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After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Hi Helen
I have checked your backlinks and they are growing over time, not falling - see the attachment from SEMrush.
Have you recently changed from http to https? if so make sure that both domains are in search console as you may be tracking an old one.
Whatever SEM is much more reliable.
Take a look at the screenshot - it shows 1700+ backlinks from 25 referring domains!
I hope that helps
Regards Nigel
Hi Kingalen
I honestly would not use that French site as a model for your own. The homepage is just one big banner and you have to scroll below the fold to search anything,
In my experience, the best home page for this type of site is one big search box in the middle with little opportunity to refine it until they get some results. You have to hook them in with the minimum of fuss.
It's not the amount of text on the homepage but how relevant it is and quite frankly it just drones on about expiring leases and out of town businesses needing a rental. Keep it focused and succinct.Go to MOZ keyword explorer or any similar product and type in 'Office Space New York' and look down the most searched keywords. 'New York Office Lease' as well and write clean contextually strong copy for the home without overdoing it and trying to rank for every keyword you can think of.
Then when a user has clicked on say, Bryant Park, show them the listings. Not just one or two at the top with a link to 'view all' and the rest of the page thick with content - Give them what they want as quickly as you can, and if then add some local area content with a map and image with alt saying 'Bryant Park' below the listings.
It seems to me that someone's attempts at novice SEO has ruined your site and you need to simplify and make the object satisfying your customers as quickly as possible rather than filling the site with cannibalising content and needless words.
Of course, Meta is important for SEO so make sure that yours are optimised 'Bryant Park Office Space for Lease' you have 70 characters so. use them.
Use one (1) H1 on the page! - for some reason your logo is an H1 - Use a logo with an Alt tag - 'Metro Manhattan Logo'
Then the other H1 'Bryant Park Office Space' is OK, grab a photo of Bryant Park and Alt it 'Bryant Park Office Space' and use just 3-500 words per page and you will be fine.
I hope that helps.
Regards Nigel
Regards
Nigel
Hi spacecollective
As long as you tag the sites correctly then you will not have a problem.
Add Hreflang tags to the pages. They can be identical pages on the same server in if you wish but this is how I would do it. As long as they are separated like this.
website.com for the US
website.com/en for the UK
Any other country would then have its own directory.
This avoids you having to mess with the various country TLDs like .co.uk or any other you'd wish to set up.
Then add Hreflang tags to tell Google which country is targetted and the relationship between each one.
https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag
(The first part en is the language and the second, the country)
The combination of search console and Hreflang tags is enough for Google to know that there is no duplication.
You would move UK users on to the gb version and US users would see the .com. It would all resolve pretty quickly as you are telling Google the alternative country versions in the Hreflang tag.
I hope this helps
Nigel
Carousel Projects
I always no index tags but keep categories. Then add unique content to each category heading to help with SEO. Some WP themes display the content, others don't. The problem with tags is they have a habit of appending themselves to all versions of a page so explode useless and low content pages.
It would take an age to caonicalise tags on most sites so in my opinion they are essentially worthless. You can always use MOZ to check the page ranks before deciding.
Try deleting these from the Robots txt.
Disallow: /collections/+
Disallow: /collections/%2B
Disallow: /collections/%2b
Submit again and see what comes up. I'd hazard that this is the most logical explanation apart from having a noindex tag on the collections pages.
Are the blogs pages coming up by the way?
Right click 'view source' and have a look if there is one there.
Regards
Nigel
Hi Sorin
When you send your products to Google Merchant Centre you will have a parent product and children which will be listed as size and colour. The XML feed should have those all listed out separately, so that if someone is looking for a Black Widget size 9 then that will be an individual listing.
The parent title will be appended with the colour and size in search results.
So the answer is: do not include colour or size in the parent title as this will be appended to from the correct attribute data in your merchant feed.
Generally too, on your website, the title of the product, where products have variants or attributes is not to list them in the product title. It's fine to add them to the description, so in organics, they may be visible, but not the title.
I hope that helps,
Regards
Nigel
It seems odd to deal with filtering here. I'd normally do that in Search Console under URL parameters but you have to be extremely careful altering stuff in there. If you email me the site I'll run a check on why Collections aren't showing.
If a product only has one colour then it's OK to have it in the title as it won't have a colour - child. Th description isn't used in PLA's
For the Dubarry Ultima - their title is just that: 'Dubarry Ultima'with the size being pulled in from the feed. Size is not in the title.
They only have one title and they come up multiple times because they send all the sizes to Google and are paying more than the next person for PPC.
The description is also being pulled in but it doesn't contain colour or size. The description is common to all sizes and colours. There is no way anyone could manage a different description for each size anyway - it's time-consuming enough coming up with one!
Regards
Nigel
I don't know what more you need to know. I work with many retailers who send in a Google feed as well as configuring them so just tell me what the issue is. The odd thumbs up wouldn't go amiss either! We do give out advice for free!
How long has this been going on?
I would check the verification. Verifying over the phone will not have properly verified the physical address which clearly needs adding to Google maps. If it's the case that Google just doesn't have a road on the map then call them.
https://searchengineland.com/problems-google-business-use-phone-support-221305
Or email - see attachment
Best of luck!
