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@Stevejcr @nb2e4fg

I'd strong advise not using tags that are rankable, especially if they replicate the sub-categories! No index them.

Also no index tags and categories in your blog. They can also damage inline pages.

Nigel

@nb2e4fg

Hi There,

Pleasure - glad you found it useful. To answer your queries

1. Like I said it depends on the search volume:

Woosculp Dog (0 searches per month)
Woodsculp Elephants (0)
Woodsclup Safari (0)

So if this is the case and my searches are correct I would put them all on one page. At a push, if there are a lot, have an ajax filter as I described in the original post, so that users can slim the page down to just the animal they want. Same for Safari or frankly even season. It doesn't matter because all the 'juice' will be directed at Woodsculp.

If there are other brands with more searched for subcategories then you need to make a decision. Remember you will have all these animals on the page so the combination of Woodsculp+Animal will make it rankable, plus you will have the SEO text so you can mention them in there.

2. If you are going to have subcategories because they are searchable, (and my research is in the wrong country maybe?) Then the category would be Woodsculp Elephants (plural) There will be plenty of occurrences of the term Elephant (singular) on the page. It's also grammatically incorrect to name a page of elephants, elephant.

3. It doesn't matter how you display the category page. I prefer a top or sidebar, but some themes have categories in blocks on the page. It can be like this but I prefer just products in the main body of the page with sub cats/filters away to the top or side (plus in the menu)

4. You can put brand and sub-cat in the URL if you like (If you are having sub-cats because they are searchable) - but only if they will never move. Nothing worse than finding a product in one category then having to move it and change the URL. NEVER have a product in multiple categories with different URLs! One product/one URL

allthingsnature. com/woodsculp/dogs/ws012-woodsculp-scottie-dog

You will just make trouble for yourself down the line if products move category.

This is fine too

allthingsnature. com/product/ws012-woodsculp-scottie-dog

Personally I think the URL slightly helps SEO so having woodsculp and dog in there is great!

allthingsnature. com/product/woodsculp/dogs/ws012-woodsculp-scottie-dog

• Note 'dogs' not dog in the URL

You can remove the 'product' and 'product-category' slugs in WordPress using Premmerce, but do it before you launch - DO NOT do it after, or if you do, prepare for a ranking hit after you 301 them!

**actually you mentioned you are restructuring so you will have to 301 all the changes from original structure to what you are doing here (Brands, Cats, Products) . This will take time - up to 6 months to get them all ranking properly. You must do this otherwise you'll have a mess, so crawl the site using Screaming Frog and extract all URLs. Then make the changes and when you launch use a bulk redirection plugin to do them straight away. Don't leave it otherwise you'll get a mass of 404s (not found)

5. Sites are better for SEO with one product in one category, however, you can get away with some product being in 2 or 3 different categories. Just note that Google will see that and the clearer you can make the structure for Google, the better

If 'Woodsculp Pets' is the higher category (as opposed to Woodsculp on its own), broken down into subcats, Dogs, Elephants etc, then I don't see a problem (If there are enough searches for the sub cats)

Many sites have Gender, Category, Brand. Others just Category and Brand

So for example you could have a category view:

Wooden Animals
Dogs
Elephants

and a Branded View

Woodsculp Pets
Dogs
Elephants

We did this for a shoes website. In each case there is one URL for each product. See the two images.

https://carouselprojects.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Brand-Hierachy-600x318.png

Yes, noindex sale, best sellers etc - they just cause problems.

Good luck!

Nigel Carr - Retail SEO Specialist
Carousel Projects

@nb2e4fg

There are two ways of handling this imho and it all depends how strong the brand and the sub categories are. It depends if people actually search for the subcategories.

Your primary aim is to rank for the brand 'Woodsculp' because that presumably is the most frequently searched word used to find the brand.

So the first way is like this

Woodsculp
> Dogs
>Elephants

So the main page will be Woodsculp with every model listed.

You then put a sidebar in to point to a subcategory page of Dogs or Elephants.

The sub-category route would be.

allthingsnature.com/woodsculp

allthingsnature.com/woodsculp/dogs

allthingsnature.com/woodsculp/elephants

• If Safari is also a 'thing' then create a subcat for that as well, but don't for Summer 2022 - that's not required. Just have them all on one page.

This would allow the subcategories to rank as well (If You Need Them To).

Note this risks the subcategories affecting the ranking of the main brand which is quite common with branded products. It depends how strong searches are for the dogs and elephants or whether they just search the brand.

