Hi Dylan,

As Patrick said, you can use the category mark up in Offer from Schema.

Aggregate rating is another one that may be useful as this can be used for a collection of reviews and ratings rather than for individual products.

While we're on this topic, I thought I'd link to this excellent guide on microformats which may come in handy as you're working through this for your client:

http://builtvisible.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-generating-rich-snippets/

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi,

Thanks for the question.

Here are some relevant sections of the Schema.org vocabulary which should be useful for you and confirm that the example you've given is correct:

https://schema.org/MedicalEntity

https://schema.org/MedicalSpecialty (Plastic surgery is linked from here)

This may also help:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/schema-structured-data

In terms of productontology - this looks sensible but I'm not sure if Google recognise / accept them as a vocabulary to better understand your content. However, Schema.org doesn't cover everything you're trying to markup, so it should work fine for now but I'd recommend running your code through the rich snippets testing tool to see how Google respond to it.

Hope that helps!

Hi there,

As has been pointed out, the rel=canonical tag is just a suggestion to Google that you don't want a page to be indexed or to rank. They can choose to ignore the tag if they want to. If you want to keep pages out of the index, there are a few options:

1. The rel=canonical tag as you've tried

2. Adding a noindex tag as pointed out above

3. Use the URL parameters configuration option in Google Webmaster Tools

Give that you've tried the first one, I'd recommend giving the second two options a try and seeing what happens.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

I've seen and heard a few examples similar to yours where someone has tried to remove a Google penalty by redirecting to a new domain. In most cases, it hasn't really worked and as you've described, it seems to take a bit of time for the negative links to the old domain to take effect on the new one. If you think about it from Google's perspective, this makes sense. If you could just remove a penalty by moving to a new domain and doing a redirect, then that would be far too easy in most cases.

If I were going to move to a new domain in order to escape a penalty, I think I'd probably not redirect the old pages and manually attempt to realign any good links I had so that they pointed at the new site. But this would definitely be a last resort, I'd rather do as much link removal and disavow as possible before trying to move to a new domain.

Cheers.

Paddy

Thanks for the question:

"To maintain or improve our rankings i'm looking for specific information for the link structure. For example, is it better to have the 'about us'/rel=author on each domain, with contributors on that specific domain or is it better to have them all in the (umbrella) brand domain."

I'd say that it comes down to how much you want to differentiate your current brands from each other. If you want to keep them quite distinct and each one has it's own team / writers / USPs etc, then you are best to have each domain have it's own sections.

"I think to maintain the rankings it is best to keep specific content (like blog/ about us) on the domain. So is it the best to just do side wide links with a logo (like health.com) and what about hosting? We work with wordpress, so all domains will be hosted on one ip? when we use the multiple site option of WP?"

In terms of cross-linking, I'd say that you should try to do this where relevant and as James has pointed out below, as long as you're not doing this in huge volumes, you should be fine and not trigger any problems with Google. The only time you may want to be careful is where your domains are competing for the same types of keywords. I would avoid cross-linking too much with exact match keywords as this could be seen as manipulate, I'd keep it on brand and to relevant pages.

If the domains you own are in the same niches, then you may hit problems of them competing against each other. I'm not sure if this is the case? If they are in the same niche, then Google certainly can look at things like IP address and footprints that links the sites together, it is hard to know to what extent this would harm you but Google certainly prefer to show diversity in search results rather than having multiple sites from the same company.