Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I have been getting conflicting advice on the best way to implement schema for the following scenario. There is a central e-commerce store that is registered to it's own unique address which is "head office". There are a few physical shops each of which has their own location and address. Each shop has its own landing page within /our-stores/. So each page on the website has the Organisation schema for the central 'organisation', something like: Then on each physical store landing page is something like the following as well as the Organisation schema: Is this correct? If it is should I extend LocalBusiness with store URL and sameAs for GMB listing and maybe Companies House registration? It's also been suggested that we should use LocalBusiness for the head office of the company, then Departmentwith the typeStore.  But i'm not sure on that?

Due to the restraints of category page layout many of the products in certain categories have the product titles truncated, in some cases missing off 2-5 words depending on the product in question.  The product name which displays on the category page is lifted straight from the product page itself, so not possible to do something like "product name including spec..."  to place ... to indicate a bit more. I'm assuming not but just wanted to check that Google will not frown on this.  Text is not being hidden it just does not render fully in the restricted space.  So there is a scenario of 'bits of' text in the source not displaying on the rendered page.

Just a quick question re implementation of JSON-ID breadcrumbs You are here: Acme Company → Electronics → Computers → Laptops So in this example laptops is my current page without a link on the visible on-page breadcrumb. When implementing JSON-LD BreadcrumbList should  Laptops be included in the schema snippet, or commence from Computers to home?

On a category page the products are listed via/in connection with the search function on the site.  Page source and front-end match as they should. However when viewing a browser rendered version of a google cached page the URL for the product has changed from, as an example - https://www.example.com/products/some-product to https://www.example.com/search/products/some-product The source is a relative URL in the correct format, so therefore /search/ is added at browser rendering. The developer insists that this is ok as the query string in the Google cache page result URL is triggering the behaviour, confusing the search function - all locally.  I can see this but just wanted feedback that internally Google will only ever see the true source or will it's internal rendering mechanism possibly trigger similar behaviour?

I am working on a site that has just gone through a migration to Shopify at the very same time as Google did an update in October.  So problems from day 1. All main menu categories have subsequently over the past 6 weeks fallen off a cliff.  All aspects of the site have been reviewed in terms of technical, link profile and on-page, with the site in better shape than several ranking competitors. One issue that i'd like some feedback on is the main menu which has 4 iterations in the source. desktop desktop (sticky) mobile mobile (sticky - appears as a second desktop sticky but I assume for mobile) These items that are "duplicated" menus are the top level menu items only.  The rest of the nested menu items are included within the last mobile menu option. So desktop menu in source doesn't include any of the sub-menu items, the mobile version carries all these there are 4 versions of the top level main menu items in source Should I be concerned?  Considering we have significant issues should this be cleaned up?

What is a reasonable length of time to expect 404s to be resolved in Search Console?  There was a mass of 404s that were built up from directory changes and filtering URLs that have been fixed.  These have all been fixed but of course there are some that slipped the net.  How long is it reasonable to expect the old 404s that don't have any links to drop away from Search Console?  New 404s are still being reported over 4 months later.  'First detected' is always showing as a date later than the fixed 404's date. Is this reasonable, i've never seen this being so resilient and not clean up like this?  We manually fix these 404s and like popcorn more turn up. Just to add the bulk of 404s came into existence around a year ago and left for around 8 months.

Without duplicating i'm looking at a similar setup to this thread There is a marine business that has within it 3 distinct departments, Sales & brokerage, marina and shipyard all within the same location but with unique telephone numbers grouped into sections on the website with the unique numbers.  I'm clarifying whether there are genuine distinct customer facing locations for each department.  We want to create department pages because each one has unique opening hours. However looking at this I have some questions i'm unsure about. Each department has a unique landline number that routes through to the main switchboard when called, does that matter? The departments kind make the idea of a core G+ page, map page redundant because there are only 3 areas of the business and the departments handle that.  So can you have just departments, or should we set up the main 'hub' page as the brand page, linking to 3 departments? Where can I find information on how to correctly set up a department so the connection/hierarchy is in place? Looking around I can't find any instructions.

I'm working on a site that has had some real bad technical issues over a period of time.  We have carefully resolved all of them, rinsed through, rechecked for issues and so forth. Organic traffic started to move slightly up but has now taken a real backward step. Taking a look at the link profile which has not really been worked on at all we have a mass of Central Index derived links coming through from sites such as gethampshire, heathrowpages and so on.  Within each of these directories the business is listed under pages for areas it doesn't belong in, so for example in gethampshire it is listed under printers in Warwick or printers in Surbiton. The end result is that 65% and quickly growing anchor text is 'website' - 90% dofollow.  They are now coming through like popcorn. My instinct is to remove these listings from the profile.  Has anyone else had this kind of issue with Central Index?

