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We have some URLs that are being flagged as poor inside Search Console in the Web Core Vitals report. For example, the report is saying that some pages have too many CLS issues.

When looking into things we can do to update we have noticed that when we run the same page using the PageSpeed Insights tool we are not getting the same bad scores. This is making it hard for us to actually know what needs to be addressed. Nor can we tell if a change actually fixed the issue because in PageSpeed Insights there is not an issue.  Has anyone else had similar issues. If so have you found a way to fix it?

For the most part in the past our company has worked on location. So filtering internal traffic was as simple as filtering out our company IPs as well as a few remote workers IPS.

Now a large number of employees are working from home due to Covid-19. I am seeing an uptick in traffic that is clearly employee-related. I am hoping some of you who work with large remote teams may have some suggestions on how to best filter out traffic from remote working employees.  I found a few articles from a couple of years ago where people were using a cookie but not sure we can get that implemented in time as our Dev team is backed up.

Any help is much appreciated.

There are no issues with targeting two different keywords to two different pages on your site. However in this case it seems to me that they are so closely related even synonymous, that targeting two different pages with what essentially is the same search intent but with a different keyprhase that you might have better luck only optimizing one page. That way any link equity is being directed towards one page rather than split between two. All on-page content would be completely unique rather than closely related to the other page, internal links would all be directed to one landing page etc....

From a user perspective I would think that when using either search they are looking for the same thing which is a Lawyer in Allen Texas who specializes in Social Security Disability. IMO I would optimize one page to meet both searches and then 301 redirect the other page to it.

Dirk,

Thanks for your quality response! Within webmaster tools we get a decent amount of clicks from image search but still less then 10% of our overall organic traffic. Without being able to filter out that the traffic is coming from an image in GA I am not sure how else I can gauge how much organic traffic we are getting from images. We came up with the solution leaving our current images at their location but moving new images to the subdomain. Because much of our inventory changes with new seasonal lines we are adding lots of new products so those images will all be hosted on the sub-domain.

Thanks,

For sever work- load enhancements we are planning to move our images to a sub-domain. so the files would be located at something like

images.domain.com

Rather than domain.com/images/

We are a large Ecommerce site so we have a lot of images. These will be self hosted so we are not using a CDN. I'm hoping someone has done the same and if there were any steps they had wished they had taken before making the move/ if they noticed any traffic impacts things like that.

We have changed the URLS a few times over the past decade. It is just maintaining some of the super old backlinks to category and product pages that are getting harder to maintain.

I appreciate you taking the time to answer.

Erica,

Thank you so much for the response. To clarify so that i understand your recommendation correctly. The pages do still get traffic, some get a lot of traffic from organic search. They just do not get a lot of referral traffic from other websites. For example I have a lot of cases where a customer links to one of our products in a tutorial they did on their website. Because the tutorial is old the link to us is from many years ago and the url has a super old url structure. And maintaining the system that helps figure out where that old url should point to on our site is causing the problem. Because it is hard to know how to judge how much value is coming from that link from an SEO perspective I am having a hard time determining if we should continue to maintain these very old urls linking to us from external domains.

Does that help clarify?

Shaqd

I have done this, although I am not familiar with the canonical method you mentioned. Social share counts are tied directly to a URL so if the structure of a URL changes at all the old count will be attributed with the shares. You can create a custom social share button that pulls the data from the old pre  url structure change. Mike King has an awesome post about how to do that here (which is what I believe you are referring to with the og: url propterty?): http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2172926/How-to-Maintain-Social-Shares-After-a-Site-Migration 

You can read a thread where he and I discussed it here: http://moz.com/community/q/preserving-social-shares-through-url-changes

His method works.

Cole,

First thanks for the response.

I probably should have added a bit more detail for clarification. The simple 301 redirect example.com/product-a-123-xyz.html is 301 redirected to example.com/product-a            can be handled easily.

However because some of the Old urls had dynamic aspects to them our system has to run code to handle the redirect logic so that the 301 redirect takes sends them the to correct place. For example we sell tires for motorcycles. Because of old technology the url 10 years ago included vehicle specific elements like the year, model brand. Right now we have redirect logic that recognizes that the link is coming in from an old dynamic url and 301 redirect the customer to that specific tire on our site. Then at the product level they can then choose which vehicle they have, all dynamic aspects are taken care of now with ajax. But maintaining that old logic is eating up resources and I am debating if it is worth doing so.

Large ecommerce site that has been around for a long time (15+ years.) During that time technology has changed a lot and we are running into issues maintaining 301 redirects for very old urls. For example we have a good amount of links to product and category pages. Some of the old links are to products that still exist and will exist for many years to come.(of note little to no traffic comes via these links. Most of them are close to 9 years old so they are buried deep within articles, forums, or websites) However as we make changes to the site and URL structure these old urls are taking up more resources to continue to maintain 301 redirects. I am Leary of no longer supporting them because I do not want it to impact rankings however there is concern on how much development time and technology resources it takes to continue to support as time goes on.

Does anyone have experience handling redirects 3 or 4 url structures old? Looking for insight from someone who has crossed this bridge before.

You can make the bid adjustment by going into the ad group. Then select "settings" then "devices" you should see a box below that has three lines.

desktop

mobile

tablet

Look to the right of that box and you will see "bid adj" below that in the mobile column you will either have a dash - or a percentage +or- click that and make your bid adjustment accordingly

Hopefully that helps. .

