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Some developers always implement the hreflang for German (which should be "de") as "de-de", so language German and country Germany. There is usually no other German version targeting the other German-speaking countries (mostly ch, at). So obviously the recommendation is to make it "de" and that's the end.

But I kept wondering and not finding anything: IF there is a more specialised hreflang, will google take that if there is no default?

Example:

Search in: de-at (or de-ch)

Search result has the following hreflang versions: de-de; x-default (==en), en

=> Will Google give the result for x-default or de-de?

You cannot set en-be in any way? This would be correct for targeting "people with English settings in Belgium" or "English content for users in Belgium", regardless whether it is in the ISO standard or not. Cf. Google's help document: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077

Depends ... do you WANT the brands to compete with each other? That might sound strange but it really isn't. Mabye the three brands have some feature that separates them from each other and makes them uniquely suitable for a different target group. Then it might not be bad to have all three rank for slightly different (long tail) terms AND each for the generic overall term. The brands itself also may carry different values; answering in a vacuum on what I would do is hard to impossible.

Nico

I'd have to disagree with David, strongly so.

But then it is probably a matter of what "tag page" means for you and what you do with your tag pages!

Is a tag just something you slap on articles and stuff to simply have all a page that merely displays them all? Well yeah, then I'd tend towards noindex. I'd also wonder how many people really use a tagging like that - and have a use for it.

Personally I favour the other approach where tag pages are made into a page that can stand alone, for example giving a general overview over a topic and then listing the tagged articles for more specialised content. (Yes, you need a certain minimum of articles for tags to be useful at all ... and too many of one tag is probably also a warning sign of over-specialisation.) Of course this is not possible with every website and organisation. I have found, though, that such "hub pages" work exceptionally well for more generic than long term searches.

TL;DR: The importance and treatment of tags and tag pages largely depends on how you define their role.

Nico

"100 link rule": At some point in early 2016, John Müller or sb. else at Google said "a reasonable number / a few thousand links at most". Unfortunately I did only save the statement, not the exact source/date.

Nico

I would chose variant 2. Less for an omnious Ranking Boost and more for segmentation of the site. With a subdirectory like /business/ you can analyse the behaviour in that content/business section much better than if you just put everything in a "no-subdirectory url".

No subdirectories are, imo, only useful if you have no clear sections or topics - or a single one defined by the domain.

As Marcus Miller mentioned, this has the added benefit of making sense in a vacuum. At least in my opinion.

Nico

I am wondering what exactly you mean by "not considered for SEO"?

For many purposes, subdomains are considered as independent domains. If they are excellent landing pages for a specific search, I see no reason to exclude them from appearing in organic search; else a noindex might be wise. But I cannot really imagine a good page deserving that, assuming linking to your regular page and no cannibalisation.

In general I would slap on the basics - proper description, title, maybe social media data and be done with it unless I have a really good reason to assume they are actively harmful somehow.

Regards

Nico

Ahoy!

Variously I have heard the opinion that content which does not generate regular search traffic (let's ballpark it at >10 views in any given month) should be noindexed or even removed. Allegedly this would improve the overall quality of the site, rankings and traffic.

I remain doubtful. What would you do if the interest in a given matter goes down over time for any (most) given topics of your content and is replaced by "newer" specific interest?

Concrete example:

I have a website about (book) reviews. Naturally, there will always be new books; old books are not in the media as much and "forgotten". Nevertheless, the reviews (all unique, based on really having read the books, no trace of the standard back cover copy) are obviously still there. Personally I feel that they do not really lose any value - they are still reviews of that one book, even though it is not the most recent one.

So, what would you do: Deindex "older" book reviews after a certain time? Even remove them completely? Just let them run?

I am looking forward to your opinions - and even your experience if you have done something like this!

Nico

In my opinion: No, you should not. The result will be that those URLs are indexed but with a standard description to the effect that google knows the URL exists but not what is behind it; titles may be taken from links or past data.

Canonical is the way to go.