Regards
Nigel
Hi Sorin
I think it's down to interpretation.
1. Their titles are identical in the feed (Dubarry Ultima) - Google appends (adds to the end) the colour (if there is one) and the size.
2. Yes, description is used to help PLA ranking by a combination of search term, title and descriptive content. That is why it is essential to have a full description. It is however only visible when a searcher hits the shopping tab.
3. The parent product does not need (and in fact can't because it is non-variation specific) to show the size and colour because Google appends (adds to the end) anyway!
4. You don't need to because the description describes the product and Google appends the colour (if there is one) and size to the end of the title, so Google knows what the product is, its colour and its size!
Making descriptions for every variant (take a product with 7 sizes and 5 colours - 35 variations!) is just not necessary as Google knows all of this information anyway.
I hope you understand better what I have written.
Kind Regards & Good Luck!
Hi Sorin
I think that resulting Google title should always be like this:
Brand, Product Title, Colour, Size
Google pretty much does this.
If you list very few products then you can send them individually with colour and size in the title. Just don't put size and colour as variants as they will appear twice in the Google title!
I have however always found that the way Google concatenates (puts together) title + colour + size as perfectly OK.
Concentrate on optimising the title of the products and descriptions along with on-page content.
Regards
Nigel
Hi Ramjam
It sounds like you have all of your blog posts on one page and that the header for each post is an H1. This is really bad from an SEO point of view as the resulting page is huge and splattered with conflicting keywords. Google would have no idea how to rank the page and for what.
The best way to run your blog is to have a single page for each post - this is the only way that you can properly separate content and to write about properly themed and separate subjects. Then you can add appropriate META tags for each page (Title & Description) and focus on a single focus keywords or very tight selection of contextually similar keywords. Also remember that when you add images to name them the focus keyword to further help with the SEO of the page.
You can still use H1s on that page but keep them keyword focused and don't duplicate content across pages. You will find that each blog page will be listed in Google. Note: ensure that tags are turned off and categories are properly optimized when you do this as this can add duplicate content URLs.
I hope that helps
Regards
Nigel
Carousel Projects
Hi vtmoz
There is not a problem if all the content is different and unique to the sub-domain.The problem only comes when you try and rank for content that you are already ranking for on the main website.
The best way is to pull all content on to the main website as it is far better for SEO.
I can understand your comment about other sites doing it but honestly, in my opinion, that is not a reason to follow them. You will get better ranking, more quickly if you combine the whole site together rather than try and promote subdomains. Which frankly just make for a lot more work.
Regards - happy to look at the site
Hi Ramjam
I have read a lot about HTML5 - but nowhere is there a direct comparison between the SEO rank in SERPS of an article separated by HTML5 tags vs an Article on a unique page marked up correctly.
My feeling is that given an article in the middle of a multi article single blog page and an article placed on its own page that the latter would rank much higher. However, I have no evidence to show you as there does not appear to be any.
If you still feel that this is a viable route to go then read this:
Then place an article on the same page with others marked up correctly with HTML5 Headers, Article & H1 tags and one on its own unique page. See which rank higher.
Maybe this is a question we should put directly to Rand and ask him to do a whiteboard Friday on it. Every bit of SEO advice I have ever read has been about creating unique pages with their own defined content so this goes against all of that!
Regards
Nigel
Hi Mike
I see this a lot with sites that have a ton of tag groups. One site I am working on has 50,000 pages in Google caused by tags appending themselves to every version of a URL, the site only has 400 products. Example
Site/size-4
Site/womens/size-4
Site/womens/boots/size-4
Site/womens/boots/ankle/size-4
Site/womens/clarks/boots/size-4
Etc etc - If there are other tags like colour and features, this can cause a huge 3 dimensional matrix of additional pages that can slow down the crawl of the site - Google may not crawl all of the site as a result.
If it's possible to canonicalse then that is the best option as juice and follows are retained - very often it would be the page with the tag lopped off that the tag should cite.
In extreme circumstances I would consider noindexing the pages as they offer very skinny content and rubbish Meta because it's impossible to handle them individually. I have seen significant improvement in organics as a result.
Personally I don't think it's enough to simply leave Google to figure it out although I have seen some sites with very high DA get away with it.
To be honest I am pretty shocked that Shopify doesn't have a feature to cope with this
Regards
Nigel
Carousel Projects.
Hi Vtmoz
It's probable that you have a new plugin which is conflicting with this one. A simple solution is to disable the newer plugins one by one and keet testing the 301 redirect plugin, clearing the cache after each disable before you do.
If nothing works and updating the plugin doesn't work, copy all of the redirects in two columns into a spreadsheet. Then add 'Redirect 301' in the first column and then add them to the htaccess file manually (The best way anyway) like this. You will need ftp access or server side file access to see the htaccess in some cases.
Redirect 301 /old-url https://yourdomain.com/new-url
Note the source URL has no http and the destination one does!
So try the first solution and if it doesn't work do the second. It should be quite straightforward to copy and paste them.
Regards
Nigel
