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Hi Eric,

Setting a Referrer Policy via a Meta tag, as described in Cyrus's 2015 post, is still valid.

Whether you need to use this to see referral traffic on your client's site is a question of the security protocol of both sites. If your site is HTTPS and your client's site is HTTP, setting the referrer policy as described is an option. If they are both HTTPS or HTTP, you shouldn't need to set a referrer policy.

Whether it will work properly in your case will best be determined by adding the correct policy and checking for the data in the analytics of your client's site.

Best,
Mike

Hi Kay,

These two example URLs do not seem to represent duplicate content - the listings are different for each page. I wouldn't want to set canonical tags on these pages as they are unique.

Did you see an error in an SEO tool of some kind indicating there was a duplicate content problem here?

For general applications, canonical tags should be added to the duplicate page(s) themselves, and those canonical tags should refer to the preferred/canonical page that you want to keep indexed (but no changes need to be made to the preferred/canonical page itself). So if these pages were true duplicates of your homepage, each duplicate would need the canonical tag  (but the homepage itself would not need to include the canonical tag).

From your examples, I'd just caution you may not be dealing with actual duplicate content - they look like valid pages to me.

Best,
Mike

Hi Joe,

If we create 301 redirects for the pages and content on the main site and add noindex, nofollow tags, will we lose the domain authority that we have from our original domain because the pages now have the noindex, nofollow tags?

If you create 301 redirects for pages on the main site, the "noindex,nofollow" tags will have no impact (bc they'll never be visible to Googlebot or other clients). The pages would have to load (200 status code) for Google to discover and make use of the Meta Robots tag or any other directive/content.

So if you're planning to create 301 redirects for these pages, I wouldn't bother with the "noindex,nofollow" tags - once Google encounters the 301 redirect they should index the new pages and remove the old pages.

One caveat: if Google detects a large disparity between the old and new pages (topic/intent is clearly different), the authority might not translate over to the new pages. We usually see this work fine, but it's something to keep in mind.

Best,
Mike

Hi cPanel,

You should be able to simply change the property name and URL in GA for this. You'll find basic instructions from Google here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3467852?hl=en

You should be able to use this interface to update the property name and default URL for your property, keep the same tracking code in-place along with all of your historical data.

Best,
Mike

Hi CORSOLUTIONS,

I think Abogados Madrid above is right in that you're best off creating specific pages for the areas this client serves with as much local-specific information as possible.

Outside of that, without a verifiable, physical address in each local, it will be difficult to rank in the "local pack" of results - these are largely driven by "distance to centroid," or the physical distance of your business's verified location to the center of the town/zip/etc the user searched for.

In short, it's pretty tough to drive traffic without visibility in the local pack these days, but with pages for each distinct area (keyword research is a good idea to verify whether a distinct area actually has specific search volume) you have a chance.

Best,
Mike

Hi Eddie,

I wouldn't be concerned about Google making an assumption about a PBN here.

I also wouldn't be surprised, though, if you don't see the traffic you're hoping for on the "aged" domain - it's anecdotal, but I've heard no shortage of stories over the years of domain consolidations, or domain purchases and redirects, that netted out without the traffic expected. If enough changes at once, Google can hit the "reset" button on the trust they've accrued to the domain(s) in question.

That said, what you're planning to do here sounds fine by me, and if I had to bet one way or the other, I'd bet on this working (I'd be shocked if you saw any penalty from this unless the domains you're redirecting or the newly purchased domain have a history of inbound or outbound linkspam).

Best,
Mike

Hi Shop-Sq,

This is a tricky one to answer definitively without knowing the details of the two sites.

Having been through a very similar situation, I expect that, unless the content is truly identical, you're existing site shouldn't suffer any losses by having both live and indexed at once.

That said, until you properly redirect the old pages to their new counterparts, the new site will probably only see marginal growth. So running them side-by-side, you're not likely to get a good measure of how the new site will perform once you redirect.

In my experience, there's no way to handle a site-wide redirect like this "risk-free" with a smooth transition. But you'd have a chance to catch any technical issues that might negatively impact Google's ability to crawl/index the new site's content if you launch it well ahead of March, then set the redirects once you're comfortable (again I'd want to do this well ahead of busy season if possible). This will give Google some time to crawl the redirects, pass PageRank to the new site - and it'll give you and your team some time to work out any kinks.

Hope this helps at least somewhat - these are not easy situations to evaluate especially without detailed knowledge of both sites.

Best of Luck,
Mike

Hi pickeringkelly,

Typically redirects on a WordPress site are found in three places:

1. The .htaccess file (often hidden by default, this file lives in the root or home directory of your hosting account and accepts redirect rules based on URL pattern matching
2. Redirection or a similar WordPress plug-in that provides a user interface for creating and managing URL-to-URL redirects based on an exact or partial URL match
3. Within the WordPress database itself, if a page's URL (or "permalink") has been updated, WordPress will automatically set a 301 redirect to the latest page - if you have a page with a permalink/URL that has been updated several times, this could cause a redirect chain

It won't be easy to spot what's triggering the redirects from the outside, even if you provide example URLs - it's much easier to spot what logic is set up with access to the .htaccess file (in the root hosting directory) or your WordPress installation.

