I've been wondering about this too. I may be wrong, but I feel as if it's contextual. For example, on many event listing websites they use event schema. Which will mark up the event details as well as the organiser details. This uses schema for the organiser and venue's business addresses, phone numbers and website, etc. This is the correct way of marking up events and the rich snippets display correctly on Google. As long as the NAP is under Organization or whatever (which lists the business' name) and you make it clear that it isn't your organisation, I assume it's fine.

This shouldn't be too much of an issue at all really.

My recommendation would be to noindex these /page/2 etc pages if you're using Wordpress. Various Wordpress plugins are available that allow you to do this easily. My favourite is Yoast SEO - you can noindex those pages and tag pages too. If you use tags, this would be more of an SEO concern than the paginated pages.

If the <a></a><a>tag includes _target="blank" then the link will open in a new window/tab, if that helps at all.</a>

Not OP, but hypothetically what would be your solution to the homepage and subpage cannibalising each other in search and jumping up and down replacing each other if homepage isn't even optimised for the subpage's target keyword?

If you have access to all the website's files, you could try finding all instances in the directory using something like Notepad++. Could even use find and replace.

This is how I tend to locate those one-liners among hundreds of files.

Good luck!

Yah, I was thinking it would be something along the lines of improving the subpage's authority with topic-relevant backlinks and anchor text. The homepage having the highest page authority of the domain, I figured Google was choosing it for that reason even without mention of the keywords on the page. Been getting a little frustrating when one month it's homepage on 1st page with subpage nowhere to be found, then the next month it's the subpage that's ranking and the homepage doesn't appear at all for the query.

Thank you for your advice!

(Sorry, Jacob, for hijacking your thread!)

I've recently been shown some SERP results where Google is appending a different website's brand name to the end of the SERP title. It's actually rewriting the brand's name to that of the other website. (This is obviously not ideal.) Why would this be?

The other website doesn't even stock the same product, so there shouldn't be any confusion there. But even if it did, many websites stock the same products. Just confusing...

This is an amazing answer (if there was an option to mark it as such, I would have). Thank you.

You, sir/madam, are a machine and I'm not surprised this has taken you years. Unfortunately, I don't work in-house for this particular ecommerce site so I only have a few hours a month to work on this. The site's been around for a few years, the physical department store itself over a century, and I've only been working on it for over a year. There's over 10,000 product pages split across hundreds of categories and there are hundreds of separate landing pages based on brand, range, designer, sets, etc (I've been culling a lot of these...).

The vast majority of products contain duplicate descriptions across the whole brand range, so I've mainly been getting rid of those to strengthen the category page so that there's not dozens to hundreds of duplicate paragraphs shared with the category page. But the product pages look so bare with what's left of the description.

I think I'll take a leaf from your book though and go through the most popular categories, aiming for 100 words per product. With smaller ecommerce sites, this would seem obvious to me, but I just wasn't sure whether time could be better spent elsewhere with a larger site.

How similar is the content/subject of the page? For example, if the page used to be about Cats and the URL was website.com/cats, then if you needed to replace it to be about Dogs then obviously you'll have to change the URL to website.com/dogs. Even a 301 redirect from /cats to /dogs doesn't really make much sense, as they're both completely different subjects. You'd be better off 301ing the old /cats to the homepage instead.

However, if the two subjects are similar or related at all, ideally you don't want to change the URL at all. You can change all the content on the page and replace everything if you need to, but the best solution would be to keep the existing URL. Especially if the page has value in terms of page authority/traffic/backlinks. For example, if the page isn't about Cats anymore but specifically Cats' Accessories. You have to ask yourself whether /cats still makes sense in context, and you can optimise everything else on the page for "cats accessories".

Otherwise, go ahead and 301 that bad boy.

Edit: I should note that the decision you make on this will heavily depend on the subjects of the two pages and your existing URL and site structure. Without seeing your site and having some idea on the replacement page, it's hard to give specific advice. Hopefully this response is helpful in that it will give you something to think about though.

Thanks for your input, Dan. I won't be using slashes but I was curious as to how they would work with Google.

The category page I had in mind at the time, I had just merged the multiple subcategory pages into the one main category due to cannibalisation evident in rankings (and I was experimenting with how to optimise browser title for previous subcategory-related keywords). The single page is already outperforming the separate pages, but thanks for your suggestion

Haha, I think the train passed the station on that one. I would have realised eventually... XD

Thanks for your help!

Fantastic resources, thank you so much.

I can understand Facebook's issue with ads that may be perceived as negatively portraying being a certain physical conditions (weight, facial features, complexions, etc). But it just seems a little overkill at times. I'll try your suggestion of a more medical/factual approach rather than promotional, and more "beautiful people" type imagery. If the "beautiful people" goes down better with Facebook, it would be kind of ironic as currently the imagery they're turning down is of real people. Real clients that have volunteered their photos to be used for marketing. Not models.

I foresee a lot of trial and error trying to satisfy Facebook's regulations and get a good CTR.

If the pages are HTML-heavy with not much text content on the category pages, this could be why. Otherwise it's hard to tell without seeing the actual pages.