I've been reading some posts on the merits and pitfalls of using rel=prev, rel=next and canonical, but I just wanted to double check the right solution. example.com/birth-announcements example.com/birth-announcements?p=2 example.com/birth-announcements?p=3 With a small selection of products on each variation. So at the moment there is a canonical on all of them to the base example.com/birth-announcements.  The problem is we are having difficulty getting the products within p=* indexed.  I don't think from all I read that rel=prev/rel=next is the way to go.  Would the solution (or best way to go) be to create a "view-all" filter and set that to be the canonical URL, so all product URLs are in clear focus for Google.  The volume of products won't (shouldn't) have too much of an impact on page load.  Or am I wrong and rel=prev/rel=next  is a feasible solution?

I'm working on a site that has hidden H1 content.  So for example: Video/Film Production with the page using the following codeVideo/Film Productionas the title.  there are no other H1 tags on the page. I have taken this up with their dev and they have suggested this has to be implemented this way due to some issues with displaying in iOS.  They are digging their heels in and suggesting it stays as is. How much of a risk would you say this is?  Well i'm actually looking for a bit of a back-up here.

Apparently on my last question my profile status says Staff?  Is there something I should know??  😉

Wooah, this one makes me feel a bit nervous. The cache version of the site homepage shows all the text, but I understand that is the html code constructed by the browser.  So I get that. If I Google some of the content it is there in the index and the cache version is yesterday. If I Fetch and Render in GWT then none of the content is available in the preview - neither Googlebot or visitor view.  The whole preview is just the menu, a holding image for a video and a tag line for it.  There are no reports of blocked resources apart from a Wistia URL.  How can I decipher what is blocking Google if it does not report any problems? The CSS is visible for reference to, for example, <section class="text-within-lines big-text narrow"> class="data"> some content... Ranking is a real issue, in part by a poorly functioning main menu. But i'm really concerned with what is happening with the render.

The site has 2 main categories for scooters.  One category is Type of Scooter menu item with nested types and the second category is Manufacturer menu item with nest makes.  So all the scooters can be found in either of these categories depending on how you search. The Manufacturer category is mainly thin content and set as noindex, as well as the nested makes categories. However when searching for products Google is invariably using the breadcrumb for the Manufacturer category rather than the Type of Scooter category, which is indexed. Should this be of concern Google using breadcrumbs of non indexed URLs, even if they are followed and therefore the site navigable?

I'm working on a site where there is a top level menu with a dropdown off a couple of the main headings and subsequent dropdown from one or two of those dropdowns.  Usual stuff. The main problem we are having is the ranking of one of the main menu pages, some of which is historical stuff we have cleaned up and waiting for Penguin. My question is whether the following is a prudent step.  The main menu option/page and keyword is something like "Green Widgets" but this activates a dropdown where there is a link to 'Types of Green Widget', then again there is a dropdown with several pages to different types of Green widget.  The two menu items "Green Widgets" and "Types of Green Widgets" both link to the "Green Widget" page. As the "Types of Green Widgets" link is sitewide and not really in the right flavour for the "Green Widget" page would it be prudent to remove the link element of that menu item or set it to /#

So the website is displaying correctly in mobile devices and online tools.  However, when using Google Page Speed Insights mobile or fetch as mobile in Search Console the page always loads as if it has moved 50% of the screen to the right - so whitespace on the left then 50% of the page in on the right side. I've been ignoring this.  The site loads fine in devices and i've put it down to a glitch in Google, but at the same time it's been bugging me.  Has anyone else seen this and should I ignore?

I'm working on a site that has implemented hreflang. The site is all in English but has slight differences and breaks down to separate domains, so example.co.uk example.eu example.com the hreflang implementation targets specific countries per domain. This was tested using http://flang.dejanseo.com.au but Webmaster Tools has thrown up errors.  For example, **URLs for your site and alternative URLs in 'en_GB' that do not have return tags.  **But every page refers back.Any ideas what's going wrong?