The second way is using an Ajax/Filtered way of listing,

The filter sits in exactly the same place, maybe a side bar but goes to a non-ranking filter version of the page like this

allthingsnature.com/woodsculp

allthingsnature.com/woodsculp?sub-cat=dogs

allthingsnature.com/woodsculp?sub-cat=elephants

The canonical (What Google sees) for all three would be allthingsnature.com/woodsculp

This means you don't set the subcategories to rank because Google doesn't read after the ?

Any other pages are produced via tags which are no indexed. This gives all the strength to the main brand page.

The first way you would write 300 word+ SEO content for the brand page. Make it really comprehensive, Maybe a short description at the top of the page with call to action and a fuller description under the listings.

SEO Title

Woodsculp - Wooden Sculptures - All Things Nature

Description

Shop for Woodsculp Wooden Scupltures including wooden Dogs and Elephants - Free Delievery ....... Other Calls to Action

Then have subcategories with a little content - focusing on the fact they are dogs or elephants.

SEO Title

Woodsculp Dogs - Wooden Sculptures - All Things Nature

&

SEO Title

Woodsculp Elephants - Wooden Sculptures - All Things Nature

Again, check the search volumes - if they are non existed use method 2 - filter/Ajax

The filtered page way you would only write content for the main brand but also write about Dogs and Elephants so you can rank for both types . Also write about Safari so that will rank as well. Christmas - you could have a separate page but noindex it so it doesn't compete. Also for Sale items - you can have a page for Woodsculp sale but no index it.

That's what I would do but it depends on the strength of the sub categories.

I would not put products in multiple brand categories - that is why I ask how important safari and Christmas are.

I would not have 'release date' categories - that's just designed to mess up SEO! If you must then use a non indexing filter as above.

I would however have no problem having them in another type of category, say 'Wooden Animals'.

Nigel Carr - Retail SEO Specialist
Carousel Projects

@Socialdom said in Block Links From Spam sites:

links backlinking to your site

The correct way of doing this is to research each backlink thoroughly. There are various tools you can use to do this, each one will give you a list of backlinks and a score of their toxicity. The correct procedure is to:

1. Email the offending site and ask for the link to be removed. This is OK if a site has stuffed a link in the footer of their site without realising the damage it can do. I've had it with friends trying to help. Just ask them to remove the link, or maybe move it to a help page or better something related to your website content.

2. If you get no joy this way then it's OK to compile a disavow file and upload it to Google. just be VERY CAREFUL doing this as disavowing sites that have a positive effect on your rankings can cause s drop.

Read more here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

The reality is that Google knows whether a link is spam or not and generally ignores them, and unless you have been involved in some dodgy link building all will be OK whatever.

If you have received a manual penalty then the proper process of research/disavow must be done thoroughly, but few websites suffer this indignity these days.

Just do things properly, build links organically, and your site will be fine. Use the disavow tool sparingly (if at all), replacing each txt file with a fill list each time you do it.

Hi Andy

The reason why they are coming up with a duplicate content warning is likely because there is very little content on the pages other than the forms.

You have a couple of options:

1. Flesh out the content on the pages so that the subject is clearly defined in each case. This would involve writing 300+ words/adding an image+alt/H1/Meta etc on the subjects of:

Content Marketing Consultation
Copywriting Consultation

• The other two

2. If you can't write unique content for each form because the subjects are too close (Copyright vs Content) then it begs the question why you have the 4 forms in the first place.

If you want to keep the 4 forms then can canonicalize 3 of them to the main one, so only 1 is set to rank.

Note: If you do canonicalize it is not guaranteed that Google won't feature either one or all the other forms. You are simply telling Google that that is your preference.

3. You could noindex three of the four forms which would be a perfectly acceptable solution even though most scanning software will warn you of the no indexes.

I hope that helps

Nigel

Hi MB

It's perfectly OK to rank articles and categories as long as you can justify them. For example, the primary keywords would be:

Category:  'Stock Market Training''

Article: What is The Stockmarket?

All well and good so far. You would make the primary keywords distinct and different for each and that would work well.

Once you introduce tags like Learn Stock Market - everything falls apart. They cut across and cannibalize the category and articles and so have no worth. It will ruin your efforts for the other two.

Write some compelling SEO text for the category page, up to 1000 words may do but check the competition and have just a short summary of each article on there with links to the articles.

No index the tags.  Trust me it's the correct way to go.

Nigel

Hi

You have to be careful creating city pages. make sure they are as unique as you can make them and add some local content. Treat them like you would any other page when SEO'ing them.

Ensure correct and on a one page one theme basis - forget the greater area and concentrate on the town/village. if you try and hoof the local area in as well you will destroy them all, especially if the local area has its own page.

Title
Description
H1
Alts
Local content

make sure it is in the form

City - Service - Company name

and not service first.

