

• description:High-quality multiple .....

• brand [Organization]:

• name:Adorini

• offers [Offer]:

• price:141

• priceCurrency:GBP

• availability:http://schema.org/InStock

• aggregateRating [AggregateRating]:

• worstRating:1

• ratingValue:4.5

• bestRating:5

• ratingCount:460

• review [Review]:

• description:It 's my first ....

• reviewRating [Rating]:

• ratingValue:4

• worstRating:1

• bestRating:5

• author [Thing]:

• name:Alessandro M

• review [Review]:

• description:excellent ...

• reviewRating [Rating]:

• ratingValue:5

• worstRating:1

• bestRating:5

thanks everybody.
excellent advice. I will just limit to make some tests of  products for now to see how it will affect ranking.

Gianluca. that is excellent news. Just curious since this is quite an important issue for us.

Do you speak from own experience with a similar case?
I did not find anywhere other references that contextual links should be fine. Do you remember anybody who wrote about it in the past?

Just noticed that tripadvisor actually removed now all their contextual links to alternative language versions that they used to have in their footer. Instead they now implemented a flag drodpown where contextual links are not showing up anymore in the sourcecode.

Gianluca, thanks.
The footer links are currently contextual deep links. 
Since I am interlinking here 16 TLD, I was just concerned that google may penalize this and that I better hide the links from google.

I remember that Matt Cutts recommended against interlinking many language versions of a site.
Considering that google now also crawls javascript links, what is best way to implement interlinking?

I still see otherwhise extremely well optimized large sites interlinking to more than 10 different language versions e.g. zalando.de, but also booking.com (even though here on same domain).

Currently we have an expandable css dropdown in the footer interlinking 16 different language versions with different TLD. Would you be concerned?

What would you suggest how to interlink domains (for user link would be useful)?

about 20% of total 500 products in our shop have a manufacturer product description, which appears repeatedly on maybe 10 other sites and also on ebay and amazon. Issue is just with our own brand. We have another brand website where we publish the same product descriptions as well (google knows that we own both sites).

The product description was first published on shop website before anywhere else and we are ranking number one for the product despite quite strong competition and we outrank our brand website as well.

Which of the following options would you opt for?

1. keeping the description and just adding some unique content
2. replacing the complete product description by a new one

thanks. I see your point regarding effective ad copy, but in our case the time saving would be valued higher than perfectly optimized ads for each individual item. Setting up 3000 individual product adgroups in 10 languages would just take really a lot of time.

This was actually also the only script that I had found in my former google search.
You have to pay at least 1 month subscription of 250USD to get access to the script which seems reasonable (scripts not available in free trial).

I was just surprised that I could not find any other options for doing this automization, as I thought that there should be many website owners being interested in such an automized setup.

I am in the process of setting up a fresh adwords account for a recently launched ecommerce site with about 3000 products and would like to automize the generation of the ads based on a spreadsheet of our product database.

I would like to have full control over the code to generate these ads and a programmer with knowledge in SOAP and javscript would be availlable to assist in implementation.

Any recommendations? Would you use adwords API or rather adword scripts?
Do you know whether there may be any existing code for doing this that we could just adapt to our requirements?

Marcus, Arnout, Cyrus, excellent comments. Thanks a lot.

Martijn, thanks.

Regarding potential: We would want to make the changes anyway at some point. 
So would you do all changes now with platform migration or would you do them later (which implies significantly more work), maybe in several stages?

We are moving a domain from oscommerce to prestashop.
We will setup 301 redirects for each page and have made sure that new platform is following SEO best practices.

I read a lot that it is critical to keep changes to a minimum when migrating to a new domain, but is this also critical when migrating just to a new e-commerce platform (same domain)? Change of URL is unavoidable, but what about these other changes below? Would you be very concerned about doing them at the same time, or rather would you do them some time after the migration?

1. title tag (about 30% of text in title tag will be different)
2. meta description tag (more customized and varied meta description than before)
3. h1 (expanding product name with some relevant keywords for a number of products)
4. additional table with product features (additional content in product pages)
5. adding additional products to store
6. moving to https instead of http

Product descriptions and product images and category descriptions will remain the same.

Replicating title tag, title description and h1 from old site would actually imply quite a lot of additional work at this point and we would have to make the change anyway at a later point, so if it is not a major risk I would prefer to do it in one go.

