Hi,

It sounds like you're going down the right path. Disallow and section of the site that has personal information, as there's no value in having bots crawl that, keep them on important content longer! In addition to Checkout and Basket/Cart, you should also disallow the My Account area if your site has one.

Your next grouping, I'm assuming these are the parameters by which you pages can be sorted. If so, yes, disallow all of those, they're only going to cause duplicate content flags for you in the future. I'm not sure which CMS you are using, but some eComm platforms also have 'email to a friend' URLs that are a major source for dupes and can often be identified and disallowed by another parameter.

Hope this helps narrow it down for you!

Roman,

Here are my thoughts:

1. Can we PM our followers on twitter or facebook and directly ask? As long as you stick to people you know would be a brand advocate for you, I don't see why not.

2. Which medium is generally most successful? We've generally only done email, but primarily because that's how we communicate with them on a normal basis anyway.

3. What if we tweeted something like: "we need your help, anyone that leaves an honest review on yelp will get _____ (money, gift card, appreciation, etc.) -  I know it's tempting and seems logical to make offers like that, but it violates Google's guidelines. Even if it's not for Google reviews, they might get wind of it and discount those reviews. Reviews are supposed to show a reflection of your business, not what you've offered in exchange for good reviews.

4. Which review site is the best for improving reputation and SERP- google plus, yelp, bbb?  Those 3 are the top ones I'd stick to.

5. Would you recommend sending people to consumer affairs to try to offset the bad rating or to just focus on all the other review sites and have them usurp consumer affairs' position? Definitely try to get some better ratings on CA to cancel out the bad.

Hi,

According to this article by Moz on hreflang, yes, having an hreflang tag with the language only will help you cast your net out to English speaking searchers from other regions.

Redirected URLs are generally removed from the index pretty quickly. I just checked and the /solutions URL is not indexed in Google, so you don't need to take additional measures to have that removed.

A good practice is to have no redirects in your sitemap. When I run new sitemaps, I use Screaming Frog and the first thing I do is remove everything that isn't a 200 status code. Keeping a clean XML sitemap helps your crawl budget and gets bots to focus on the more important parts of your site rather than having them step through unnecessary steps.

Hi Roman,

According to Google's Search Quality Raters Guidelines, third party reviews can have a negative impact on your organic visibility. Google is actively pursuing reputation information from third party sites and factoring that into the way they determine the "best results" for a query.

The best thing you can do to curb this, and hopefully improve your overall ratings, is to get some new good reviews to overpower the bad ones. My suggestion would be to start by picking a handful of customers you know have been happy with your products/services and reach out to them. If you've (or the client if you're not in-house) got some staff internally that interact with these customers, have them do it. People are much more likely to be responsive if they're asked by someone whom they've dealt with before. The message should be very candid, but not canned, people see right through that.

And as Patrick mentioned, always follow up on bad reviews. The only thing worse than a bad review, is one that goes unaddressed.

Hope that's helpful!

Hi Luke,

I've had many clients in the same situation. The approach I typically take is to split up the street address between a Suite A and Suite B (or some similar variation of that). Google is still able to pinpoint the geographic location of the business, but also recognizes that they're not identical.

You should be all set# I wouldn't worry about link equity, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to keep an eye on your domain authority over the next few days.

No worries, that's what this community is here for!

Google views subdomains as different entities. They have different authority metrics and therefore different ranking power. Removing a URL on a subdomain won't have any affect on it's brother over on a different subdomain (for example: dev. and www.).

Good call to keep the disallow: / on the dev.chiplab.com/robots.txt file - I forgot to mention that you should leave it there, for anti-crawling purpose.

This is the query you'll want to keep an eye on. The info: operator is new and can be used to show you what Google has indexed as your 'canonical' homepage.

Do you have different examples? The Home Depot link doesn't work when trying to view the actual page on the site. With the Microsoft link, the canonical is working, as the version with the parameter is not indexed in Google, but the canonical version is indexed, which is what I would expect for a canonical that is being obeyed.

I just noticed that clicking on the entire slider, even out to the sides where it appears to be just white space, takes you to another page. At first I didn't realize what I was clicking that got me to the next page. When I do Crtl+A on the page, the full width of the slider images shows highlighted in blue, but to the side of those images outside of those bounds is linked. I'm wondering if Google sees this as cloaking and kicked out the homepage as a result.

*I did see that AGM pointed out it's indexed now, but that's not to say this wasn't the cause of original de-index.

Hi Anton,

You really only need to worry about having an actual address if your customers come to you, i.e. retail stores, restaurants, mechanics, etc.

I can't access the site you reference, but it looks like it's probably a courier service or something along those lines. In that case, your serving the customers at their location, in which case they don't really have a need to know your actual address, just what areas you service.

So no, you're not likely to see any affect on your SEO by providing an actual address as opposed to a P.O. Box.

David,

Everything John just said in Point 2 is exactly what was running through my mind as I read your question. As the person responsible for the SEO strength of your website, you should have full control over as much of your SEO activity as possible. If your blogging platform is concerning as described, you really need to reevaluate whether that's the best thing for your site.

I've had some run-ins with case-sensitive URLs in the past and it drives me crazy, I don't understand why CMSs still do that!! While canonical tags are a perfectly fine way to handle this, there's a better solution. Brian Love wrote a great blog post on how to do server-side URL lower-casing. I've used this on a few sites and it works great.

It depends on how many pages you'll have in each of the subsequent country-level sitemaps. If it's only going to be a few pages in each country, then it's probably not worth it. It'll take extra time for you to generate and waste some of your crawl budget. If you have a substantial amount of content in each of the country folders, it could help search engines understand your site structure a little more clearly.

Either way you go isn't going to make or break your SEO campaign.