There's no manipulation whatsoever. In fact, Google encourage website developers and SEOs to optimise/tidy their code and keep a good code-to-content ratio. This is why Google gives us so many tools in order to do so. It makes our sites easier to crawl for Google, and in return Google may even like us more for it!

Just found an article that sums it up quite nicely:

"Essentially what is being stated is a fairly logical conclusion: reduce the amount of code on your page and the content (you know, the place where your keywords are) takes a higher priority. Additionally compliance will, by necessity, make your site easy to crawl and, additionally, allow you greater control over which portions of your content are given more weight by the search engines. The thinking behind validating code for SEO benefits is that, once you have a compliant site, not only will your site be a better user experience on a much larger number of browsers, but you’ll have a site with far less code, that will rank higher on the search engines because of it."

- http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/official-google-prefers-valid-html-css/

But going back to your original post, "above-the-fold is dead", yadda yadda... So long as your content in the source is metaphorically "above the fold" and not drowning in heavy code, on the page itself just worry about giving your users the "experience" that they're looking for. And not how many pixels from the top of the browser your content is. Hope that makes more sense!

I feel prioritising elements to be "above the fold" is a bit of an outdated concept these days.

Where is the fold? Different devices and screen resolutions will have different folds, and more websites are being designed now to make the traditional "above the fold" section more visually interesting and designed for user experience, rather than packed full of content.

The higher the content is in the source code itself, the more weight it will have on the page. This doesn't necessarily translate to the "visually higher the content is on the page". Google is going to be reading from top to bottom of your code, so naturally you want the most important content/links to be found first. As long as you meet (or exceed!) the user's expectation of the content upon arrival, and you keep the code tidy in terms of how much Google has to read before it gets to the real valuable content, I doubt Google's going to worry about whether users have to scroll a little to get to it.

Thanks for the tip! Definitely need to sit down and have a real brainstorm.

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.

I have a client who owns a cosmetic dermatology clinic. Recently he's been trying to work more on his Facebook page, and has been attempting to boost his posts but they keep getting declined for this, that and the other. "No before and after photos", "Ad is sensitive in nature", etc.

Nothing shady, he's a registered doctor and a member of the Royal College of Physicians in London and the Royal College of General Practitioners. Main treatments offered are things like Botox (which I know he can't legally advertise due to strict advertising standards in the UK), dermal fillers, lip fillers, non-surgical lifts. Just general non-surgical prescription-level cosmetic treatments.

I don't have much experience in Facebook advertising, but this line of work seems particularly challenging to advertise on Facebook. Does anyone who has experience in advertising this type of business on Facebook have any general advice on what sorts of posts/ads have worked with them before?

Ah, this makes so much more sense now! I hadn't read this announcement and have been wondering why Firefox Mozbar was acting all screwy the past few weeks. Finally decided to just try re-installing it this morning, but after I uninstalled I couldn't find it in Firefox's Extensions library!

Looking forward to being able to use it in Firefox again. Unfortunate though that it'll be the current Chrome flavour one. Always seemed to work a lot faster in Firefox than in Chrome, so I tried to push all my Mozbar usage to my "Firefox monitor" rather than my Chrome one when working.

Miriam Ellis recently wrote a blog post about this on Moz, which I would definitely recommend checking out:

https://moz.com/blog/local-seo-client-discovery-questionnaire

Within it, she provides quite an awesome template or "Client Discovery Questionnaire" of questions that she recommends sending to new clients to get a better understanding of the client's history including other consultants that they have worked or are working with. This is available to download as a Google Doc too! It's a great resource.

In addition to noindexing the pages using the meta tag, if you have WMT / Search Console set up, you can request Google remove those URLs from their index for the time being. I've found that this may take up to a couple of hours from the removal request to the time of actual removal.

As to how they were found, there's a good chance that Google crawled a link to a preproduction webpage and went from there.

My Keyword Explorer is showing 15,000 keyword queries available. If this is correct, then this is awesome. I especially love the SERP analysis. Great job, guys!

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.

When an ecommerce site has 200 product pages, this is fine. It's time consuming, but I can write 200 unique paragraphs describing the product and it's not an insane amount of work for one person. But when there are 10,000+ product pages... what is the best way for one person to go about this? Risk the page being thin and just bullet point a couple of "need-to-know" info bits, or take the time to prioritise what products could benefit the most from the unique content and get cracking with a paragraph for each?

Or do you just forego having truly unique copy on each product page and just aim to optimise the category pages for the longtail?

Just wondering how you guys deal with thousands of product pages really. Starting to feel as if I should re-evaluate my strategy and wanted to get some idea on what others are doing...

Notes:

• Product pages already have reviews, helps with adding more unique user-generated content to each page.
• There's dynamic content e.g. "You may be interested in...", "Related products", etc.

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!)

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?

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.

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