Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi all, I have a question regarding keywords. Of course we all know that keyword research should be focused on a certain topic and on user intent (and thus on answering specific questions) instead of trying to put keywords in a page to make it rank. However, duplicate content is of course still an issue. So here's my question: A client that sells floor heating systems that you can install yourself, has a product page for this topic and blog pages for questions regarding this topic. So following pages are on the website: Product page about the floor heating systems the client sells Blog article with tips how to install a floor heating system yourself Blog article about how to choose the right floor heating system These pages all answer different questions and are written about different topics. However, inevatibly all these pages also talk about different aspects of floor heating systems so this broad term comes up on all pages naturally. You could say that a solution is to merge pages and redirect the blogs to the product page, so the product page would answer all questions. But that is not what a customer is looking for. The goal of a product page is to trigger a conversion: let a customer contact the company or ask for a price offer. If the content on a product page is not comprehensive enough, the goal gets lost. Moreover, it doesn't make sense to talk about tips and tricks on a product page. So how do you tackle this problem without creating duplicate content? In search results, the blog pages rank for the specific questions, but the product page doesn't rank for the generic term 'floor heating'. The internal link structure is ok: the product page has obviously more incoming links than the blogs. All on page SEO factors are taken care of as well. Any ideas on this? Thanks!

Hi all, I am looking for a conclusive answer on how to handle images on Wordpress websites. Most of the time we encounter the same problems regarding images. There are several options to make sure that images don't increase page load too much: Page caching and compressing: standard Lazy loading: helps decrease page load time, but Google might not crawl the images so not good for SEO. See this article on Googlebot scrolling. Correct image format (for example WebP): tried it several times and doesn't help much to decrease page load time. What is best practice? Are there standards or preferred options for the image dimensions and quality (max height, width, number of pixels, rectangular or square) before you upload it, also regarding responsiveness? Is it better to use .jpg, .png or WebP? To sum up, what should you do by default to handle images on websites so you can still have a good page speed even with loads of images? Thanks for your answers!

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 all, We are checking to optimize a website that has four language versions in subfolders. When setting the self referencing canonicals and the hreflang tags, we came across a particular problem. Both the URL's example.com and example.com/nl are being indexed and have the same content in the same language. For the other language versions, it is quite straightforward, but what to do with these two URL's? Currently, there is a canonical tag from example.com to example.com/nl. Is a simple 301 redirect to the URL with the language subfolder the best solution? Something to consider: if a backlink points to example.com (without specifying the language subfolder), all the link juice will go to the /nl version and not to other versions (with a canonical as well as with a 301 of course). Thanks!

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 all, Most of the URLs that are created by using the internal search function of a website/web shop shouldn't be indexed since they create duplicate content or waste crawl budget. The standard way to go is to 'noindex, follow' these pages or sometimes to use robots.txt to disallow crawling of these pages. The first question I have is how these pages actually would get indexed in the first place if you wouldn't use one of the options above. Crawlers follow links to index a website's pages. If a random visitor comes to your site and uses the search function, this creates a URL. There are no links leading to this URL, it is not in a sitemap, it can't be found through navigating on the website,... so how can search engines index these URLs that were generated by using an internal search function? Second question: let's say somebody embeds a link on his website pointing to a URL from your website that was created by an internal search. Now let's assume you used robots.txt to make sure these URLs weren't indexed. This means Google won't even crawl those pages. Is it possible then that the link that was used on another website will show an empty page after a while, since Google doesn't even crawl this page? Thanks for your thoughts guys.

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, On a webshop we are optimizing, the main navigation consists of the 5 main categories to which all of the products can be assigned. However, the main tabs in the navigation just activate a drop down with all of the subcategories. For example: the tab in the navigation is 'Garden equipment' and when you click on this tab, the drop down is shown with subcategories like 'Lawn mowers', 'Leaf blowers' and so on. Now, the page 'Garden equipment' is one of the main category pages and we want this page to rank of course. This shouldn't be a problem, since there is a separate URL for this page that can be indexed and that can be reached through internal links on the website. However, this page can not be reached when a visitor initially comes on the homepage of the webshop, since the tab in the navigation isn't clickable. This page will only be reached when a subcategory is selected, and then when the visitor goes back to the category page through the breadcrumb or through an internal link. Is it a problem that these important overview category pages can not be reached immediately? Thanks.

Hi, We are setting up the URL structure for a big webshop and this raised the following questions regarding the URL's for products that belong to several categories (most of the products do, so the same approach would be used for products that just belong to one category). There are three options in my point of view: Use root-level product page URLs (limits trackability in Analytics software because you can not specify on product types)
URL: example.com/product-1/ Use product type URL directories for all products (which at least offers minimum trackability of all separate product types in Analytics software)
URL: example.com/book/product-1/ Use product URLs built upon category URL structures, but ensure that each product page URL has a single, designated canonical URL.
URL: example.com/category-A/product-1/ with canonical= example.com/category-A/product-1/ URL: example.com/category-B/product-1/ with canonical= example.com/category-A/product-1/ Which option is the preferred one? Thanks!

Hi, I am checking the SEO for a website that has a homepage consisting of the 5 most important categories. These are represented by different images with the category title in clickable text in the image. When I check the alt tags of the images they all have the following structure: brand - activities - locations - category. So for each image alt text the items 'brand - activities - locations' are used and only the category changes. Can this be seen by Google as spamming?

