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Thank you for your responses. Hopefully someone who may have experienced this before will be able to contribute. It seems there's very little in this area about the potential impacts.

Yep clean URLs there.

So, do you believe that Google ignoring these canonicals is something we should be worried about? (Basically setting a high priority so development sorts these issues out)

Yeah they're definitely right, as a whole our canonicals Google agree with, but there's various batches that Google chooses to ignore.

Unfortunately I don't have access to search console, I have access to GA but that's it. I have to rely on third party tools and other things to try and see the impact. We also have a very restrictive platform which requires things to go through development. So i'm just trying to gauge the seriousness of this issue so that I can do a priority list.

To put the scale into perspective, it looks as if Google is ignoring the majority of our product URLs (thanks to a product recommendation software we use) and is using a different url path. Same with breadcrumbs.

255k indexed pages, ignored canonicals that i've found run to about 15k from just the two above.

If Google decides to ignore your canonical and indexes numerous versions, does that count as duplicate content?

We've got a large amount of canonicals ignored by Google, so I'm just trying to gauge if it's an issue or not.

The 123456 url is only used in once place (or on banners in various places) any time this is in a category it is using the canonical url, once stock is loaded it only takes an hour for this to pull through. So the mass of links to this is the canonical url (however it usually has some form of tracking attached to it)

It's a very large and dated website, so we've got to try and get workarounds until development get round to sorting this kind of thing.

The mass of urls are showing as the canonicals, we've just got a few (hundreds) that aren't playing ball.

Really appreciate your help.

Thank you for your response ATP.

I've done numerous checks and we're following all of the best practices, the only thing I can think of is that this url is the first that's seen (we only release stock on a time due to the nature of the business, we then only get the canonical on that day) so any scheduled work uses the part code, which we then at a later date manually change to the canonical url.

We are always trying to get these links changed to the correct version, however as we have a large site (570k+ pages) crawling for these is always an issue.

We can quite comfortably get a list of the canonicals thanks to screaming frog and being able to export our product codes (which are these six digit numbers). So you think it would be a viable solution to bulk upload our whole product catalog and on the /product/123456 urls redirecting to the /product/product-title and we should see a benefit from this? (Would take about an hours work initially then just adding current urls being 5 minutes a day)

I'm doing some work on a website, they have a very popular product search where you enter a specific part code (6 digits) and it takes you to the product. So for example

Search: 123456

Page redirected to domain.com/product/123456

With a canonical of domain.com/product/this-is-the-product-title

Would it be beneficial to redirect from /product/123456 to /product/this-is-the-product-title

Google seems to be indexing both versions. For some of these products a reasonable amount of links are built.

This should be a suitable guide for you  http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/sitemanagement/urlrewriting.html

Poundstretcher has category content on the page that you linked, which in comparison to the tesco site there  is a lot more on page content, hence the probable increase in rankings. See this image for the content: https://gyazo.com/df52dd151308160aef2296f0a0c58d07

I have done a test personally on 7 categories in the past couple of months on a site I am working on and have seen some massive ranking jumps just from me adding this content.

Here is an interesting conversation on the topic: http://forums.seochat.com/search-engine-optimization-28/e-commerce-categories-descriptions-anno-2015-a-482420.html

Have you got your url? I'll be able to tell you how to do a redirect with that information.

Does your company do anything to help out the local community? If so perhaps you can list this here. If you go into a mcdonalds (atleast in the few local to me) there is a board where they stress what they've done to help the local community. It's a great way of making yourself known in the local community whilst also keeping your content to a high quality.

You should be able to find the answer to your question right here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection

Links aren't the only factor to ranking a site, by the look of it they've got a quality site with a reasonable range of plastic storage boxes, which makes this page very relevant to the search term.

Am I right in saying that the other brands who have a higher DA/PA have less of a range?

"If someone was going to do a redesign for me, they should be able to tell me how their new design was going to be a huge kick up for my SEO, visitor engagement, sales, and more.    Design changes should be done well enough that the website owner gets multiple bangs for the buck."