If this is happening across all URLs of a given type (for instance a global redirect for all http:// page requests to https:// (secure) versions), it's likely to be driven by your .htaccess file logic. If it's just a few pages and the chains are unique, it's probably handled via a redirect plugin or the built-in WordPress logic.

Hope this helps!

Best,
Mike

Hi Bob,

This is one of the woolier aspects of SEO ("quality" or trust).

One thing I'd recommend is getting familiar with Google's Quality Rater/Evaluator Guidelines: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//insidesearch/howsearchworks/assets/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf

These are the guidelines they provide to their ~10k human search quality raters - this is the group they use to review potential changes to their search results to gather qualitative data on those results.

You'll see that there's not much "hard" data to go on here, but one way we've measured this and made it actionable at Distilled is by running surveys that we can deploy via SurveyMonkey+Amazon Mechanical Turk to get some sense of how the "average user" would rate a site across some of these points.

Here's a blog post that walks through the process: https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/replicate-googles-panda-questionnaire-processing/

There are no universally-applicable tips here, but trust elements like badges, aggregate user reviews, testimonials, etc are good places to start. Depending on the niche, if you're dealing with "YMYL" (Your Money Or Your Life) topics, basically any advice that could have a serious impact on a person's quality of life, Google has made big shifts recently (see: "Medic" update) to prefer sites where the "experts" running them or publishing content have clean, established reputations in the space (not just accolades displayed on the site itself but elsewhere on the web). This seems to have been particularly important for sites that are offering both advice and selling "solutions" related to that advice (for example, a medical advice blog that's connected to an ecommerce site that sells dietary supplements).

Hope this helps!

Best,
Mike

Hi Mat_C,

For the HTTPS update, you'll want to ensure that all HTTP URL requests are redirected to the new HTTPS versions. Usually this can be done with a global redirect (often it's easiest to do this via your .htaccess file).

However, because you're migrating from what sounds like a HTML site or non-WordPress CMS, your page paths, file extensions, etc will also be changing - so you'll want to map redirects from the old URLs to their new WordPress counterparts more granularly. This should only be necessary for URLs that have external links (links on other sites) referring to them or URLs that users will have stored in bookmarks or will find in advertisements or other referral sources.

We usually look for URLs that have external links using a tool like Moz's Link Explorer and URLs that have Direct or Referral source traffic via Google Analytics / similar.

When you know what old URLs needs to be redirected to new URLs, there are WordPress plugins (like Redirection) that can make this easier than adding an exhaustive list to your .htaccess file or similar.

Best of Luck,
Mike

Sorry, Cesar - you're right, this thread went way off course.

My notes on 301 as preferred vs rel=canonical were strictly focused on potential "duplication issues" brought up by Federico as related to Desktop URLs. The 301, you're right, is the wrong tool for the job when it comes to Desktop/Mobile.

The page I linked to originally - here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details#separateurls - has the instructions you'd want to follow under "separate URLs."

To clarify with Google which page should be served to which search users (Desktop vs Mobile), you need 1) a rel=alternate tag pointing from Desktop to Mobile and 2) a rel=canonical tag pointing from Mobile to Desktop.

Effectively if you will have the same canonical for both versions - the Desktop home page. Whether or not you have rel=canonicaled the Desktop back to itself (again this doesn't accomplish much but it won't hurt you), the Mobile home page (following the instructions from Google) will be rel=canonicaled back to the Desktop home page.

And yes, if your Mobile home page has a lot of links pointing to it, using this setup should increase the overall authority and ability to rank of your Desktop home page. It will consolidate that link equity at the Desktop home page URL.

Both pages will remain indexed, but Google (learning from the rel=alternate tag) will serve up the Mobile home page only for mobile search users.

Hope that clarifies a bit. Disregard the discussion between Federico and I on the correct use of 301s in this thread, as it was off topic. In short, a 301 will not serve you well in this case. You want one of the three implementations recommended by Google on the page I linked to above (and in your case, the third option for separate URLs sounds best to me).

Best,
Mike

Rand published this blog post, the result of an SEOmoz study on this very topic, a couple of years ago: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts

By most accounts this approach by Google, only accepting the first anchor text, still prevails.

If your main objective is the second link, you may want to render the first invisible to Googlebot. Otherwise only the first anchor text will factor.

Barry is quite right - I assumed these pointed to the same page. Two links to two separate pages on the same domain will both be counted.

Good catch, Barry.

Generally speaking, the links higher to the top of the main content block tend to get more weight, but it's slight. For most intents and purposes, they'll be getting equal weight (not worth fretting over).

Hi rswhtn,

I can't add much more than others have here already.

Are sliders in general bad for SEO? If they diminish the user experience or slow down the page, they could hurt more than help. Technically speaking, speed is a potential reason. Since Google responds to signals of a satisfied user (and uses quality rating in their algo.), anything that impacts the user's impression of the value of a page is a potential factor for SEO.

Is Revolution Slider specifically good/bad for SEO? We have no indication Google has targeted specific WordPress plug-ins for security warnings / similar. If a site gets hacked and Google detects malware, different story, but there's no indication an unhacked Revolution Slider instance would impact SEO.

