Hey Dan,

Its a bit confusing and has been for a while! See: https://moz.com/community/q/uk-and-gb-when-selecting-targeted-engines-in-campaign-management. Results should be the same between them anyway but Moz is saying that GB is the mistake and is due to be phased out.

Hi,

It can happen for a number of reasons, in my experience usually due to either unintentional blocking of the page from crawling or from being a JavaScript heavy/only site which doesn't allow content to be easily read by the moz crawler. Check out this dev blog post for a rundown on most issues and solutions. Hope it helps!

Hi Adam,

Are the ticket pages on the sub domain the same as the event pages on the main domain except with the ticketing system included? If yes it would make more sense to canonical each event ticketing page back to the same event page so: tickets.domain.com/event1 -> domain.com/event1.

If the ticketing pages are not meant to be indexed at all then I would put the robots no index tag on them also (or a robots file on the whole subdomain) and keep an eye on GWT to make sure none of them creep in. Canonical tags are a 'recommendation' not a rule so if your plans are for these pages to not be indexed at all best to ensure that as completely as possible.

HI,

If technically that is the best solution for your needs then a couple of things to keep in mind:

1. If you are using Universal Analytics subdomain tracking is included by default so if you put the same analytics code on your subdomain pages then you should not be seeing any 'bounces' -  google should be able to figure this out also.

2. You can install GWT for the subdomain also. I dont think you can set the preferred domain for a subdomain setup but you can use GWT to monitor issues and make sure that duplicate pages for the subdomain are not getting indexed.

3. To avoid indexing of the subdomain pages (which I assume you don't want) you could canonical them to their equivalent on the www domain. You could also meta robots no-index them all. If they creep in anyway you can use GWT to remove them.

If the subdomain is a complete clone and the experience is seamless then why not make all links on the subdomain go back to the www domain pages. That way the only pages available on the subdomain would be the ticketing pages and the rest would be on the www as normal.

Hope it helps.

HI,

There was a recentish video here with John Mueller that refers to this (see around the 46 minute mark). Basically it is saying that of you have redirects in place but google is seeing other indicators such as the original url is 'nicer' looking (often meaning shorter) and if there are other strong leads to the old url (like lots of links) then they might decide to show the original url in the serps. Since your case involves your root domain homepage and both those factors are likely the case for your original url.... I think you should probably proceed as if the serp is never going to change (really what the serp is showing now is correct, even though you do the redirect, what users are expecting to see and are seeing is the root domain's homepage right?).

I am not familiar with the site's subject - but personally I don't understand why you would want this setup anyway. If it is to get a more 'seo optimised' url into your homepage then it is looking a bit dodgy. Would it not make more sense to build a real page on the second url, optimised to the relevant phrases and leave your homepage on the root?

HI,

I doesn't look like exotravel.vn is redirecting right now, I get a 'page is not available' message so first thing to do is make sure the 301 redirect is set up and working as you expect it so that anybody clicking on that result will get to the right page. A look at the page cache shows that a coupe of days ago the site seemed to be returning normal content (it wasn't parked in other words but was actually serving html content). So between the redirect not working as expected and the site returning content until recently it is likely a bit confusing to google in regards what results it should/should not be showing for a branded search. If the redirect is implemented properly I expect the .vn site should fall out of the serps pretty quickly.

Hi,

Not sure why there would no h1 tag and then two, but to override the default category h1 you are likely going to have to do a bit of coding to add an extra field to your category cms pages so you can override the default. This link runs through a way to apply it (I haven't tried it personally so test thoroughly!).

HI,

I had the understanding that noindexing pages would not stop images on them from being indexed - google runs another bot for images which is different from the 'normal' bot - and the noindex directive is applicable to the PAGE url, not the IMAGE url. There is a discussion here that mentions a noindex tag specific for images which would imply that your images should still be in the index even if you noindex the page. Hope that makes sense!

Hi,

There are some differing opinions on the benefits of using base64 images to reduce http requests. From an seo point of view I don't think it will make much of a difference one way or the other if you are only talking about 20 icon images, but from a performance point of view I would use css image sprites which also reduce http connections and are (in my opinion) easier to maintain.