Welcome to the Q&A Forum

We plan to implement an exit intent layer.
For mailing list expansion and/or to display personalized third party advertising. Any negative impact this may have on google rankings?
Shall we limit exit intent layer so to show only to users who visited at least 2 pages on our site?
Shall we reduce size of layer on mobile?
Anything else to consider to minimize potential negative impact on google rankings?

Any ideas how to increase the Yandex Site Quality Index via onpage changes?

We are considering to add at the end of alll our 1500 product pages answers to the 9 most frequently asked questions. These questions and answers will be 90% identical for all our products and personalizing them more is not an option and not so necessary since most questions are related to the process of reserving the product. We are convinced this will increase engagement of users with the page, time on page and it will be genuinely useful for the visitor as most visitors will not visit the seperate FAQ page. Also it will add more related keywords/topics to the page.
On the downside it will reduce the percentage of unique content per page and adds duplication. Any thoughts about wether in terms of google rankings we should go ahead and benefits in form of engagement may outweight downside of duplication of content?

About 30% of product reviews that the clients of our ecommerce store submitted in the last 10 years are 3 words or less (we did not require any minimum length). Would you recommend to hide those very short review texts? Where to draw the limit?
Numeric star rating would still go into our accumulated product rating. My only concern here is what impact it may have on google ranking. 
To give some context, the site has for a long time some panda/phantom related issues where there are no obvious reasons that we could point to.

We are going to implement a faceted navigation for an ecommerce site of about 1000 products.
Faceted navigation is implemented via ajax/javascript which adds to the URL a large number of #parameters.
Faceted pages are canonicalizing to page without any parameters. We do not want google to index any of the faceted pages at this point. Will google include pages with #parameters in their index?
Can I tell google somehow to ignore #parameters and not to index them?
Could this setup cause any SEO problems for us in terms of crawl bandwidth and or link equity?

What is best way to display user reviews in languages different from the page language? (e.g. English reviews on a page in Spanish). For the user it would be useful to see these reviews but I am concerned about negative SEO impact.
I would not want to invest into having them all translated by human translator. Any suggestions?

When moving the content after a while to a subdirectory of my core website I would copy the full content and later further improve it. Would the external links that I redirect via 301 be counting similar to links I had earned in the first place? I understand that 301 redirect normally just implies minimal loss of link power. Topic of the site I consider to acquire is loosely related to my core site.

I have a website which has 25 different language versions on 16 different domains. Hreflan are setup to point to different language versions. In the footer we have deeplinks to the 25 language versions. Site is not spammy but in small niche and many language versions have very few other external links. For some time this site had lost rankings for reasons that are unclear till now. I see that large international sites such as booking.com, tripadvisor, apple  all use different approaches to interlink their language versions. Interestingly Tripadvisor is nowadays loading the links to their other language versions dynamically only upon click so that these links do not show up in source code, deviating from their former implementation of static deeplinks to all language versions. Matt Cutts mentioned back in 2013 “If you have 50 different sites, I wouldn’t link to all 50 sites down in the footer of your website, because that can start to look pretty spammy to users. Instead you might just link to no more than three or four or five down in the footer, that sort of thing, or have a link to a global page, and the global page can talk about all the different verions and country versions of your website.” But in their webmaster guidelines google recommends: "Consider cross-linking each language version of a page. That way, a French user who lands on the German version of your page can get to the right language version with a single click." I assume for SEO anyway these links have no value, but for user experience it would certainly be better to provide somewhere deeplinks to other language versions. Also the fact that language versions are on different domains and have few external backlinks may increase a bit the risk in our case. I guess in doubt I would prefer to be safe and load deeplinks only upon click same as tripadvisor. Any thoughts/suggestions on best interlinking in our specific case?

We have pages with lots of unique content that are ranking very well in google.
I am now considering to add towards the end of the pages widgets from the booking.com affiliate program and also from the affiliate program of two other accommodtion sites. These affilliate widgets would be placed far beyond our core content in the bottom 15% of the page. Each widget will contain a large number of links to the different accomodation options that booking.com or others offer. In our context this information would be indeed very useful for our visitors. Shall I be concerned that our google rankings may suffer due to google perceiving our site as less quality (or google misinterpreting our intent to generate traffic to affiliate programs) ? If google rankings would be suffering, is this something we would normally see in a week (most of our pages are crawled daily by google)  and then recover in a week when we would remove the widgets or would this generally be something that would affect the ranking over the course of a month or more? Shall I be concerned abou link dillution since my pages would now have a lot of links pointing to the affiliate sites, which could devalue my internal links? Any thoughts?

For a new B2B service we have identified websites that we would like to make aware of our service.
There are about 1000 websites for which it was not possible to retrieve emails, and where we need to do the outreach using the websites contact pages. Do you know of any tools that save time or outsource companies specialized in such a service? We do not want to fully automize the process but a human should do a visual check that form is properly filled. What I imagine could save time would be tools that already load from a list of URLs the next pages already in the background  of the browser and good autoform fillers. Any recommendations?