I have a bit of a tricky situation with a client where there is some history with old domains.  But this is the current situation which I need to stick to: Business name (all made up) is Acme Print 2 live websites - acme-niche(dot)com  and productsandservices(dot)com Third website acmeprint(dot)com is live and owned by an old partner, different NAP. acme-niche(dot)com  and productsandservices(dot)com share the same NAP.  Not much traffic and a bit of a poor domain profile for acme-niche(dot)com, so suggest just using productsandservices(dot)com.  Also acme-niche(dot)com would be a bit misleading for use for the whole business in any case. However, all content for productsandservices(dot)com refers to Acme Print.  Because of all the confusion should we keep the productsandservices(dot)com referring to Acme Print throughout, or update with new productsandservices(dot)com logo, mention that it is a trading name of Acme Print and refer to the trading domain name throughout the content. I want to know the best option for listings and citations - the trading name which is a domain name or Acme Print?  I've not worked with a local site where domain name and business name and a separate business with domain are mixed up.

A Wordpress site has a footer widget for facebook with some images, all of which are served within an iframe.  The FB CDN robots is blocking the images from being crawled so Webmaster Tools rendering tool is reporting these 8 or so images as blocked.  Should I be concerned?

Does anyone have direct experience regarding the impact on quality score by ensuring there is a privacy policy in place on the landing page? I am aware of the legal requirement but I have heard anecdotal evidence there could be an impact on quality score if one is missing.

Just wondering if anyone had come across this kind of scenario which I had/have with a client. Rebuilt/revamped site that has got problems with thin content we are looking to resolve.  Rankings for the main keywords were ok on page 2 or 3 and being worked on.  Two weeks ago ALL main keywords disappeared from ranking (category pages).  The homepage took over and ranked ALL those keywords at #1!  Bang -straight to top spot.  However happy I was I find this disconcerting as there is a reasonable level of competition. Today homepage rankings in the main go and directories come back into the rankings at some good positions on page one.  We still need to fix thin and duplicated content! I can justify the problems and swing with the category pages but the massive cross the board top position for the homepage has been pretty bizarre. Has anyone else had the experience where the homepage suddenly 'out-performs' in a big way?

We are working on a site that has a whole section that is not indexed (well a few pages are).  There is also a problem where there are 2 directories that are the same content and it is the incorrect directory with the indexed URLs. The problem is if I do a search in Google to find a URL - typically location + term then I get the URL (from the wrong directory) up there in the top 5.  However, do a site: for that URL and it is not indexed!  What could be going on here? There is nothing in robots or the source, and GWT fetch works fine.

Any idea why someone would put a sitewide non-clickable one pixel wide link within an iframe in the footer to a linkedin profile?  It has thrown me.

Is there a tool, or Chrome extension I can use to load a page, identify the .js on the page, 'uncheck' selected .js and load the page again to check loading correctly?  Even better to be able to defer/move to the end of the file to test.

I'm working on a site that has low traffic volumes due to its niche.  That's fine but we are daily getting referral traffic from unrelated domains without a link.  These visits are always 100% bounce which is impacting the overall click.through rate.  The domains are not the same and different ones come through all the time, so it is difficult to keep on top of. Any ideas what could be going on here and an effective way of dealing with this?

I'm working for a client who is in a very tight niche.  They offer a service which can come as part of a new build or installation to an existing building. The problem is the the traffic volumes are very targeted and very low, but a single sale can be very lucrative. Another problem is that it is very difficult to determine who the converting visitor will be as depending on the potential project it could be an owner, PM, architect, designer and on...  There are no clear cut decision makers, it's always on a case by case basis. Because of this the client is baulking at any attempts to gather contact details because they are arguing it may not be the decision maker and in their industry they know it will cheese people off parting with contact details and it "may not be the right person anyway". I am looking at encouraging exploring ideas based around a traditional newsletter, whitepaper, survey etc.  Has anyone else had experience in this kind of scenario where search volumes (organic, PPC) are low enough that the timeframes for testing any value become uncomfortably stretched and even then difficult to determine any general trends?

A client has two businesses running from the same address.  Both businesses will operate out of Unit 1.  Would it be safe to go for Unit 1 and Unit 1A.  Will that distinction be enough for Google local and has anyone had any specific experience with this issue?

I'm starting to use schema on a site currently working on the business address in the footer.  What is the correct way to use data that has more than one line? So for example the address is something like "Unit 1, Some Farm, Some Street..." Unit 1, Some Farm Some Street or Unit 1, Some Farm
Some Street

Does anyone know of a tool to check open graph data, especially og:url and og:image? I use the og object debugger in FB, but wanted to know if there is a tool to load all URLs or crawl the site in one go?

