Hi Alex Cox,

I understand why you would want to do this and i have seen instances where this was done (not with the shoping aggregator markup but using the product markup with aggregateratings) and they got the rich snippets in the serps, like you mention. But for how long?

The point though is that your not following the intentions of the schema markups.  These reviews that you would be using on the category would be from people reviewing your products and not the category itself.  Hence you are gaming the system.

I´ve had the urge in the past (had to use some restrain) but refrained from doing it because at the end of the day you are eluding your users and thats not good business in the long run.

Hope my thoughts helped

Hi xdunningx,

You can use them and they could have a positive impact on SEO if they are not duplicates of the Category taxonomies. So for instance you have an eCommerce site that sells sports clothes and you have categories for fitness, tenis, golf, soccer etc.. . than you could have tags for leggings, t-shirts, tops, etc...

Many times though they would be subcategories as well so you would have a subcategory page for leggings e.g. sports.com/category/fitness/leggings and a page for the leggings tag e.g. sports.com/tag/leggings.  Both these pages would be competing for search queries related to leggings and therefore have less of an impact (as its not a clear statement of your site to google as to which page should rank) compared to one unique page on your website ranking for that query.

In general i would stay away from tags (woocomerce or others).for ecommerce unless they are very tightly managed and are for terms with sufficient search volumes and relevant for your business, and dont duplicate your categories.

Hope this helps

Hi Jenna,

In relation to the client searching their Business name, that shouldn´t be a big issue (unless they have chosen highly competitive generic words for their business name like "low interest loans") as EGOL mentioned they should rank fairly fast for this.

For adwords you can show them this http://www.tbkcreative.com/why-you-shouldnt-google-your-own-ads/ .  Many times though the clients will still continue to search anyway.  One of my clients only stopped after i showed him in his account that the keyword he was constantly searching had a ctr of 4% where all others in the account were more close to 20% and that it was the only one with a Quality score 3 points lower than the rest.  After this i showed him the results of him having stopped searching and he hasn´t restarted.  In this case though we were talking about 15-20 searches a day minimum.  Sporadich searches shouldn´t impact that much.

You need to also setup a regular reporting where you can show the results and this should be part of the inicial agreement.  Here you can show either data from analytics, GSC, Adwords, Moz etc... that will assure them there are actual results from your work. And be very clear from the start about what they can expect.

to go back to your initial question and assuming .ie is treated as ccTLD, what GSC seems to validate; in Google´s eyes your site is more relevant for users in Ireland and will therefore not be able to rank equally well as a gTLD globally.

What you can do is change to a gTLD (which i think is the most efficient if you have one website targeting globally). or ccTLD´s for the countries you want to target (ok if you have a lot of recourses)

Hi Alick300,

isn´t .ie a ccTLD though for Ireland or does google treat this one as a gccTLD as seen here https://www.screencast.com/t/5YgjXIriy ?

Hi  jgodwin,

I think the default search engine on Safari would still be Google Search so you would be all right there.  And as ios and android  cover more than 99% of world wide operating systems (https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/16/14634656/android-ios-market-share-blackberry-2016) that would leave under 1% not covered. For the few Microsoft phones out there, in this 1%, you can off course optimize for bing https://ignitevisibility.com/how-is-bing-seo-different-than-google-seo/

Good luck, hope this helps

Hi Luke Griffiths-Jones,

The url reflecting the Page title is a good practice and so is maintaining your URl´s as short as possible.

In your case you have another option that would keep your url reflecting the page title and at the same time keeping it short (though i wouldn´t worry to much about 80 char more on this https://moz.com/community/q/maximum-length-of-the-url-for-seo-75-115 and https://moz.com/blog/should-i-change-my-urls-for-seo

https://www.tumbleandhide.com/newton-leather-wallets-card-holders

But if you want to choose between your two options i would go for the first https://www.tumbleandhide.com/collections/newton-leather-wallets-card-holders as the latter doesn´t include some important keywords.

I have read those same countless articles but can´t think of any study on it, neither any respectable person in the industry elaborating on it.  We pay attention to maintaining consistency in the NAP´s  (don´t sell it as a service though) just as good business practice and always had the idea it would be good for SEO as well. Now i am not so sure if there is any impact there.