Dean,

Thanks for your reply! It seems that not many people are familiar with this scenario. Currently I have been using the advanced filter for reporting. However other Managers within the company use GA for some minor reporting and are not familiar with using it so I was hoping to apply the reverse an ecommerce transaction method.

Before implementing the reverse an eCommerce transaction method I discussed the scenario with my Adwords rep who talked with some GA engineers, and confirmed what I had feared which is the reverse transaction will be applied to whatever day it is uploaded not to the day the faulty transaction took place. Which means I will have two days with terribly bad data. Especially because at best a transaction like this will not be found in GA until the next day.

They did state that this has been a very common complaint and that GA is working on a solution to make the process much easier and so that it can apply to back data.

I am looking for help on using Googles Reverse an Ecommerce Transaction in Analytics work flow documented here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1037443?hl=en&ref_topic=1037062

Essentially an incorrect transaction was processed that was for such a large number that it is really messing up reporting. I have never used Googles outlined process and from my research it looks like it might not reverse the transaction for the date it was placed but ad a negative amount to offset it on the date submitted. This will still work for year of year reporting but it will mess up the data for two different days in one month. If someone who had done this before has any insight please chime in thanks!

Here is a support thread about the reverse transaction messing up a different days data.

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/analytics/reverse$20transaction/analytics/gDiVNJDwx5I/BwlNJ9D6Lp8J

Mike,

Thanks a ton for jumping in, I really appreciate it! I may have a hybrid solution using part of your suggestion.

We have toyed with the idea of creating a custom URL for each product (easy to automate on our end) that is tied to the product number. That way if the URL changes in the future (if we did an architecture redesign which will happen again I am sure) the share count will still be connected to the unique url so it will last over time. The URL that is shared just redirects to the product page just like if I was using a URL shortner. In testing we are having issues with Twitter being able to recognize this and increase the shared count number on the product page, even though shared count is recognizing it. So if we amended our code to call from the shared count API to pull the old numbers until passed by the new numbers like you suggested I believe it would give a very accurate result. Also moving forward url changes down the line would not affect the numbers because they are unique to the product number.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you see any pitfalls?

We are working on a site redesign which will change/shorten our url structure. The primary domain will remain the same however most of the other urls on the site are getting much simpler.

My question is how should this be best handled when it comes to sitemaps because there are massive amounts of URLS that will be redirected to the new shorter URL how should we best handle our sitemaps? Should a new sitemap be submitted right at launch? and the old sitemap removed later. I know that Google does not like having redirects in sitemaps. Has anyone done this on a large scale, 60k URLs or more and have any advice?

Axial Dev,

Thanks for responding I have considered the Robots disallow however my worry has been several Videos by Matt Cutts talking about how now that the Google Bot can make AJAX requests that the best practice is to allow it to do so. So that is why I have not thrown on all around disallow addition to our robots.txt file, but It is clearly having issues on our site distinguishing the difference between a server side AJAX request on our site vs an actual real URL that should be indexed

Below is Matt Cutts plea to allow Java script to be allowed to be crawled there are a few others out there as well.

Does anyone else have experience with AJAX server side requests being indexed and how they combated the issue?

watch?v=B9BWbruCiDc

We are making significant URL changes to our website. Because the URL is changing the social sharing buttons are not showing previous shared counts. I have read several resources like the one below that is linked to in several other similar questions.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2172926/How-to-Maintain-Social-Shares-After-a-Site-Migration

However I would love to get some insight from someone who has done this and there thoughts on the outcome. As an ecommerce site the "Social Proof" of products that have received social shares is a big deal to us.

In Mike Kings example above the counts are being attributed to the OLD URL which is problematic over time. Our site has been up for over 12 years and has had several major changes to it, and I am certain there will be more in the future, being able to preserve the count on the current URL is ideal. While I agree with him that over time I believe social platforms will let data pass through 301 redirects, until then I need to find the best way to do this.  Also with his example and others I have seen people mention than new likes from the new url can reset the counter. If you have gone through this and have ideas pleas share them. I look forward to your thoughts thanks.

I recently took over as the SEO for a large ecommerce site. Every Month or so our webmaster tools account is hit with a warning for a high number of URLS. In each message they send there is a sample of problematic URLS. 98% of each sample is not an actual URL on our site but is an AJAX request url that users are making. This is a server side request so the URL does not change when users make narrowing selections for items like size, color etc. Here is an example of what one of those looks like

Tire?0-1.IBehaviorListener.0-border-border_body-VehicleFilter-VehicleSelectPanel-VehicleAttrsForm-Makes

We have over 3 million indexed URLs according to Google because of this. We are not submitting these urls in our site maps, Google Bot is making lots of AJAX selections according to our server data. I have used the URL Handling Parameter Tool to target some of those parameters that are currently set to let Google decide and set it to "no urls" with those parameters to be indexed. I still need more time to see how effective that will be but it does seem to have slowed the number of URLs being indexed.

Other notes:

1. Overall traffic to the site has been steady and even increasing.

2. Google bot crawls an average of 241000 urls each day according to our crawl stats. We are a large Ecommerce site that sells parts, accessories and apparel in the power sports industry.

3. We are using the Wicket frame work for our website.

Thanks for your time.