Just spent a few minutes, stumbled across this page too, not sure if this is related to affiliate or not, found via here: http://dannybrown.me/2015/04/01/sorry-affiliate-bloggers-but-your-about-page-disclosure-doesnt-cut-it/

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2013/03/ftc-staff-revises-online-advertising-disclosure-guidelines

https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press-releases/ftc-staff-revises-online-advertising-disclosure-guidelines/130312dotcomdisclosures.pdf

The key part I can see is this

"In addition, it is important for advertisers to draw attention to the disclosure. Consumers may not be looking for — or expecting to find — disclosures. Advertisers are responsible for ensuring that their messages are truthful and not deceptive. Accordingly, disclosures must be communicated effectively so that consumers are likely to notice and understand them in connection with the representations that the disclosures modify. Simply making the disclosure available somewhere in the ad, where some consumers might find it, does not meet the clear and conspicuous standard."

My concern with having the H1 in the logo, is actually that it may devalue the other h1 tags on the site. As they would then be duplicates. I haven't really done any research into this, would be interesting to see what would happen.

Very few people will be typing https://www.me.website.com, so I believe that you will be fine with https://me.website.com.

Expanding on what Tymen has said,

This could be a good strategy, but why would you not just 301 redirect the whole site to a page on your own site (explaining that they don't exist anymore). This way I see you getting more value to your site (one hop through the redirect instead of one hop from the redirect and the link)

Also, something that may be worth looking into is if they have any high value links, seeing where they come from and explaining the company is not existent and trying to get the links that they once had.

Have a listen to this, it summarizes duplicate content quite nice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxWo4ttPgAc

Something i'd never thought about: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/anchor-links.html

So looks to not have an impact according to that article.

An answer from one of the founders (no longer in the company) who I have on skype, I stripped out a couple of things from the chat (my posts and a couple of irrelevant bits):

[16:08:31] A Founder: that's a difficult question to answer really
[16:08:43] A Founder: is it worth £80 a year ?
[16:08:51] A Founder: I would doubt it to be honest
[16:10:07] A Founder: apparently I cant reply anyway
[16:10:37] A Founder: I aint a pro
[16:11:09] Me: If you want to write it out I can reply for you
[16:12:48] A Founder: well if you want to tell him scoot also offer a free listing and I am happy to talk to him but cant as I aint a pro
[16:13:08] A Founder: and yes I was one of the 3 founders
[16:13:27] A Founder: ya they now bulk list you
[16:13:46] A Founder: 500+ directories, that to me sounds so spammy
[16:14:13] A Founder: I would claim the free listing and say thanks but no thanks to the rest
[16:17:36] A Founder: but feel free to post my thoughts if you want

Hi Aleyda,

The reason we want to merge to one domain is because the higher ups want to, so that's what is happening.

Anyway, thank you for your in depth reply unfortunately having suggested that the site merge and https goes live at the same time development won't be able to achieve that.

I do only have one question left really, if a page doesn't have an equivalent on one site. What does the rel alternate have to be, is it left blank or does it go to the main language url?

Thanks,

Tom

Have you got a link to your site? I'd happily have a quick look around your site if you want from an on-site perspective? (If you don't want to post it publicly please do pm me it)

As the moz index grows in size, Moz may have crawled some lower quality sites that have actually lowered your domain authority.

Have you seen an actual drop in traffic? As whilst Moz is a useful metric, the truly important metric is rankings/traffic.

Load time isn't that much, same domain redirects only take 16-25ms. I would be more concerned with cross domain redirects.

It'll vary because of the crawlers, each company will have a different amount of sites in their database, and they will also have a different process to get their data live in their console. Honestly I would take each with a grain of salt and just try and use them as a rough guide.

I would honestly redirect the whole site, then redirect the specific pages to the most relevant new pages.

Best of luck, feel free to send me an email (or message on here) if you need me to go any further into detail.

Your web developer is wrong. You do have multiple version of the homepage

You have the following:

http://wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/index.php

http://wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/

http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/index.php

http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/

I would first of all get your web developer to do a http:// to http://www. redirect across your whole site, so whenever any user lands on your site they atleast get put onto the same version.

As for with/without index.php you are getting these duplicates, I would ask the web developer to remove any references to index.php and just refer specifically to http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/ whilst also setting a canonical within the index.php to http://www.wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/

If your developer tries to fight this I would look for a new developer.

Just had a quick look through the site, your developer looks to be being lazy. https://gtmetrix.com/reports/wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/I6khUBrH under serve scaled images, they haven't bothered to resize it and that's making your website load slower.

http://wilkersoninsuranceagency.com/images/img0018.png is just a lazy way of naming images.

It looks like you're trying to track http://nappyvalleynet.com instead of http://www.nappyvalleynet.com/

You have a redirect from the http:// version to http://www version, so wherever you are entering nappyvalleynet.com enter http://www.nappyvalleynet.com instead.

