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Hi all,

A fairly common problem in webshops is having the same subcategory in multiple main categories. Let's take the following example:

• example.com/legal/economic-law/company-law
• example.com/tax/companies/company-law

I came across this interesting article on this topic:  https://moz.com/community/q/e-commerce-site-one-product-multiple-categories-best-practice

Although I understand that the answer on the above question is the most thorough method, I don't see a problem with just using canonicals either. On the webshop we are restructuring, there are only a few of these subcategories that return in multiple main categories, so generating a path via user activity and storing it in a cookie doens't seem really necessary to me.

Is it ok to just use canonicals or can this cause issues?

Thanks.

Hi all,

We've recently migrated a Wordpress website from staging to live, but the robots.txt was deleted.  I've created the following new one:

User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-content/cache/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

However, in the site audit on SemRush,  I now get the mention that a lot of pages have issues with blocked internal resources in robots.txt file. These blocked internal resources are all cached and minified css elements: links, images and scripts.

Does this mean that Google won't crawl some parts of these pages with blocked resources correctly and thus won't be able to follow these links and index the images? In other words, is this any cause for concern regarding SEO?

Of course I can change the robots.txt again, but will urls like https://example.com/wp-content/cache/minify/df983.js end up in the index?

Thanks for your thoughts!

Hi,

I have a question concerning multilingual SEO for webshops. This is the case: the root domain is example.be, which has several subdomains. One of these subdomains is shop.example.be which is used for two webshops (Dutch and French), being shop.example.be/nl and shop.example.be/fr .
The other root domain is example.lu (for Luxemburg) which is only used for the subdomain for the Luxemburg webshop in French, being shop.example.lu/fr.
The content on the .lu/fr webshop is a small part of the content on the .be/fr webshop, and the product descriptions are the same and are both of course in French. The webshops will be redesigned and restructured, and the question is what to do with the .lu/fr webshop.

There are two possibilities:

• Integrate this webshop for Luxemburg in the existing .be webshop, since most of the products are the same and the .lu webshop doesn't get a lot of visitors because of Luxemburg being a small country. The only thing to do then would be setting up a 301 from the .lu webshop to the .be/fr version to transfer link value.
  People in Luxemburg already sometimes get pages from the .be/fr webshop in the SERP anyway because these already have a bigger authority than the .lu/fr pages.
• Keep the .lu/fr webshop and use hreflang tags so the correct pages with similar content are shown in the correct country. I know that when using different TLD's this normally isn't an issue anyway, so implementing hreflang tags even isn't really necessary.

Please feel free to share your thoughts about what would be the best approach.

Thanks!

Don't worry too much about keywords that are that similar. Google's algorithms are smart enough to recognize these small variations.

Moreover, as you say yourself, this will lead to awful content and thus a bad user experience. Unless these two words mean totally different things (which they don't), don't start rewriting everything because it simply won't change your rankings.

I mostly agree with Robin here.

Also, be sure NOT to mix 'noindex' and canonical tags. Google will (in most cases) end up picking rel=canonical over noindex when you use both of these. So it is very possible that even when using 'noindex', your pages will appear in search results.

The approach of canonicalising all your paginated pages to the first one, is not good practice. We all just found out that Google hasn't been using rel=next/prev for a couple of years now, but most of the pagination was indexed in a correct way.

So doing nothing is maybe not that bad of an option. If you see things going wrong, you can further evaluate and test other possibilities.

Hi,

I would like to redirect a small website that contains info about a specific project temporarily to a specific url about this project on my main website.

Reason for this is that the small website doesn't contain accurate info anymore. We will adapt the content in the next few weeks and then remove the redirect again.

Should I set up a 301 or a 302?

Thanks

Thanks for the answer.

I know the 302 is the standard for a temporary redirect, but the reason I ask this question is that I came across a lot of articles that mention that 302's shouldn't be used, unless for testing a page for example.

Since http 1.1, the 307 redirect is used and this could be another option for a temporary redirect.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks, this is a really helpful answer.

Hi,

I would like to block all URLs with the parameter '?filter=' from being crawled by including them in the robots.txt.

Which directive should I use:

User-agent: *
Disallow: ?filter=

or

User-agent: *
Disallow: /?filter=

In other words, is the forward slash in the beginning of the disallow directive necessary?

Thanks!

Hi,

Indexing of your pages is just the first step. Achieving better rankings doesn't happen overnight (unfortunately). It can take up to 6 months and longer before you will see any significant change in rankings.

I agree with Joe. Just deindexing will make sure you lose all the built up value.

Small addition: when creating 301 redirects, try to redirect to a new URL that is as closely related to the old one as possible.