We have 30 sitemaps, one for each language version of our site. About 5000 pages per sitemap.
To get a better idea on which pages google is not indexing, I thought about quickly generating sitemaps by page cagetories to see if there are any patterns. Any problems if I submit now new additional sitemaps dividing all our pages by product page, considering that the same pages are already in our existing sitemaps we submitted in the search console. So having same URL in more than 1 sitemap would be a problem? As a side note, we observed when adding a sitemap index that google search console in its count of total indexed pages, now counts every page twice since we submitted both the sitemap index and the individual sitemaps, so search console does not recognize in count that sitemaps in sitemaps index are identical to the ones we submitted individually in search console.

We migrated 4 days ago to https and followed best practices..
In search console now still 80% of our sitemaps appear as "pending" and among those sitemaps that were processed only less than 1% of submitted pages appear as indexed? Is this normal ?
How long does it take for google to index pages from sitemap? 
Before https migration nearly all our pages were indexed and I see in the crawler stats that google has crawled a number of pages each day after migration that corresponds to number of submitted pages in sitemap. Sitemap and crawler stats show no errors.

We just migrated to https and created 2 days ago a new property in search console for the https domain. Webmaster Tools account for the https domain now shows for every page in our sitemap the warning: "Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt."Also in the dashboard of the search console it shows a red triangle with warning that our root domain would be blocked by robots.txt. 1) When I test the URLs in search console robots.txt test tool all looks fine.2) When I fetch as google and render the page it renders and indexes without problem (would not if it was really blocked in robots.txt)3) We temporarily completely emptied the robots.txt, submitted it in search console and uploaded sitemap again and same warnings even though no robots.txt was online4) We run screaming frog crawl on whole website and it indicates that there is no page blocked by robots.txt5) We carefully revised the whole robots.txt and it does not contain any row that blocks relevant content on our site or our root domain. (same robots.txt was online for last decade in http version without problem)6) In big webmaster tools I could upload the sitemap and so far no error reported.7) we resubmitted sitemaps and same issue8) I see our root domain already with https in google SERPThe site is https://www.languagecourse.netSince the site has significant traffic,  if google would really interpret for any reason that our site is blocked by robots we will be in serious trouble.
This is really scary, so even if it is just a bug in search console and does not affect crawling of the site, it would be great if someone from google could have a look into the reason for this since for a site owner this really can increase cortisol to unhealthy levels.Anybody ever experienced the same problem?Anybody has an idea where we could report/post this issue?

To my understanding in many Asian languages city names are transcribed as they sound and this can cause confusion especially in the case of lesser known American city names. So I was planning to put in our international website versions (Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc. ) the English name in brackets after the translated city name in meta title and H1.
However when I checked Tripadvisor and Booking.com I noticed that they do not show the English city name anywhere on their Asian language versions. Any thoughts?
Would you recommend to  put the English city name in brackets after the translated city name or may it rather hurt our ranking and traffic?

90% of our sales are made with products in one of our product categories. 
A search for main category keyword returns our root domain index page in google, not the category page.
I was wondering whether integrating the complete main category directly in the index page of the root domain and this way including much more relevant content for this main category keyword may have a positive impact on our google ranking for the main category keyword. Any thoughts?

I have a page which is ranking already pretty well for a relative competitive keyword. 
Google also ranks us on first page for synonym of keyword we optimize the page for (even though synonym does not appear on our page). I am now considering to replace some occurences of the keyword in the page by different synonyms, in the hope that our ranking may further improve for these synonyms. 
However I am concerned that google may penalize me for keyword stuffing if I am using a wide range of synonyms of one keyword on our page. My plan is only to replace some occurences of keyword with synonyms. I am a bit nerveous here since page is already ranking quite well in a competitive niche. Any thoughts?

Currently we have direct links to the top 100 country and  city landing pages on our index page of the root domain. 
I would like to add in the index page for each country a link "more cities" which then loads dynamically (without reloading the page and without redirecting to another page) a list with links to all cities in this country. 
I do not want to dillute "link juice" to my top 100 country and city landing pages on the index page. 
I would still like google to be able to crawl and follow these links to cities that I load dynamically later. In this particular case typical site hiearchy of country pages with links to all cities is not an option. Any recommendations on how best to implement?

Some elements are not properly shown when I preview our pages in search console (fetch as google), e.g.
google maps, css tables etc. and some parts are not showing up since we load them asynchroneously for best page speed. Is this something should pay attention to and try to fix?

When searching for "Madrid hotels" in google I see that the top organic search results have one row of sitelinks. 
What can I do that also my site shows sitelinks if I am among the top organic search results?
Anything onpage that I can do to increase probability that google will show sitelinks? Strangely the text which shows as sitelink for SERPs from booking.com and tripadvisor does actually for most of the sitelinks not appear on the landing page (I also checked the source code).