Does anyone have any quantifiable evidence regarding text that is collapsed - when clicked the section expands and presents the text, against just having the text on view in the page. That is, instead of having a FAQ with question followed by answer, there is a question which you click to expose/expand the answer. Could the collapsed text be potentially detrimental to ranking?

I'm looking for a bit of advice regarding links coming into main site from another site in the client portfolio. The main site we are working on has been going great, organic traffic has grown considerably.  The past few weeks there has been a subtle decline including ranking for a few keywords down a little. What I have noticed is that there is another site in the portfolio (that I am not working on) has had a steady tailspin in organic traffic since Jan and i've been informed it is a dying site in terms of the products offered.  This has some links in the main menu going directly to the main site. My gut feeling is to isolate the secondary site from the main (no-follow or remove links), but the impact on slightly dropped rankings on the main site is not directly related to those linked pages.  Would you go for it and isolate anyway?

Looking at the link profile anchor text of a site i'm working on new links keep popping up in the reports with let's say very distasteful anchor text.  These links are obviously spam and link to old forum pages for the site that doesn't exist any more, so the majority seem to trigger the 404 page. I understand that the 404 page (404 header response) does not flow any link power, or damage, but given the nature and volume of the sites linking to the "domain" would it be a good idea to completely disassociate and disavow these domains?

A site i'm working on has about 12 language domains - .es, it, .de etc. On each page of every domain the header has links to every homepage.  At the moment these are all set to no-follow as an initial step to stop potential link profile issues spreading around. Moving forward i'm not totally sure how to handle these links.  On one side I see and agree that no-follow is not necessary, but do-follow is just filtering out and weakening link juice.  What is the best way to handle this scenario?

I'm working on a site that has 10 languages served from centrally located core files in Magento.  So each language has its own TLD with localised content served from SQL.  GWT has also had the preferred country set for each domain. The problem is that each and every domain is indexed in each of the local Google indexes.  In DE Google the FR homepage is ranking higher for the brand keyword.  I kind of think I am wasting my time with hreflang but would like some advice whether this is an option or clues how I can handle this situation best.

I am working on a revamped multi-language site that has moved to Magento.  Each language runs off the core coding so there are no sub-directories per language. The developer has created sitemaps which have been uploaded to their respective GWT accounts.  They have placed the sitemaps in new directories such as: /sitemap/uk/sitemap.xml /sitemap/de/sitemap.xml I want to add the sitemaps to the robots.txt but can't figure out how to do it.  Also should they have placed the sitemaps in a single location with the file identifying each language: /sitemap/uk-sitemap.xml /sitemap/de-sitemap.xml What is the cleanest way of handling these sitemaps and can/should I get them on robots.txt?

I just wanted to quickly run this past someone.  I have some footer links I want set to nofollow: <map <span="" class="webkit-html-tag">name</map>="Map"><area <span="" class="webkit-html-tag">shape="rect" coords="10,39,73,101" href="URL" target="_blank" alt="some text"> should this be <map <span class="webkit-html-tag">name</map <span>="Map"><area <span class="webkit-html-tag">shape</area <span>="rect" coords="10,39,73,101 <a <span class="webkit-html-tag">href="URL" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" alt="some text"></a <span> Want to check before I advise. If this is not the way how can I fix?

This is more of an observation than anything else. Has anyone noticed any strange results in Google News, in terms of very old content hitting page 1?  My example is football, I support Newcastle so keep checking for the latest transfer failure or humiliation.  First page for couple of days is showing old articles (April, May) from the same source rather than the usual spread of tabloid and broadsheet news.

I've noticed a possible discrepancy with my data and the figures in the Ranking Report >> Rankings which leads to this question: In top 3 : 10 On first page: 19 Is this meant to mean 10 of the 19 are in the top 3, or after the 10 top 3 there are 19 more keywords on first page?

I have a page that is optimised - title, URL, content etc for the chosen keywords. However, within the content are some batches of bullet point text that has repeated text throughout. So for example I have 5 instances of my chosen keyword within the content and 24 instances of the two word text within the bullet points.  Does this kind of scenario have any impact on ranking?

I'm working on a site that is built on DNN.  For some reason the client has set all pages to convert to HTTPS (although this is not perfect as some don't when landing on them). All pages indexed in Google are straight HTTP, but when you click on the Google result a temp 302 header response to the corresponding HTTPS page for many. I want it changed to a 301 but unfortunately is an issue for DNN. Is there another way around this in IIS that won't break DNN as it seems to be a bit flaky?  I want to have the homepage link juice pass through for all links made to non HTTPS homepage.  Removing HTTPS does not seem to be an option for them.