When i see people mentioning ".. even the slightest variations...will hinder a search engine´s confidence" my hairs standup as i have seen over time that many NAP´s from clients have natural variations, sometimes parts of the address are abbreviated, order of words changed, a small insignificant part of the address omitted, phone numbers with international codes and without, with extensions and without, Names with Ltd and without.  Doesn´t make any sense to me that these would already hinder the search engines´s confidence as they are natural (google always claims to like natural).

Very interested to see if someone will come up with a credible source for this

Hi Brian Nash,

Don´t think this funcionality exist.  Can you explain why you would like to nofollow instead of disavow?

Hi Aua,

Since speed is a ranking factor for Google anything influencing this speed negatively would theoretically be bad for SEO.   I don´t know how many are "too many" but if you are talking about several dozens that shouldn´t really impact that much.  It isn´t good practice though to leave not completed unpublished posts in your site, and usually not necessary, to keep a clean database it would be better to finish them off site on an editor and insert them in your site when they are done.

Hope this helps

Hi Jenna,

In relation to the client searching their Business name, that shouldn´t be a big issue (unless they have chosen highly competitive generic words for their business name like "low interest loans") as EGOL mentioned they should rank fairly fast for this.

For adwords you can show them this http://www.tbkcreative.com/why-you-shouldnt-google-your-own-ads/ .  Many times though the clients will still continue to search anyway.  One of my clients only stopped after i showed him in his account that the keyword he was constantly searching had a ctr of 4% where all others in the account were more close to 20% and that it was the only one with a Quality score 3 points lower than the rest.  After this i showed him the results of him having stopped searching and he hasn´t restarted.  In this case though we were talking about 15-20 searches a day minimum.  Sporadich searches shouldn´t impact that much.

You need to also setup a regular reporting where you can show the results and this should be part of the inicial agreement.  Here you can show either data from analytics, GSC, Adwords, Moz etc... that will assure them there are actual results from your work. And be very clear from the start about what they can expect.

Hi Alex Cox,

I understand why you would want to do this and i have seen instances where this was done (not with the shoping aggregator markup but using the product markup with aggregateratings) and they got the rich snippets in the serps, like you mention. But for how long?

The point though is that your not following the intentions of the schema markups.  These reviews that you would be using on the category would be from people reviewing your products and not the category itself.  Hence you are gaming the system.

I´ve had the urge in the past (had to use some restrain) but refrained from doing it because at the end of the day you are eluding your users and thats not good business in the long run.

Hope my thoughts helped

Hi Alick300,

isn´t .ie a ccTLD though for Ireland or does google treat this one as a gccTLD as seen here https://www.screencast.com/t/5YgjXIriy ?

Hi Brian Nash,

Don´t think this funcionality exist.  Can you explain why you would like to nofollow instead of disavow?

You could use GSC to find some actionable insights to optimize your on-page content.

1. go to the search analytics area and click on the "pages" option.  Then click on the page and change the option to "queries" to find relevant keywords you can add to the that page on your site.
2. Find pages in the same report with low ctr´s on good positions and optimize the meta descriptions and page titles.
3. Identify your top queries and see if the right pages are ranking for them.  If not diagnose why and correct the issue(s). You can check out his moz resource https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranks-for-keywords-whiteboard-friday

Hi Aua,

Since speed is a ranking factor for Google anything influencing this speed negatively would theoretically be bad for SEO.   I don´t know how many are "too many" but if you are talking about several dozens that shouldn´t really impact that much.  It isn´t good practice though to leave not completed unpublished posts in your site, and usually not necessary, to keep a clean database it would be better to finish them off site on an editor and insert them in your site when they are done.

Hope this helps

to go back to your initial question and assuming .ie is treated as ccTLD, what GSC seems to validate; in Google´s eyes your site is more relevant for users in Ireland and will therefore not be able to rank equally well as a gTLD globally.

What you can do is change to a gTLD (which i think is the most efficient if you have one website targeting globally). or ccTLD´s for the countries you want to target (ok if you have a lot of recourses)