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

Hi, I am checking a website for SEO and I've noticed that a lot of pages from the blog have the following meta robots: meta name="robots" content="follow" Normally these pages should be indexed, since search engines will index and follow by default. In this case however, a lot of pages from this blog are not indexed. Is this because the meta robots is specified, but only contains follow? So will search engines only index and follow by default if there is no meta robots specified at all? And secondly, if I would change the meta robots, should I just add index or remove the meta robots completely from the code? Thanks for checking!

Hi, I have two questions regarding keyword cannibalization. 1. I am doing the SEO for a website that sells do-it-yourself packages for heating, bathrooms, ventilation and so on for new houses or for renovations. The most important pages are the product pages (e.g. example.com/products/bathrooms) but there is also a blog divided into categories per product (e.g. example.com/category/bathrooms). The difference is clear: the product page focuses on the product itself, and the blog category page contains all blog posts relating bathrooms (tips, new materials, new innovations,...). My question is if the product page and blog category page can compete with each other for the term bathrooms (although they have different content). Does it help or is it enough to direct internal links from separate blog posts to the most important page (being the product page) and back to avoid my category blog page to compete with my product page? Another possibility would be to use a canonical tag on the category page pointing to the product page, but this actually isn't good practice because it isn't really duplicate content. Third possibility would be to no index the category page. So what is the best solution of the three? 2. A second example of keyword cannibalization can be category archive pages for webshops. If you have a category page example.com/jeans and a subcategory page example.com/jeans/women, is it useful to optimize on both pages for different terms, being jeans for the first page and jeans for women for the second, or will Google not make this distinction because the keyword are too closely related? In other words, is it useful to write content specifically for jeans for women and make a landing page for this keyword, or will this page compete with the category page that has been optimized for just the keyword jeans? In large clothing webshops, you can see for example that there is an optimized page for Nike (content, headings,...) but not for Nike for women or Nike for men. Is this just laziness or is this done exactly to avoid keyword cannibalization? Looking forward to your comments!

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!

Hi everyone, I have a question about embedding videos on a website: if you optimize the title and description for the video in Youtube, will these be taken into account for the ranking of the page where the video is embedded? Or will only the Youtube link for the video show in SERP's, instead of the page itself? I've read in a post of Phil Nottingham that it's usually not a good idea to embed a Youtube video on your own site, but use Wistia instead, exactly to avoid cannibalisation of your own rankings. Is this correct? Thanks!

Hi, I am doing extensive keyword research for the SEO of a big webshop. Since this shop sells technical books and software (legal books, tax software and so on), I come across a lot of very specific keywords for separate products. Isn't it better to try and rank in the SERP's with all the separate product pages, instead of with the landing (category) pages?

Hi, I am doing the SEO for a webshop, which has a lot of linking and related websites on the same root domain. So the structure is for example: Root domain: example.com
Shop: shop.example.com
Linking websites to shop: courses.example.com, software.example.com,... Do I have to check which keywords these linking websites are already ranking for and choose other keywords for my category and product pages on the webshop? The problem with this could be that the main keywords for the category pages on the webshop are mainly the same as for the other subdomains. The intention is that some people immediately come to the webshop instead of going first to the linking websites and then to the webshop. Thanks.

Hi, I am building a website in Wordpress and when checking the pages through Moz toolbar or Yoast plugin, I notice that these don't recognise the internal links in custom CSS and the images neither. Here some code to clarify how it is built: [vc_row][vc_column width="1/2"][ultimate_heading main_heading="Veldrijden" alignment="left" main_heading_margin="margin-bottom:20px;"][/ultimate_heading][vc_single_image image="6497" img_size="full" onclick="custom_link" link="http://k488239.hosting.kinamo.be/activiteiten/veldrijden/"][vc_btn title="Meer info" color="mulled-wine" align="left" link="url:http%3A%2F%2Fk488239.hosting.kinamo.be%2Factiviteiten%2Fveldrijden%2F|||"][/vc_column] The links are embedded in images and in 'More info' buttons. Also the internal links in the main website navigation are not recognised, but the normal a href links are recognised. For the images it is a little different: the alt text from the images gets recognised by Moz, but Yoast says there are no images on the page. The only thing I can think of that there is no 'a href' in the links and for the images that it has something to do with the page builder. Can this effect my SEO results? Thanks.

Hi, I have a Wordpress website and want to delete or edit the text that appears when I hover over my navigation tabs. In my case, the text is always the same as the page title, but I don't know where to edit it separately. When I change the title of a page that is in the navigation, the text that appears changes too. So the general setting is that this text is the same as the page title. Does somebody have an idea where to edit this? Thanks!

Hi, We are migrating an old website to a new one built in Wordpress soon. We also added an SSL to change to https:// Most of the url's stay the same. Can we just migrate from http to https on server level, and for the url's that do change just set a 301 redirect? Or are there other things we should take into account?

Hi, I have to set up a campaign for a webshop. This webshop is a subdomain itself. First question: The two subfolders I need to track are /nl_BE and /fr_BE. What is the best way to handle this? Shall I set up two different campaigns for each subfolder, or shall I just make one campaign and add tags to keywords? **Second question: **it seems like Moz can't crawl enough pages. There are no disallows in the robots.txt. Should I try putting the following at the top into my robots.txt? User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow: Or is it because I want to crawl only a subdomain that it doesn't work? Thanks