More here: https://moz.com/blog/do-you-need-local-pages

I hope that help

Nigel

Hi There,

There are a few reasons if you want to rank for the term Rubbee

1. Meta title

This is set as: "Le Meilleur Kit Vélo Électrique du Marché | Rubbee"

It should be: "Rubbee - Le Meilleur Kit Vélo Électrique du Marché"

So move the primary keyword to the front on its own.

2. Meta Description

This is not a rankling factor on it's own but keywords will bold and a good description can increase a higher click through rate (CTR) which is a ranking factor

Include the term Rubbee in this as well.

"Turn your bike into an electric bike today with Rubbee - Ready to pre-order now from just E599 with free delivery and guaranteed.............."

Something like this a strong call to action.

3. Alt Tag

You have many and this is OK - make sure you alt them all.

4. H1

make this a close variant of the primary keyword. It is Rubbee - make it "Rubbee - Kit Vélo Électrique"

4. NAPS

Add address, as well as phone number and email - maybe company number

5. Content

You only have this on your home page.

"Rubbee est une assistance électrique pour n’importe quel vélo standard. Sans ajouter un seul fil, ce kit électrique vous permettra de transformer votre vélo classique en un vélo électrique en seulement quelques minutes. Dans sa version la plus puissante, le moteur électrique vous permet d’atteindre la vitesse maximum de 32 km/h pour une autonomie minimum de 48 km. Avec un prix compris entre 599 CHF et 797 CHF, Rubbee est à un tarif défiant toute concurrence."

Make AT LEAST 300 words of content describing what Rubbee is and what it does.

6. Hreflang

One of the main reasons I can see is that there is no hreflang tags on the page.

There is :rubbee.co.uk

No doubt there are other international websites as well. the problem here is that Google doesn't know which site belongs to each country despite the .co.uk and .ch TLDs.

each site should have Hreflang tags to specify the language and the country.

so read here:

https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

and here:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

You need to pick a default and then specify each country's version of the website. Then add the hreflangs to every page where there is an equivalent.

The blog may be original content so that may be why it is ranking.

So in summary:

Add standard SEO enhancements on a one page one theme basis.
and, sort the Hreflang tags.

7. Sitemap

There does not appear to be a sitemap - use Yoast to add one.

So lots of basic reasons why it is not ranking well.

I hope that helps

Nigel

Hi John

If the pages are old and have had no useful visits then it would make sense to forward them to more relevant content. This would be standard SEO practice anyway. However, unless you have 1000's of pages then crawling and indexing your site really isn't a problem. If you had a very large site with frequently updated pages then it could be a problem. You can change the crawl rate but if it is 'calculated as optimal' then you needn't bother worrying. read more here...

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/48620?hl=en

Regards
Nigel

Hi Shirapn

I think it is perfectly acceptable to use an accordion to 'read more'. However, according to Rand Fishkin, who did a study on this a couple of years back, the page with the hidden text will not rank as highly as it did with the page visible. They will not treat the hidden text with the same weight as it would if it were visible.

https://moz.com/blog/google-css-javascript-hidden-text

It is far better to have the text visible. One of the ways around this would be to have a couple of lines at the top of the page and then add the rest of the text under the category content.

I hope that helps - watch the above video - it's very clear.

Nigel

Hi Luca

I would use option 3 where you add country followed by language.

website.com/uk/en
website.com/ca/fr
website.com/ca/en

This will allow you flexibility when there is a country with two languages like Canada.

Just remember to use the hreflang tag on all pages.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Fitflop do this very well www.fitflop.com/uk/en

I hope this helps

Regards

Nigel

Hi SDavis11

The main point here is that each page should focus on a particular theme or subject, If you start overlapping then you will dilute any link juice between pages. Taking your points one by one:

1. If you have an article which is unrelated to your website topic then consider noindexing - or just leaving it alone. If you 301 to the main site then you are telling Google that the page has moved and that the main site is the new version. It is not. Any backlinks you do have are linking to that page because they feel that it is relevant to them. If they are suddenly linking back to the home page which is not relevant you end up:

a. Upsetting those who link to you as they are not now connected to relevant content.
b. Having a toxic backlink to your home page from non-relevant content.

2. If the article (I assume this in ON your site and not _TO) _has more irrelevant content - first I would question why you keep producing irrelevant articles then I would remove any site related keywords. Then treat it like point 2. Retitle it and let it breathe on its own. this will benefit the article and the site as you have removed overlapping themes from the title.