I completely disagree, I know some people who can design a phenomenal website, yet they don't know a thing about SEO. That's not their job, their job is to offer a highly converting and inviting website NOT help it rank. If I went to a designer who does everything then I should be very wary of their work as after all a jack of all trades is a master of none.

This could possibly be due to: https://moz.com/community/q/10-14-mozscape-index-update-details

See the following snippet: "Second, many PA/DA and other metric scores will look very similar to the last index because we lost and had problems with some metrics in processing (and believe that much of what we calculated may have been erroneous). We're using metrics from the prior index (which had good correlations with Google, etc) until we can feel confident that the new ones we're calculating are correct."

Personally I believe that it's "Or is Google just aiming to bring up the most relevant looking result? Based on that specific search? "

Hi Jason,

Are you purely moving to SSL for the SEO benefit? Without knowing your site and any links I wouldn't be able to guess the impact. SSL is a relatively low ranking signal from what I can tell (and the studies into it) so I would hesitate to say that the benefit for the moving to ssl will out do the 301 redirects.

However, does the SSL have a benefit to your users? Will it help you increase conversion rates using it? Will you be able to put a trustmark on your site to help convert higher? This should help with your business case as any change you do should be to help your site perform better (either through money as a business or through informing people if you're a charity)

Darcy,

Whilst noindex would be a good solution, if the page has no benefit why would you noindex instead of deleting it?

"There are old sections of the site that are thin, obsolete, discontinued and/or noindexed that are still on the sitemap."

Why not remove these from the site?

I personally believe that it'll have a positive impact, as you're submitting this sitemap to Google, you're giving it a way of going through your whole site, so why would you give it low quality pages. You want to provide Google (and your users) the best possible experience, so if you've got out of date pages, update them or if they're not relevant delete them, a user who lands on this page anyway would just bounce because it's not relevant anymore.

If these out of date pages can't be found by crawling, then 100% it's best to craft your sitemap to show the best pages.

Glad you've got the load time down, if you've get any benefits in terms of rankings/conversion from the change i'd love to hear about it.

Best of luck with the site.

This may help you: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200169886-Can-I-use-a-naked-domain-no-www-with-CloudFlare-

It looks as if you may be not need to migrate the domain to the www. version after all.

"it would seem strange from a UI point of view not to have a consistent navigation."

You hit the nail on the head, imagine is a website like Amazon removed the link on their logo to the homepage from the homepage, some people click this on the homepage just because they're confused and if they don't see a page refresh they may be upset. It's also a LOT more work to implement this.

I would argue a consistent navigation is good, as Google likes to follow a good structure, it's just causing you potential problems, what if you're using a CMS and you're on the blog, then you go to a blog article, do you remove the blog menu link as you're within the blog? There's just no real reason I can personally see for it.

Have a look at: https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/

Your page only has "hotel, product, and breadcrumb list", this should help you: https://developers.google.com/structured-data/rich-snippets/reviews

Not really, I would be more concerned with the 302 redirects on your homepage.

Yeah I believe that regaining the DA back shouldn't be an issue for the old domain. It won't be instant, but shouldn't be a massive amount of time before you get back to where you were previously.

No issue that I can think of, apart from the following:

• Have any links to the old site been updated to the new site? If so can you request for the webmaster to change them back?

Do you have this on any other pages? If so is there a similarity between any of them? Is there anything that you're using that auto generates dates anywhere?

You're not trying to rank your basket page, so I wouldn't personally worry about these.

Without a doubt domain.com/shop. Think about it though from a customer point of view, most languages read from left to right, so with the /shop they subconsciously read your brand name before the shop, however with the shop.domain.com they may just stop when they see shop as that's where they know they need to be.

I would personally approach this from a financial point of view, bring up both pages of content and show your customer the two side by side, then ask them "Why would a customer want to buy from you rather than the other store?" This approach has personally worked for me when all technical avenues have failed, as after all this is the same sort of lines that search engines live by showing the customer the most relevant page.