I think I'd consider UX here before SEO - are users engaging with the slider? Would they engage more with another layout? Split testing is easy and free with Google Optimize these days. Security may be an issue, but that's a valid concern with any plug-in.

Best,
Mike

Hi CORSOLUTIONS,

I think Abogados Madrid above is right in that you're best off creating specific pages for the areas this client serves with as much local-specific information as possible.

Outside of that, without a verifiable, physical address in each local, it will be difficult to rank in the "local pack" of results - these are largely driven by "distance to centroid," or the physical distance of your business's verified location to the center of the town/zip/etc the user searched for.

In short, it's pretty tough to drive traffic without visibility in the local pack these days, but with pages for each distinct area (keyword research is a good idea to verify whether a distinct area actually has specific search volume) you have a chance.

Best,
Mike

1. I would not expect the footer text to hurt on-page SEO. "Duplicate content" does not mean any repeated content whatsoever across your pages. This flag only goes up for Google's filtration purposes when the vast majority of content on the page is duplicate to another page.

There are countless sites across the web with similar "template" content that occurs across all pages, and this does not impede them from ranking or draw any filters/penalties against them.

2. Keyword density is not worth focusing on. It can safely be dropped from your SEO work at this point.

3. I'd look at this from a usability standpoint. If you have reason (data) to believe the footer content is being read by users and therefor actually serving a purpose, I'd recommend leaving it as-is. If nobody is reading this content, or it simply clutters the page unnecessarily, it's a good idea to remove it in favor of a more straightforward user experience.

Hi Kenji,

I'm not sure if you're still experiencing this problem or have found a workaround at this point...

I'm wondering if you c an figure out how people are getting back to that conversion page for their subsequent visits. Are they simply bookmarking the page, or is it linked to a confirmation email/similar?

What I'm thinking you could do is set a variable in your confirmation URL, just a means of varying the URL slightly for that first time you push the user to the final step.

So instead of:

http://www.example.com/thankyou.html

You'd use:

http://www.example.com/thankyou.html?var=true

(The "var=true" can be anything - it won't effect the page load.)

Changing your Goal URL setting to Exact match, you could require this variable.

So when you push your users to the final step (the true conversion), you send them to the URL including the variable.

Then, from all other places the user might be able to navigate back to the confirmation page (emails, etc), the variable is not included in that version of the URL. And to ensure they aren't just bookmarking the page and coming back later, you can use HTML 5's pushState() to change the address bar and remove the variable after Google Analytics tracks the pageview.

Hope this helps. I think taking a closer look at how you can customize the confirmation page URL for the first time the user hits it is where you'll find your answer.

Best of Luck,
Mike

Hi Robin,

There's no indication Google is having any trouble picking up the separate URLs and their associated Titles and Descriptions properly - a site: search for your domain returns all pages I'm able to find manually, and each page has a unique and accurate Title and Description snippet.

ReactJS is one of the most commonly used JS platforms, with a lot of momentum in the development community especially on high-traffic sites, and Google has innovated their crawl tech to include JS-support (they crawl with a headless version of Google Chrome) to adapt to this platform.

"View Source" is no longer valid for interpreting page code as Google will render it - they crawl with JS support, so JS interactions and modifications of source code are visible to Google. Using "Inspect Element" in Chrome shows a more accurate representation of what Google can crawl/render.

In short: I see no negatives for SEO here, and I expect at this point your analytics and Search Console data will show that your pages are indexed and eligible for traffic (potentially already getting traffic) from Google.

Best,
Mike

I'd expect you'll find, if you look closer at the inbound links site.com/home has, they'll explain why it's ranking for those terms.

And, in such a case, I'd expect you'll generate similar rankings with site.com once the 301 carries - which is what I'd recommend doing.

Unless (there's always an "unless") there's another page on the site relevant to what site.com/home is ranking for (or you could build one) - in which case, you can use that 301 to send that link juice to that deeper page. Never a bad thing to build deep links, but I'd want to be sure the topic is a match. (Again, I'd take a look at those links and their anchor text.)

Without knowing the specifics I'd say 9 out of 10 times you want to achieve a canonical home page URL and consolidate link juice by redirecting all alternative home page URLs to site.com via 301.

Hi Federico,

A 301 is still the preferred/recommended method to point alternative URLs with exactly the same content back to the core version.

A canonical can achieve this as well, but it's not the preferred, most foolproof method to consolidate link equity and avoid duplication.

A canonical of a URL to the exact URL itself, again, achieves nothing. I'm not suggesting it'll cause some kind of problem (Google/Bing have been able to handle this from the beginning without any "infinite loop" issues), just that this in itself doesn't solve anything.

What you'd want is a canonical tag on those other URLs pointing back to the preferred URL. If you have no way of serving up unique source code per URL variation, then a self-referential canonical would be acceptable. But a 301 would be my first choice.

Maybe splitting hairs a bit.

In the example here, we're talking about desktop vs mobile URLs and how to handle canonical/alternate tags between the two, so duplication issues are a bit off-topic.

Best,
Mike