301 Redirects, testing that canonicals are on the https url, working through the site and removing the http:// links and changing to https:// links.

Also I feel that it's important to say that could be an issue with a custom website too, due to the fact that a lot of web developers are not seo professionals, so they don't build a site to be seo friendly.

I think the biggest and most important question you need to answer is:

Does it do what you want it to do?

You need to make sure it converts a user once it's on the site, that the user can navigate through the site well. That's the top priority that people seem to neglect, they focus so much on rankings that they forget a user actually needs to land on the site and fulfill the goal of that site.

There are lots of templates that rank really well, I have customers who have used templated sites and beat all of their competition. If you create lots of unique content and modify what you've got (make sure to change alt tags from the default template) and url paths for example, then you should be fine.

It's a small ranking factor, but if you've got an established domain then I would say your established domain is more valuable.

but mydomain.com/fr with the correct code would do that?

https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

Why mydomain.com/france? This just makes the url much longer and the two letter country codes are recognised by most people?

"My company has a got a name in the industry as well as some amazing reviews on google + and other forums. "

This alone answers 2 and 3. You have a brand and that's more powerful than an exact match domain, it differentiates you from your competitors.

As for "If you were to use the same domain would you do fr.mydomain.com or www.mydomain.com/fr." I would choose www.mydomain.com/fr but that's just personal preference.

Got around this by adding catch alls for a-z/0-9.

RewriteRule ^a(.*) http://www.domain.com? [R=301,NE,NC,L]

This meant that the homepage wasn't being touched. However I did lose all of the category specific redirects. I'm sure there was a way around this however I don't know htaccess to do this well enough. Would be interesting if anyone would know how to do all three?

There are SEOs (like myself) who do SEO full time for a company then also do SEO as a part time role outside of working hours just to get a bit of an income boost. I have some customers who pay me as and when they want me to work and some who pay me £50 a month just to do some work for them.

I would just be wary and ask to see some of the sites they have worked on.

If you want to find these kinds of people, try sites like freelancer, seochat forums, elance. There's a load of seo forums and freelance sites that are more suited.

Annoyingly it's time to play with this beast again.

I've been given the task of doing the following.

Keeping the homepage live

Redirecting categories to the specific categories on the new site

Catch all redirects

Now i've managed to setup the specific categories and the catch all redirects, however I am unsure how to keep the homepage live (which is like this:www.domain.com/ so I can't just exclude that?)

Would appreciate any help.

It depends on the module, as a whole yes it does though.

Answered my own questions:

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_txt?csw=1#file-format

"A maximum file size may be enforced per crawler. Content which is after the maximum file size may be ignored. Google currently enforces a size limit of 500kb."

We're looking at potentially creating a robots.txt with 1450 lines in it. This will remove 100k+ pages from the crawl that are all old pages (I know, the ideal would be to delete/noindex but not viable unfortunately)

Now the issue i'm thinking is that a large robots.txt will either stop the robots.txt from being followed or will slow our crawl rate down.

Does anybody have any experience with a robots.txt of that size?

Hello,

I've never had to deal with an international site before, let alone a site merge.

These are two large sites, we've got a few smaller old sites that are currently redirecting to the main site (UK). We are looking at moving all the sites to the .com domain. We are also currently not using SSL (on the main pages, we are on the checkout). We also have a m.domain.com site. Are there any good guides on what needs to be done?

My current strategy would be:

1. Convert site to SSL.
2. Mobile site and desktop site must be on the same domain.
3. Start link building to the .com domain now (weaker link profile currently)

What's the best way of handling the domains and languages? We're currently using a .tv site for the UK and .com for the US.

I was thinking, and please correct me if i'm wrong, that we move the US site from domain.com to domain.com/us/ and the domain.tv to domain.com/en/

Would I then reference these by the following:

What would we then do with the canonicals? Would they just reference their "local" version?

Any advice or articles to read would really be appreciated.

According to screamingfrog the current line:

Line:40 http://www.t2tea.com/on/demandware.store/

Is the line on robots.txt is causing you an issue.

Have you had any sort of caching?

Also have you tried cloudflares free cdn? They offer minifying and it makes it really easy.

I don' think Martijn's statement is quite correct as I have made different experiences in an accidental experiment. Crawling is not the same as indexing. Google will put pages it cannot crawl into the index ... and they will stay there unless removed somehow. They will probably only show up for specific searches, though

Completely agree, I have done the same for a website I am doing work with, ideally we would noindex with meta robots however that isn't possible. So instead we added to the robots.txt, the number of indexed pages have dropped, yet when you search exactly it just says the description can't be reached.

So I was happy with the results as they're now not ranking for the terms they were.

