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In its structured data (i.e., Schema.org) documentation, Google says that the "image" property is required for the breadcrumbs data type. That seems new to me, and it seems unnecessary for breadcrumbs. Does anyone think this really matters to Google?
More info about breadcrumbs data type:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/breadcrumbs
I asked Google directly here:
https://twitter.com/RyanRicketts/status/755478266878853122
The link you supplied is broken. Has it been updated?
Thanks, Keri! Yeah... sometimes I think SEO needs to be a certification for IT folks...
Thanks for the validation, Highland. I'm hoping others will chime in, too!
Someone within our company's IT department just sent me some SEO advice that I believe is bogus. Can someone let me know if my initial gut-check is correct?
We have two websites selling two identical catalogs of products but branded differently (color scheme, wording, etc.) like this:
We want to shut down the second website.
I think we should set up 301 redirects from all pages on the second site to corresponding (relevant) pages on the first. In theory, this would pass over 90% of the earned link juice from one to the other.
Here is what my IT peer said:
"We could keep www.two.com set up indefinitely and just have it as the same web site as www.one.com (so two URLs but one site). This would help alleviate any issues with search engine results, etc. (Although I believe Ryan would agree this does impact www.one.com's rankings a bit, but shouldn't be a problem as long as we don't advertise both.) Google doesn't know they are on the same site, so you could technically get away with it. And it helps in indexing multiple pages on our sites."
... but wouldn't this be a big no-no because of the massive amounts of duplicate content it would create?
Great thoughts, but I would just like to add another: you may want to keep all subfolders in lowercase. This could prevent headaches later on if URL characters have a mixture of cases.
Thanks, Phil! I really appreciate your insights.
This is causing some hand-wrangling and I need some help.
Let's say we were developing rich video content for our products and our agency is hosting the content on a new external server. There are already plans to link to these videos from product detail pages, category pages, and landing pages on our main website: www.example.com.
Would it be better to create a new subdomain or to use a subfolder with a reverse proxy technique for this video content? It's not truly a microsite and will not have a gallery page to navigate the various videos.
For example, would it be better to use this: video.example.com/
...or this (executed with a reverse proxy
www.example.com/video/
Of course, regardless of whether this new content will live on a subdomain or within a subfolder, we plan on creating a video Sitemap using guidance from Justin Hammack in this terrific post.
Extensionless URLs are a good idea because it helps with unavoidable future platform transitions. If you switch server technologies, you might end pages in .jsp or .html or something else.
Search engines generally consider every character when determining separate URLs. This goes for adding .html and even capital letters. Therefore, these two URLs are different in the eyes of search engines:
But to really answer your question, adding an extension should have little to no effect on page authority. Search engines are more concerned with your page's content, relevancy, popularity, authority, etc.
Extensionless URLs are a good idea because it helps with unavoidable future platform transitions. If you switch server technologies, you might end pages in .jsp or .html or something else.
Search engines generally consider every character when determining separate URLs. This goes for adding .html and even capital letters. Therefore, these two URLs are different in the eyes of search engines:
But to really answer your question, adding an extension should have little to no effect on page authority. Search engines are more concerned with your page's content, relevancy, popularity, authority, etc.
This came up in our company recently, too.
I personally dislike special characters in any web copy, be it page titles, meta descriptions, product descriptions, etc. Even though it's anecdotal, I tend to not click on any links with special characters.
I'm pretty interested to see whether testing proves me wrong, though.
This is causing some hand-wrangling and I need some help.
Let's say we were developing rich video content for our products and our agency is hosting the content on a new external server. There are already plans to link to these videos from product detail pages, category pages, and landing pages on our main website: www.example.com.
Would it be better to create a new subdomain or to use a subfolder with a reverse proxy technique for this video content? It's not truly a microsite and will not have a gallery page to navigate the various videos.
For example, would it be better to use this: video.example.com/
...or this (executed with a reverse proxy www.example.com/video/
Of course, regardless of whether this new content will live on a subdomain or within a subfolder, we plan on creating a video Sitemap using guidance from Justin Hammack in this terrific post.