Heyo!

I would not recommend your homepage exists at any URL other than example.com for the following reasons:

1. It's web development best-practice
2. Most of the links you will acquire naturally will point to example.com
3. Some citations won't accept a URL with anything after the .com
4. It's confusing for people
5. If bots can't access your homepage at example.com, they most likely won't find your robots.txt or XML sitemap files either

I'm sure other could drum up more reasons, but the ones I've listed here should be enough to dissuade you.

You can typically fare much better by giving non-branded keywords interior pages that are specific to that topic rather than the broader homepage content. This will increase the likelihood of people finding what they're looking for and is a better way to tailor your content to your audience and to algorithms.

Hi,

There's a couple things you'll need to do. First is to set up a Search Console account for each TLD version of your domain. Once you've setup and verified, you'll want to specify the target country for each. To do this, go to Search Traffic on the left nav, then click International Targeting, then head to the Country tab. Set each for its respective domain.

Next, you'll need to implement hreflang tags. They work similar to canonical tags, but instead of telling search engines the preferential version of the content, these tags point them to the other country/language versions. Everything you need to know about this tag can be found here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag.

These two actions will help the country-specific versions of Google serve up the appropriate versions of your content and avoid getting dinged for dupes.

Hope that's helpful!

Hi,

I wouldn't recommend the noindex approach here. Three of your four URLs are parameter'd versions of the homepage; meta tags are applied at the page level, not by parameters. This means your noindex tag would apply to the homepage - no good!! You could put a nofollow attribute on the links that point to those parameter URLs, but don't expect it to have a huge impact on your SEO efforts. Your /members/ folder might be worth de-indexing via a noindex tag, depends on what is contained in that folder. It sounds like it's probably account-level pages, if that's the case, you can and should keep those pages out of the index.

Hope that's helpful!

Hi,

Google will count this as duplicate content, regardless of 'affiliate' status or not. You've got a few options here:

1. Have the affiliates canonicalize to your client's URLs
2. Require them to write their own unique product descriptions
3. You could (or have the client) write unique descriptions for the content on the client site

I think option 3 is the most viable, since you won't have to ask the affiliates to make any operational changes.

Hi James,

My choice: Love Live Chat Pop Ups

Reason: Compare your conversion rates for users that chat and users that don't. We have one eComm client who saw 3-4 times the conversion rate for users whose session included a live chat vs. those who didn't chat.

It doesn't have to be all or nothing either. You say you're recommending disabling it and that it automatically pops up 1.66 times per session - you can curb that a bit and only show it based on site engagement. For example, you could show it only after a user has been on a product detail page for X amount of seconds. Or after Z amount of products viewed.

Hi,

I've not seen any comment from Googlers regarding this debate. I realize I'm keeping this in the Moz-sphere, which isn't quite what you're looking for, but this quote is from Moz's domain setup guide:

"Since search engines keep different metrics for domains than they do subdomains, it is recommended that webmasters place link-worthy content like blogs in subfolders rather than subdomains. (i.e. www.example.com/blog/ rather than blog.example.com) The notable exceptions to this are language-specific websites. (i.e., en.example.com for the English version of the website)."

I think that quote is pretty compelling towards the subdirectory side of this quandry. I also recommend checking out the comments on the Whiteboard Friday link you posted, there is plenty of evidence there as well.

Unfortunately, this debate will probably go on forever until we get definitive word from Google.

Yea, I wouldn't worry too much about those. You should however, specify the purpose of those parameters in Google Search Console - it'll help Google better understand their function. Here's a good guide on how to do that: http://www.shoutmeloud.com/google-webmaster-tool-added-url-parameter-option-seo.html

Good to know! Thanks!

For future reference, if you've got the Moz bar installed in your browser, all you need to do is click the pencil/marker icon and select the "Nofollowed (pink)" option. All nofollow links on that page will be highlighted.

Hi Rena,

Issues like this pop up frequently in Moz QA. Here's what's happening - the only difference on these pages is the name of the product, the meta data, and the URL. This being the case, the majority of the source code for each page is the same, when you take into account all the code for the template (header, footer, etc). Moz sets a threshold of 90% for source code match, any 2 pages that have at least 90% same source code get flagged as duplicate.

So what can you do about it? It looks like you're using these pages as product detail pages like you'd see on an ecommerce site. Product detail pages typically have descriptions providing details about the particular product. I'd recommend writing some descriptive content for each of these pages. This will increase the uniqueness of the pages and should differentiate them enough to not trigger the dupe content warning. Descriptions on these products will also help your users' experience on the site, so you're not doing this just to appease the bots.

Hope that helps clear things up!

Hi Rena,

You technically can do that, but it's not recommended - for the exact reason you state above. More often than not, 2 sites aren't going to have the same set of disallow rules.

Additionally, you should also be using robots.txt files to direct search engines to your XML sitemap, and if you're sharing a robots file, then you can't specify 2 different sitemaps on 2 different domains.

Do you have reviews on your homepage? On most sites, reviews are relative to specific products or services rather than the whole company. You would need to have an aggregate review score displayed on your homepage in order to be able to mark it up with schema. Schema is meant to identify data types that are visible on the site, it's not like meta data where it runs in the background for search engines to see and not people.

James,

They do have that threshold, confirmed by Tawny's comment on this thread from a while back.