I would use the search console "fetch as google" it can take a few weeks for Google to crawl and update your site in the serps. Usually I leave 4-6 weeks for any change (on a small site) with larger sites normally being crawled more frequently. When you do cache:yourdomain.com in google chrome, is the time listed sooner than you did the changes?

For those wondering, I haven't been able to find a solution and the people I have spoken to have agreed that we don't think this is possible (to warrant the amount of work we would need to do)

Sorry the title may not make the most sense as I'm not entirely sure what my question would be phrased as.

https://developers.google.com/structured-data/breadcrumbs#examples

We have breadcrumbs on our site, these are generated by a plugin.

So for example we have:

• Where am I:

• Homepage

• Page 1

• [Page 2](../../Page 2 "Page 2")

• <a id="ctl00_RptBreadcrumbs_ctl04_link" title="Page 3">Page 3</a>

Do we have any way where we can implement this without development being involved?

Alternatively is there anyway to use the current url? (as we do use folders) so an example being: http://domain.com/page1/page2/page3

Probably not possible but I live in hope.

This is strange, what does google suggest on their pagespeed tool for you to do?

What would be wrong with addthis? It's used by a large amount of sites. I don't believe there would be any negative impact from you adding this to your site.

I have had something similar, this is response I received:

You don’t have canonical tags on the URL and that’s expected.

On pages where BVSEO is implemented, canonical tags must be updated or removed when the product contains more than one page (more than eight) of reviews. BVSEO paginates the product page so all reviews are in the search engines’ index. Canonical tags that point away from a pagination URL will cause search engines to ignore the paginated content.

When any of the BVSEO pagination parameters are present (bvstate, bvrrp, bvqap, bvsyp, bvpage), do one of the following:

•Remove the canonical tag. This is the most common, recommended solution.

•Append the "name=value" pair to the canonical URL.

Hello,

We've currently got 9500 products live on our site at the moment with ~2000 in this category that we're adding the new products in. All of these products we're adding are coming from a site that we own and we're trying to expand the range on our site (the 9500 product site has a lot more visitors than the 4000 product site).

However, all these products imported I believe are atleast duplicates from the 4000 product site, but the first ones I have seen (500) are manufacturer duplicates.

What issues are we potentially going to run in to?

Just for extra information:

We have no control over canonical/noindex/robots etc

Hello all,

We want to block something that has the following at the end:

http://www.domain.com/category/product/some+demo+-text-+example--writing+here

So I was wondering if doing:

/*example--writing+here

would work?

Am I correct in saying that the allow/disallow is only applied to msnbot_mobile?

mobile robots file

User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile

User-agent: YahooSeeker/M1A1-R2D2

User-agent: MSNBOT_Mobile

Allow: /

Disallow: /1

Disallow: /2/

Disallow: /3

Disallow: /4/

We're looking at expanding our robots.txt, we currently don't have the ability to noindex/nofollow. We're thinking about adding the following:

• Checkout
• Basket

Then possibly:

• Price
• Theme
• Sortby
• other misc filters.

What do you include?

I would say it depends on how bad the current page is. If you're going against known best practices I would do a redesign and then do element by element.

However if you're close and just trying to squeeze every penny possible, I would do individual elements on a 50/50 (or 30/30/30 or something like that if more variants) if possible. You don't want your users to load one time and see something completely different the next time.

Are you using a CMS? There are some great plugins for various different platforms.

Hi Ruth,

Appreciate your response. Trying to get these sorted at a code level, but we currently have six different issues all providing various issues, along with a variety of other features not working correctly. (The joys of working with a 10 year old system that is behind in a few areas)

You say the following:

• Make sure that the pages your canonical tags point to are very similar to the pages the tags are on - if they're too different, Google may decide they both need to be indexed.

Is it strange that the canonicals that are not the exact duplicates (category filters on ecommerce) are the main ones that are obeyed, the product canonicals (with exact duplicates, excluding changes to the breadcrumbs) are the ones being ignored.

There are pages that are receiving search traffic, but not a massive amount (atleast compared to the true versions of these pages, some of these pages get 10s to 100s of clicks, the canonical pages get thousands/tens of thousands)

Would a viable strategy to try and deal with these by redirecting these non-canonical urls to their canonical format? (short term until we can get issues sorted)

Final query, if Google ignores the canonical is this potentially going to be penalising us? If the answer is believed to be yes then it'll be a higher priority item to deal with.

Same as Peter, I would be happy to offer some free advice.

Sent an email, have you received it?

Hi Tom,

I use Moz, Screaming Frog and this canonical checker: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/canonical/dcckfeohihhlbeobohobibjbdobjbhbo?utm_source=chrome-app-launcher-info-dialog I'm sure that these canonicals are set up correctly.

I will send you an email to the email you have included on your profile.

Thanks,

Tom