Hey Kirupa,
Short answer is that you're all good. The canonical is correct.
All the best,
Sean
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Hey Kirupa,
Short answer is that you're all good. The canonical is correct.
All the best,
Sean
Hey Thomas,
It looks like your tweet did the trick and they've been tweeting a whole bunch of people - congrats!
I shall turn off the sad music now.
Sean
Hi Becky,
Authority-wise, they were product pages that were deep down in the IA of the site so they had very little PA anyway. And rankings-wise, they were very niche, branded products so we didn't have a great deal of competition anyway - rankings were always pretty good.
Even if you're selling something unbranded and generic, I would say that you should create the pages ASAP to start the ball rolling. You're not going to get penalized in the first instance of loading them on and when you come back later to optimise them, you should gain rankings.
Cheers,
Sean
Hey Susannah,
Generally speaking, sorting out GMB listings can be quite a troublesome process.
Your best bet, if you can't verify ownership yourself, is to report the page. There's a good guide to how to do this here:
https://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/how-to-report-a-fake-google-business-page/
Failing that, I've found the GMB team at Google quite helpful for dealing with these kind of things - It's a troublesome process to get in contact with them but once you do, they're not bad.
There should be an option to request a call from GMB within your GMB login interface - it takes a bit of looking to find it but I'm sure you will.
I hope this helps,
Sean
Hi there!
You're absolutely correct, you would just need a domain-level server redirect to take all http URLs to their https equivalent.
Best practice is to ensure you've also got the non-www. version of the website covered in that same redirect too, to avoid any chains. You'll see what I mean if you run your domain through this > https://varvy.com/tools/redirects/
Depending on what stack you're using, here are the 2 guides. One for htaccess and one for IIS:
You shouldn't need to, but just to be on the safe side, I would also add canonical tags to the http pages, pointing to their https equivalent prior to putting the server level redirect in place. This is to ensure that you won't be causing yourself issues if the redirect fails for any reason. Details here:
Once you've got your redirection planned in, make sure you set up a Google Search Console account for the https version to ensure there are no crawl issues and to check that the http version of the site stops receiving traffic.
That should just about cover it!
Hope it all goes well,
Sean
Would this be anything to do with the space you have between the 'equals' sign and the opening quote marks:
Hey there,
Put your website URL through Moz Open Site Explorer and pull out all backlinks pointing to any page on your domain. Moz has it's own metric known as 'Spam Score' that will rate how likely each link is to be 'spam'. This should help you on your way:
https://moz.com/blog/spam-score-mozs-new-metric-to-measure-penalization-risk
I hope that helps!
Sean
Hi Nikki,
You're absolutely right. There will be a domain level http > https redirect in place within the htaccess file and page to page redirects.
Any page to page redirects that sit below that rule can be put in manually and will be caught **after **the domain level rule and this will not conflict.
All the best,
Sean
Apologies, my mistake.
The Mozbar picks up your meta descriptions correctly so I don't know what's going on. Perhaps flag this question as 'Moz Support' and see what the tech guys say?
Sean
Hey there,
Personally, I don't look at footers as duplicate content, whether they are the same across multiple domains or multiple subdomains. More often than not, footers are pretty generic and contain social links as well as a few links to secondary pages on the site such as 'terms and conditions'.
Unless you're packing your footer with a large chunk of text, I wouldn't worry about duplicate content issues as there aren't going to be any.
Duplicate content on main pages across sub domains will ALWAYS be the biggest issue and that should be concentrated on above site footers - I would have a word with your outsourced specialists and ensure they're concentrating on the biggest wins for the site rather than the nitty gritty bits that would have little to no impact.
All the best,
Sean
Hi Alan,
If they're not willing to share their link/outreach targets with you, I would steer clear of them.
What they're saying about it being their 'intellectual property' is complete rubbish. At the end of the day, the site they're building links to is your business and it should be in your best interest to ensure that links that are being built to the website are of high quality. It sounds like they're being unnecessarily shady.
Find yourself an SEO that is transparent and working **with you **to create a solid link acquisition strategy, not working in isolation and secrecy.
All the best,
Sean
Hi Charles,
I would say that this might require a little bit more context if I'm being totally honest.
Visibility scores are often a metric created by SERP tracking software and how they're calculated can vary, making it hard to understand the impact of your 1.17% visbility score.
In regards to keyword rankings and your position 7 SERP, it's hard to say how good it is without understanding what the keyword is you're ranking for and the service your website provides. For example, if you're an industry leader with a ranking of #7 for your brand term, it's likely that this is a negative result. On the other hand, if you're a small travel blog and you're ranking position 7 for 'travel blog', then it's likely that you're doing pretty well!
All in all, I would say try and compare it to your industry averages and benchmark against your competitors to find out exactly how you're doing.
regards,
Sean
Hey Michael,
If you're using the same pages/URLs but just updating the design/functionality, search engines don't need to update the URLs that they have indexed, they just need to recrawl the new design to determine content/design changes to update their records of your domain. This would be a slightly different story if you were redirecting old pages to new pages and using a variety of different redirects to do so (301/302 etc.)
I wouldn't have said that updating the design of a site would mean that you're going to lose any rankings - if anything this should help reinforce/improve the rankings that you already have.
Cheers,
Sean
Hey Anders,
I always ask myself the question "Is this link useful for users?".
If someone will be reading those pages and will come across the areas of expertise - they will likely want to find out more about them, especially if they're unsure of what they are.
My vote is to add the links in - it creates an association between these pages and benefits users looking to find out more about the services the staff specialise in.
Cheers,
Sean
Hey there,
Google wrote up a guide to hidden text, content and links. Check this out:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66353?hl=en
Maybe pass this to your devs and get them to check all the guidelines are adhered to.
I hope this helps,
Sean