We have a site of about 100.000 pages that is getting several million of visitors per year via organic search. We plan to add about 50.000 new pages gradually in the next couple of months and would like to add affiliate links to the new pages. All these 50.000 new pages will have unique quality data that a team has been researching for a while. I would like to add in the area under the fold or towards the end of the pages in an unobstrusive way affiliate links to about 5 different affiliate programs with affiliate links customized to page content and of real value to visitors. Since affiliate links are one of the factors that may trigger panda I am a bit nervous whether we should add the affiliate links and if there is any way of implementing the affiliate links in a way that they may be less likely to trigger panda. E.g. would you consider hiding affiliate links from google by linking to intermediate URL (which I would mark as noindex nofolllow) on our domain which then redirects to the final affiliate landing page (but google may notice via chrome or android data) ? Any other idea?

I used to be able to see google seller ratings of my sites at
https://www.google.com/shopping/seller?q=example.com Now I just see it for sites with a couple of hundred reviews. 
Is there still any other URL or other way how I can see the seller ratings that google collected so far for my sites (even if I did not reach the threshold of 200 ratings in last 12 months)?

We plan to add several thousand images to our site and we outsourced the image search to some freelancers who had instructions to just use royalty free pictures. Is there any easy and quick way to check that in fact none of these images violates copyrights without having to check image by image? In case there are violations we are unaware of, do you think we need to be concerned about a risk of receiving Takedown Notices (DMCA) before owner giving us notification for giving us opportunity to remove the photo?

Our customer reviews of products are mainly very short and many times not fully formulated sentences. Would you recommend to just publish the longer comments? I am concerned about googles evaluation of the quality of the page content.

In a travel related page I have city categories with city related information. 
Would you recommend for or against duplicating some relevant city related in subcategory pages. For visitor it would be useful and google should have more context about the topic of our page.
But my main concern is how this may be perceived by google and especially whether it may make it more likely being penalized for thin content. We already were hit end of june by panda/phantom and we are working on adding also more unique content, but this would be something that we could do additionally and basically instantaneously. Just do not want to make things worse.

We just lost over 20% traffic after google algo update at June 26. 
In SEO forums people guess that there was likely a Phantom update or maybe a Panda update. The most common advice I found was adding more unique content. While we have already unique proprietary content on all our pages and we plan to add more, I was also considering to add some  content from external sources. Our site is travel related so I thought about adding for each city page external data such as weather, climate data, currency exchange data via APIs from external sources and also some data such as population from open source databases or some statistical info we would search on the web. I believe this data would be useful to the visitors.  I understand that purely own content would be ideal and we will work on this as well. Any thoughts? Do you think the external data may rather help or hurt how google perceives content quality?

We are now introducing 5 links in all our category pages for different sorting options of category listings.
The site has about 100.000 pages and with this change the number of URLs may go up to over 350.000 pages.
Until now google is indexing well our site but I would like to prevent the "sorting URLS" leading to less complete crawling of our core pages, especially since we are planning further huge expansion of pages soon. Apart from blocking the paramter in the search console (which did not really work well for me in the past to prevent indexing) what do you suggest to minimize indexing of these URLs also taking into consideration link juice optimization? On a technical level the sorting is implemented in a way that the whole page is reloaded, for which may be better options as well.

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".)

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. Is it safe to delete all 301 redirects which did not receive any traffic in last 2 months ? Or would you apply another criteria for identifying those 301 that can be safely deleted? 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?

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?

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?

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)

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

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

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?

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? title tag (about 30% of text in title tag will be different) meta description tag (more customized and varied meta description than before) h1 (expanding product name with some relevant keywords for a number of products) additional table with product features (additional content in product pages) adding additional products to store 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?

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: 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. 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? 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?

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

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?

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?

Now I have facets setup with ajax and ajax just adding parameter #facet1... at end of URL and I have setup canonical so that domain.com/category/#facet1 refers to
domain.com/category/ Would you make the facet links no-follow or better better not to add no-follow for better link juice distribution?
Would you hide the whole facet block from google and if so how? Any thoughts?

Would like to submit the different language versions of our site to some non-english web directories worth submitting to. Does anybody know about a good list as a starting point? To get an idea what may be the 3-5 most important web directories in different countries/languages. Thanks

We have chosen the one domain approach with our international site having different language versions in subdirectory of main domain:
www.domain.com/es
www.domain.com/it
etc. What is SEO-wise best practice for implementing international index pages. I see following options: entering  www.domain.com will display without redirection the index page in language of user (e.g based on IP or browser) in www.domain.com
Example: www.booking.com entering www.domain.com will always show English index page.
Additionally one may display a message in the header if IP from other country with link to other language version.
Example: www.apple.com entering www.domain.com will always redirect automatically to country specific subdirectory based on IP
Example: www.samsung.com Any thoughts/suggestions on what may be best solution from a SEO perspective? For a user I believe options 1) & 3) are preferable.

We would like to migrate from an EMD to a brand name domain, since our service offer has become much broader than indicated by the current EMD. The current domain name is a money keyword. Do you believe there is a big risk of suffering a penguin penalty if we go ahead with the domain migration, due to large share of anchor texts containing keyword of old domain name? Quick facts about our site:
-about 500.000 pages indexed by google PR6 10 years old 1200 linking root domains 30% of linking root domains contain our domain name with domain ending as anchor text 5% of linking root domains have just the domain keyword as anchor text Any thoughts? 
Thanks