Regards

Nico

I don' think Martijn's statement is quite correct as I have made different experiences in an accidental experiment. Crawling is not the same as indexing. Google will put pages it cannot crawl into the index ... and they will stay there unless removed somehow. They will probably only show up for specific searches, though

In September 2015 I catapulted a website from ~3.000 to 130.000 indexed pages (roughly). 127.000 were essentially canonicalised duplicates (yes, it did make sense) but also blocked by robots.txt - but put into the index nonetheless. The problem was a dynamically generated parameter, always different, always blocked by robots.

The title was equal to the link text; the description became "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." (If Google cannot crawl a URL  Google will usually take titles from links pointing to that URL). No sign of disappearing. In fact, Google was happy to add more and more to its index ...

At the start of December 2015 I removed the robots.txt block - Google could now read the canonicals or noindex on the URLs ... the pages only began dropping out, slowly and in bunches of a few thousand in March 2016 - probably due to the very low relevancy and crawl budget assigned to them. Right now there are still about 24.000 pages in the index.

So my answer would be: No - disabling crawling in the robots.txt will NOT remove a page from the index. For that you need to noindex them (which sometimes also works if done in robots.txt, I've heard). Disallowing URLs in the robots.txt will very likely drop pages to the end of useful results, though, as Andy described. (I don't know if this has any influence on the general evaluation of the site as a whole; I'd guess not.)

Regards

Nico

Let me ask a counter-question: If a website is bad quality, why would you link it at all in the first place? (Barring that you want to give a negative example ...)

Imo the use of "nofollow" should be clearly restricted to paid links and ok, maybe forum/comment links. It is somewhat idiotic to slap a "do not follow or count this link" on a link you set yourself. A link you set yourself with a purpose, because it is relevant to the topic, gives additional information etc. If I was a search engine, I'd really consider NOT honoring the nofollow tag when somebody puts it on every link. To me it also feels somewhat dishonest: You point to a good ressource and also say "but do not give them any credit for me linking and recommending it!". Never mind the human visitor does not see or feel the nofollow in any way at all... and when user signals get more and more important, why exactly should search engines (continue to) honor something that has no bearing on human users at all?

In short: IMO nofollow belongs on paid links and on links the website owner has no way to endorse/influence (comments &c.) if necessary. If you set links yourself, it should be a normal follow link. If you want to put nofollow on it, question why you want to set this link in the first place.

Nico

Provided you mean Google PageRank: Then, because it is discontinued (or more exactly: the displaying of page rank is discontinued), cf. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-fully-turns-off-toolbar-pagerank-feed-21946.html . So I would not expect Google PageRank to show up anywhere any more.

Regards

Nico

I would not use a canonical here. I'd implement a logic that sets empty categories on noindex as long as they are empty IF they are really, really useful and needed there, which I kinda doubt. Might be if you display a "no entry yet - place your location here" registration form or something like that. Nearly as likely I'd just kill them and recreate them when/if there is actually useful content for the page. Core question I'd ask is: What exact use DO such pages have for users/search engines? (and NOT: What future use might they eventually have some day for you/others?)

Nico

You can even have it appear, be totally valid, then suddenly disappear at some point with no visible reason. By now I think of schema.org as offering google extra data for inclusion - after that it is hope and pray...

This happens quite often to my own review site which aggregates reader reviews - right now, no single aggregate review is displayed. Breadcrumbs did prove rather weird, too: sometimes schema.org works fine; at other times it does not work at all and you have to include different markup - then it works almost instantly. (Google admitted problems there at some point; does not make it less weird, though...)

Also, the "common standard" of schema.org time and again seems less common and less standard than it is oftentimes presented. (e.g.: 'till shortly google's testing tool declared isPartOf and hasPart as invalid for CreativeWork/Book ... which is, frankly, stupid. The new tool accepts it.)

Nico

My take: Do not use bold/italics/underline to mark keywords; use them to mark up important parts in your text in a consistent way. That can be the same but needn't be. For example, I tend to italicise proper Names and quotes; I tend to bold the most important points of a text so somebody can skim the page, immediately see the most important points and decide to read the rest or not (in addition to subheadings); I outright avoid underlines. Those are for links.