3. If you have a relevant topic in an article on the site then beef it up. If it's a 300-word article and it's ranking reasonably well then it is likely that the content is not enough to fully satisfy a user's query and that is why the engagement is low.. Extend the article, serve the answers as quickly as you can, above the fold and internally link to pages that will lead to a conversion.

Write semantically connected and strong content written around your theme which invariably will be a medium to long length keyword or phrase. Make the writing rich without overstuffing.

I hope that helps

Regards

Nigel

Hi Tej

I am an eCommerce specialist and come across this question all the time.

It is far better having one core product with colour and size as attributes feeding off the one page. You then have, for example, a simple non-colour specific URL with the colour and the size as drop downs or swatches that the potential customer can choose from.

Doing it this way you can focus all of your writing efforts in producing a block of keyword rich and contextually strong product description. You do not need to think about the colours which may well come in and out of stock.

By doing it this way you don't split the ranking across the 5 colours (say) weakening every one of them in SERPS (Search Rankings) Imagine having to write 5 different descriptions to describe the colour variations. Yes!, it just ain't going to happen!

One super strong page with colour and size as attributes will outrank any other. With a bit of luck, your competitors will be doing it the one page/one colour way and you will smugly outrank them!

You will never rank well for one colour one page variation. The reason is that they are 90% the same content with only the colour, different. There is one thing that Google hates and that is duplication and while there is no physical penalty you are asking Google to choose one of the variations - the result is they rank none of them highly!

I hope that helps

Nigel

Carousel Project.

Hi Richard

These are parameters that sit after the main URL and often include 'sort' 'page'.  (They can also be created in some eCommerce pages as 'products' but these should be dealt with a mod-rewrite to show properly constructed URLs with category name and title). There are a number of ways with dealing with them:

1. Google search console - you have to be very careful messing with the rules in parameter handling but for some, this is the way.

• 'sort' then you can tell Google that it narrows the content on the page - you can then choose to let Googlebot decide or block the URLs - I often block them as they just create skinny and duplicate content.
• Pagination - 'page' you can tell Google that this paginates and then let Google decide. Look at rel/prev tag on those pages as well.
• Attributes - like size and colour - I generally block those as they just create skinny duplicates of main categories
• Others - like Catalog - it depends on what platform you use but there could be other parameters being created - I block most of them as they create useless URLs

2. Robots.txt

You can use this file to block the indexing of these pages depending on the parameter by excluding them from being followed by the search bots. Once again be very careful as you don't want to accidentally block indexing of useful areas the site. Your bskt page should be dealt with like this but read about all the other ones as well.

https://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt

3. Canonicals

If you are able a great way of dealing with attributes like size and colour is to canonicalize back to the non size specific URL - this is a great way of maintaining the link juice for those URLs which may otherwise be lost if you blocked them all together. You add a rel=canonical tag pointing to the non-parameter version.

https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

4. As a last resort you can 301 redirect them but frankly, if you have dealt with them properly you shouldn't have to. It's also bad practice to have live 301 redirects in the internal structure of a website. Best to use the correct URL.

There is more reading here:

https://moz.com/community/q/which-is-the-best-way-to-handle-query-parameters
https://moz.com/community/q/do-parameters-in-a-url-make-a-difference-from-an-seo-point-of-view
https://moz.com/community/q/how-do-i-deindex-url-parameters

Regards

Nigel

Hi grbassi

You are basically asking the broadest of questions which is 'How do I do Local SEO for my website?'

The website you posted doesn't even mention Santa Clara in the title so you might wish to start there. Setting up Google My Business (GMB) is another.

There are a host of articles on local SEO here: https://moz.com/blog/category/local-seo

I would start there if I were you, at least it will give you a basic understanding which you can build on by asking specific questions here.

Kind Regards

Nigel

Hi Trazo

I would work on developing a simple brand name without a generic word in it that can be used in every country as a .com. I would then use subdomains to set up country and language-specific sites.

So make the site name 'Jorgevolo' or some clever multi-national name.

Then:
jorgevolo.com/us/en for the English version in the US
jorgevolo.com/us/es for the Spanish version in the US

Many multi-national companies do it this way and you don't see Marks & Spencer, Microsoft or Nike trying to translate their brand names do you? One brand name= one brand logo and a much easier multi-site to manage on one IP/server etc.

Then place an hreflang tag on each version and also a link between versions.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

I hope that helps

Regards

Nigel

Hi Alix

Just go to Google and type in site:firstcapitol.co.uk/ and you will see all of your pages that are indexed.

It's pretty easy as there are only 46.

1
Go through them and noindex the payment pages, author and category.
Delete sample blog page
Delete /hello-world
Delete /london-office

Then write unique content for what is left. Your London page (/london-collection-agency/) is a duplicate of the home page and should be canonicalised as it offers no value. You also have a contact page and a London contact page so get rid of the latter.