I just wanted to check what you guys thought of this strategy for duplicate product descriptions. A sample product is a letter bracelet - a, b, c etc so there are 26 products with identical descriptions.  It is going to be extremely difficult to come up with 25 new unique descriptions so with recommendation i'm looking to use the canonical tag.  I can't set any to no-index because visitors will look for explicit letters. Because the titles only differ by the letter then a search for either letter bracelet letter a bracelet letter i bracelet will just return results for 'letter bracelet' due to stop words unless the searcher explicitly searches for 'letter "a" bracelet. So I reckon I can make 4 new unique descriptions.  I research what are the most popular letters picking 5 from the top (excluding 'a' and 'i').  Equally share the remaining letters between those 5 and with each group set a canonical tag pointing to the primary letter of that group. Does this seem a sensible thing to do?

I've started to look at ranking and visitor behaviour within a specific product category and I've come across this strange data in GA that i'm struggling to get my head around. keyword - wishbone necklace gold landing - ...necklace-dive-in.html bounce - 99.31% new visits - 0.00% The landing page is not anywhere in the results for the given keyword (nor does the keyword appear anywhere within the page).  The data is spread out to date since Dec 2011 and the landing page accounts for about 97% of the traffic for that keyword. I then looked at browser which is 95% Safari (different versions) and breaking that down into City about 30% is (not set), 30% a single city and then there is a spread of locations.  It might be fair to assume that therefore 60% could be the same location but there is still 40% to take into consideration. What I can't get my head around is how the landing page is being accessed so regularly for the wrong keyword.  The correctly ranking URL only accounts for 5% of the traffic which is more in line with the estimated search volumes for that keyword.  I've checked versions of the page going back and none contain the keyword. Am I missing something, or any ideas how to fix?

Each product is an item of jewellery based on a letter of the alphabet.  At present all 26 are indexed but as you guess they all share the same description, title and URL (apart from change in letter). What I was going to do was set all but one to no-index, recreate new descriptions and revert back to index. But then that got me thinking - through stop words will the titles be seen as duplicates: letter bracelet letter a bracelet letter i bracelet

Looking at the list of linking domains in Webmaster Tools I have come across 36 from domains similar to **searchengines.com or .net, where ** is a number.  They are all duplicates and get their data from DMOZ. I'm cleaning up the link profile and my question is should I be concerned to get these cleaned up especially as I have some more serious links to clean out and possibly need to use disavow? Actually if I need them removed and the sites state I have to go through DMOZ to do so is that good enough for Google to understand that I can't really manually remove these links and I can proceed to disavow them?

I've had some varying advice on here regarding the best way to proceed with [i'll PM the URL] which was hit by Penguin 2.0.  There were previous issues with the homepage and before the 22nd had started creating new decent links. Some have suggested to ditch the domain and start again.  There are several reasons not to and branding is the deciding factor at this stage. I'm going down the route of initially trying to manually remove links and then follow on with disavow.  I would really appreciate another pair of eyes taking a quick look to see if i'm missing anything other than a dodgy link profile.

I'm working on a site that has historically had issues ranking the homepage.  We cleaned up some on page issues and then it went into a high and low pattern - page 4 then page 12 etc (was static around page 9 before), settling at page 6. The link profile was not good and there were a high level of links that should have been no-follow as they were clearly looking paid for - we addressed this along with some other poor links.  This effectively dropped ranking down to page 23, but not unexpected considering the very big drop in followed links. Meanwhile we have embarked on a fresh steady link building strategy with nice clean links, varied anchor text coming from varying DA domains, smattered with a few no-follow links - strongly focussing on being as natural as possible. At the Penguin update the homepage has totally disappeared.  Frustratingly just after the update (same day) we removed a 301ed old domain from the profile.  This was the old company URL which we discovered had a lot of spam linking associated with it.  An oversight - there were other 301 domains that were removed some time ago which were totally unrelated to the main site and we were told all other domains were simply bought and redirected to stop hijacking - all but this were. Considering the work we have done would it be good assumption this domain 301 could be the underlying factor?  So far organic traffic is steady, in fact a tad up. What would you guys do?

Hi, the main focus of my question is to add a bit more information to my client as to where they are going wrong. Firstly they have a directory on a third party domain with subdirectories containing all their product listings.  All the links need to be no-follow for sure. However, from a link juice passing perspective if there are per page say 20-30 links to varying URLs on the same domain is it still the same sort of calculation that the link juice is sufficiently weakened that each link has little value, or because the links are to the same domain there is an extra (potential) filter going on?