Nothing of that has to do with search engines. Its aim is improved legibility/"scannability". I doubt google would directly penalise for marking keywords up like this - it might worsen the user experience, though.

Nico

More than "minimal", "working" html, css etc is probably a ranking factor - if not directly, then via good UX.

"Minimal" is a somewhat  problematic attribute in my opinion. In some context, you can have really minimalised code; in many contexts, best practices should be applied - if only to better maintain code, markup etc. Sometimes you do face technical or ressource restrictions and sometimes, non-minimal practices are just better. (All-time favourite: A certain wordpress plugin that minifies code, in theory speeding up loading time; in practice it oftentimes quadruples the loading time due to its own execution. Nothing won there.)

Moz has now taken to see  small markup as a spam signal (whyever) - one of my pages gets the warning that  "Site Mark-up is Abnormally Small There's a high ratio of visible text compared to HTML, JavaScript, etc." Well yes, it is self-coded and has pretty much nothing that is not needed, making concessions only for having source code that is readable by humans as well. This should for sure not be seen as a call to make bigger source code when it is not necessary.

TL;DR: Clean code without unnecessary stuff helps in maintenance and with finding errors should they appear; more than minifying code, I'd worry about page speed and functionality.

You can also very likely change this directly in the wordpress settings without fiddling around in plugins. Normally this Suffix comes from the "website name" you enter in "Settings" > "Tagline".

Many people tend to enter the whole, long name of their business here, which is quite commonly very, very long and thus exceeds the displayed title limit.

Nico

I recently posed this question the other way around, i.e. a site had different pages (technically totally unconnected) for each product variant and it caused certain problems: https://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-content-through-product-variants

I am not sure if this 100% applies to you: I would not use "different model" and "variant" as synonyms. If they are different models, they are different, unique products and have distinct features, advantages, maybe extras etc. Variants, to me, are for example different colour, maybe the same model with different extras or similar. There might be some grey zone where different models might actually be quite like variants, differing little from each other - then I'd ask if they differ enough to say something about each and/or contrast them.

For different models I would in fact chose different pages that go deeper into details. (Think of different books from the same publisher!) For variants, having more than one page is problematic. If I had the free choice, I'd bundle all variants on a single page with dropdowns to select the variant. There is also the question if variants are sufficiently different to write unique content for each - if that is the case, it could justify separate pages. A definite benefit of those is that they can be linked directly.

Regards,

Nico

I think that page anchor's importance is increasing. Moz has pointed out that long content tends to rank better (for in-depth articles) than short content. The (shortened) logic being that it is better to present one articles that gives readers everything (and maybe a bit extra) rather than forcing them to do another search.

Personally I am a fan of a Table of Contents that links to the sub-headings in an article. (For Wordpress there is the rather good plugin Table of Contents Plus. It ads an anchor to all <h[1-6]>with an id that equates to the heading, replacing certain invalid signs.)  Google also likes this and USES the anchors: When you Google for https://www.google.com/search?q=wikipedia+en+SEO+Methods&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 , for example, you will get an extra "Jump to"-link that gets you directly to the relevant paragraph (or what google thinks is the most relevant paragraph for your search query anyway). This, of course, needs anchors.</h[1-6]>

I do not know how many people actually use these anchor-links and would be very much interested in that data. Personally I find this very nifty and would recommend it. It is not that much extra effort in most cases and it adds a very useful feature - also for linkbuildling and sharing.

You should of course consider possible implications for tracked scroll-depth and such stuff!

And for exactly that reason I would here chose different pages for tables, chairs etc - how would you know what people were searching for exactly? (So far I mostly used anchors for articles, not for different product sections). As I see it, that starting page is more a "furniture" landing page than a dedicated "tables" or "chairs" landing page.

I would chose variant 2. Less for an omnious Ranking Boost and more for segmentation of the site. With a subdirectory like /business/ you can analyse the behaviour in that content/business section much better than if you just put everything in a "no-subdirectory url".

No subdirectories are, imo, only useful if you have no clear sections or topics - or a single one defined by the domain.

As Marcus Miller mentioned, this has the added benefit of making sense in a vacuum. At least in my opinion.

Nico