Write unique Titles and Description using 60 character and 140 character limits respectively - make sure they are unique.

This is very easy to fix.

Regards Nigel

Hi Marc,

The answer to this question really depends on just how much effort you want to put into the two websites and frankly what your resources are. There are many companies that successfully run different operations, Zappos and 6pm is one example.

The upsides:

1. Different target market - allows for different branding appealing to separate segments of the market
2. Different pricing strategy - allows for one site to be a 'marketplace' and the other, a full price site.
3. Different locations - One may target England, say, the other Wales & Scotland.
4. Dominate Google - Both sites may appear at the top of SERPS if enough SEO is thrown at them - therefore increasing real estate in top 10.

So there are definite upsides to having a dual site approach.

The Downsides:

1. The work involved in building and maintaining two websites. You have already said that one of them is not responsive, so I assume that is the case because you either didn't have the time or the funds to make it so.
2. Ongoing operational operations - uploading of content and rewriting for the two sites, banners, product photographs, ALTs, promotions - keeping everything separate will be a daily challenge.
3. NAPS - presumably the name & address is identical for the two sites, what about the host and IP addresses?
4. Maintaining a balance of attention to the two operations and serving the niches they are targetted at.
5. Marketing costs associated with two separate sites and brandings.
6. Marketplace links to Amazon, Ebay etc and associated costs.
7. Socials - maintaining two separate groups of Social Media accounts.

I ran an online shoe store for many years and we set up a 'sister' site which focused purely on Women's fashion. I quickly found that we lacked the resources to run two websites and ended up redirecting all of the second site links back to the first - just because of all the headaches involved.

If I were you and reading the 'non-responsive' comment, I would can that site and focus all of your attention on to the one main site:

1. 301 redirect the whole site page by page to the main website so that you preserve any backlink juice that may be pointing to it.
2. Write great original content 300+ words at brand and category level.
3. Write great original content 150+ words at product level.
4. Make sure ALL support pages are fully written, and optimised.
5. Make sure all META is optimised in terms of character length and relevance.
6. Make sure your site speed is as good as it can be.
7. All image Alts are filled in
8. Merge Socials

Frankly without going on, just make sure you cross all the Ts and dot all the i's when it comes to SEO and I am pretty sure that the combined effort of running one great site will far outweigh the schizoid way you are doing it now!

There are of course other issues, resources - do you actually want two brands? along with all the marketing costs? is that sensible from a business point of view?

I hope that helps to give you some encouragement.

Regards

Nigel

Carousel Projects

Hi seoman

Canonicalisation was set up by Google originally to deal with pages which were basically the same but had two different URLs so for example:

website/cycles/racing-cycles
website/cycles/productid=123

If the URL contained content that was the same then you would add a canonical on the second one pointing at the first. The second one would then drop from serps and the first one would be allowed to breathe and in most cases rise because the duplicate content was taken away.

People then started to use it in a more sophisticated way and as your example shows you could canonicalse 'second-hand racing cycles to racing-cycles.  This would only be in a circumstance where you believed that the content on the second-hand page was so similar to the racing-cycles page that you would find it really hard to rank for both.

So you canonicalse second-hand cycles to racing-cycles which could be a good move. The thing is that Google won't combine content from both pages it will simply rely on the content of the racing-cycles page to rank it. You must make sure that the racing-cycles page contains everything you would want both pages to be found for.

Now here's the problem.

If you canonicalse second-hand cycles to racing-cycles and the two pages are very different then Google can start to distrust your canonicals and show the page in serps anyway! (serps = search engine results pages - so they have to be very similar. It would truly be a disaster if you canonicalise one to the other and they both still ranked (badly ) but I have seen this happen.

So the rule is:

1. Only canonicalise if both pages serve the same user intent 
2. Make sure that the two pages are very similar otherwise Google can ignore the canonical
3. If they are just not similar build-up the content on second-hand cycles to take it away from just racing-cycles and have it as a separate page or sub-page of racing-cycles.

The conclusion is that if you want racing-cycles to rank for all the keywords and phrases that second-hand cycles does, then include them and synonyms on the page.

I hope that helps

Nigel

Hi Satans Apprentice

Best practice is to add rel/prev to the pages and self-canonicalise as you say. Then go to parameters and tell Google that the parameter (usually 'page') paginates and to crawl every URL.

See attachment for the setting in search console.

If you don't do this and you 'release' all the pages you risk them being indexed and cannibalising the main content.

Best Regards

Nigel

cizwrt6