Any thoughts?

uuhh thats a long time for bouncing back.

I would use a 301 redirect to assets from old to new domain. This should give clear signal to google to where content lives, or do I oversee anything here?
My key concern really is that google may get signals that new domain is about topic of asset I am moving first and then when I migrate later my core content, it may be more difficult to rank for core content since google associates the new domain with the topical focus of content that was moved first. Is this something you would be concerned about?

Cyrus, thanks a lot for the advice.

In the long-run, what do you think is the percentage of organic traffic you lost at moz.com due to the domain migration? 30% was just short-term effect, right?

Regarding moving assets upfront, it would be quite easy to do in our case.
But would you be concerned about giving google wrong signals about topic of domain which may make it more difficult later to rank our core content well?

We plan to perform a domain migration in 6 months time.
I read the different articles on moz relating to domain migration, but some doubts remain:

1. Moving some linkworthy content upfront to new domain was generally recommended. I have such content (free e-learning) that I could move already now to new domain.
   Should I move it now or just 2 months before migration?
   Should I be concerned whether this content and early links could indicate to google a different topical theme of the new domain ? E.g. in our case free elearning app vs a commercial booking of presential courses of my core site which is somehow but not extremely strongly related) and links for elearning app may be very specific from appstores and from sites about mobile apps.

2. we still have some annoying .php3 file extensions in many of our highest traffic pages and I would like to drop the file-extension (no further URL change). It was generally recommended to minimize other changes at the same time of domain migration, but on the other hand implementing later another 301 again may also not be optimum and it would save time to do it all at the same time. Shall I do the removal of the file extension at the same time of the domain migration or rather schedule it for 3 months later?

3. On the same topic, would the domain migration be a good occasion to move to https instead of http at the same time, or also should we rather do this at a different time?

Any thoughts or suggestions?

thanks Monica. Will then setup seperate campaigns.

Is it possible to show different prices by country of visitor in adwords using adwords customizers?

I would like to avoid having to setup campaigns for each country, in order to show country specific prices in adwords.

thanks

in webmaster tools 404 are going gradually down for desktop and now suddenly going up for mobile for pages that are not linked to for months.

thanks a lot SilverDoor.

The huge number of errors, were caused by a problem with the internal site architecture several months ago which got thousdands of pages in the index that should not exist (and also have no other related relevanted pages). This architecture is fixed now. Still for some reason mobile crawler of webmaster tools is returning now suddenly lots of 404 for mobile view, which I suspect are coming from old 404 in google cache.

We are building URLs dynamically with apache rewrite.
When we detect that an URL is matching some valid patterns, we serve a script which then may detect that the combination of parameters in the URL does not exist. If this happens we produce a 301 redirect to another URL which serves a 404 error page,

So my doubt is the following: Do I have to worry about not serving directly an 404, but redirecting (301) to a 404 page? Will this lead to the erroneous original URL staying longer in the google index than if I would serve directly a 404?

Some context. It is a site with about 200.000 web pages and we have currently 90.000 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (even though only 600 detected last month).

Fresh Web Explorer finds daily about 10 articles/blog posts where I could post in comment section a relevant link to content on my own website, which I really belief may be of interest to many readers of the articles.

I would like to do this for the traffic that these links are generating to my site (intention is not ranking improvement).
Would I need to be concerned that it could affect negatively my ranking if I post so many times links to my own site in the comment sections and also considering that I would always link to the same about 5 landing pages on my site?

To give some context. The site for wich I want to build links for is long established PageRank 6  site with legit links from about 1000 different root domains. I would only post to articles published within last 48h.

Would I need to be concerned about the frequency of the posting and if so, any ideas what may be a reasonable frequency to post my links?

good point. thanks Gianluca.

But in this particular case crawling would not be an issue since non-English language versions are in subdirectories which are accessable via country dropdown. US google spider seeing the EN version in the main domain is exactly as desired. So if crawling is not an issue, do you still see a problem with option 3). To address your point, I  would also enforce that if someone clicks via country dropdown to English version, that this person would not be redirected again.

What do you think?

In case of websites following an international one domain strategy such as booking.com, redirecting to subdirectory may be most convenient for vast majority of users, since the name of the main domain is promoted to users in different languages.

I want to show some additional info on our website that will only be visible to the IP address of our office.

Do I need to be concerned that google may consider this cloaking?