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To the best of my knowledge you should have one for each instance.

http://yoursite.com
http://www.yoursite.com
https://yoursite.com
https://www.yoursite.com

The one you find indexed and in the search results is almost always the preferred domain you have chosen.

From Google below ---- Link to google support page

Search Console data and reporting work best on a site level. For example, if your site http://www.example.com has separate sections for different countries, we recommend adding each of those subsites or subfolders as a separate site. For example, if you have a travel site with specific subfolders covering Ireland, France, and Spain, you could add the following sites to your Search Console account:

• http://www.example.com
• http://www.example.com/france
• http://www.example.com/ireland
• http://www.example.com/spain

**Similarly, if your site has http:// and https:// versions, you should add each as a separate **__site.

I tend to agree.

I too do not like it when you see the same copy, over and over again. Although on the other hand I do feel that reposting some content still does have its benefits providing it is done sparingly and not in a repetitive fashion (normally months apart). I try to consider any new followers and sometimes, providing the content is useful, may try and highlight a particularly important or time relevant article again.

Flooding people with the same content all the time will lead to a healthy number of lost followers and potential influencers leaving your social channels.

Hello Taraneh,

While I can understand your logic for putting the dates into the header tag to try and influence and reduce duplicate data issues the header title tag really tend to work best when it is a bit more focused. Hence why you probably tend to see a improvement when you just target specific keywords such as "home team vs away team" etc.

I don not feel that the word "preview" would become too repetitive as does actually describe the content well. As would "post match report" etc

To reduce the issues have you considered using the mark-up schema for articles with published dates or maybe even periodical articles. Periodical articles could possibly allow you to have multiple fixture all tagged with a period(volume), in your case each season. This could hopefully allow Google to identify each article as a stand alone item that could be different from season to season.

More information on article schema can be found here

Hope that helps a little.

I would suggest doing a bit of a crawl error report in GSC to establish how many error links are being pointed at your site. I would suggest it is not too late to get them in place.... remember you will possibly have lots of external links that are incorrect and need to resolve to a viable page.

Search Engine Roundtable just released a very timely article - Click to read in full

Google's John Mueller said in the Google+ Hangout from last Friday that he'd recommend you keep your 301 redirects live and in place for at least a year after you set them up. He said "I'd aim for at least a year," when it comes to keeping your 301 redirects in place.

He said it can take 6-months to a year for Google to fully recognize a site has moved. Plus you may have people finding old links and if those no longer have redirects, they may lead to a 404 page or a parked domain, which would result in a bad user experience.

I have personally never heard of them. Whilst this may sound like a quick fix, I would air on the side of caution when outsourcing your link building.

Many a site has been caught out in the past when it comes to this kind of pass off, as the results can often be rather dodgy to say the least. Don't get me wrong, they might be good, but I tend not to trust external link building sources with very little knowledge of my market segment.

I would suggest looking into doing your own outreach as you then know the legitimacy of your targets and that they are relevant to your content and business.

Don't try to manipulate the rankings, don't try a quick fix and don't pay for links as they should be tagged with a rel="nofollow", simply work hard, create engaging content that garners natural links and sharing and the rewards will come.

If you want reputable companies check our moz's list.

Cheers all for the responses, this was pretty much what I was hoping to hear....

Thanks

Tim

I am looking into a .htacess file for a site I look after and have noticed that the urls are all 301 redirecting from a none slash directory to a trailing slashed directory/folders.

e.g. www.domain.com/folder gets 301 redirected to www.domain.com/folder/

Will this do much harm and reduce the effect on the page and any links pointing to the site be lessened?

Secondly I am not sure what part of my htaccess is causing the redirect.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.co.uk [NC]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.domain.co.uk/$1 [L,R,NE]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.php
RewriteRule ^(.)index.php$ /$1 [R=301,L]

or could a wordpress ifmodule be causing the problem?

Any info would be apreciated.

I think VERB answered it pretty much  but as an alternative you could click / bookmark - https://moz.com/community/q/my-questions

As Martijn has stated if your homepage has a much lower amount of traffic than any of your specific category or product pages then I would see no harm in adding a little festive cheer to your title. However, If it is for the "Chocolatier" that you work for, then I would assume a lot of your traffic is actually direct, based on brand terms and relatively close matches so be careful when making changes and monitor so you can always revert if it doesn't work as hoped.

I would imagine that it may help with your CTR at this time of year. Also Valentines and Easter. This can also be said of the meta description and possible snippets you may or may not have in place.

Finally...

As it is likely a very popular time of year, make sure you have some festive content on the homepage which I am sure you already have scheduled in, and that this content leads to specific seasonal category and unique product pages.

Hope this helps a little.

mmmmmm chocolate

Your sitemap all looked good, but when I tried to view the robots.txt file in your root, it returned a 404 and so was unable to determine if there was an issue. Could any of your settings in your WordPress installation also be causing it to trip over.

If you believe they are genuinely hindering your site then yes I would suggest disavowing the links where possible. Starting with those that are particularly spammy. Rather than doing a huge batch do a few at a time and measure the impact where possible.

Secondly, also mention within the #hashed comments in your disavow file, that you have tried to get in touch with the problems site administrators but have had no response. Google would like to see that you have tried to get in touch first to resolve the issue before jumping in to disavow.

Hope that's of some use.

Cheers

Tim

Hey Torbett,

Sometimes you will see the DA drop a little for your domain, but in many cases this is nothing to worry about. It could simply be due to the overall index size changing and that has an effect not only to yourself, but all of those around you.

Have you set up some monitoring for your competitors, if they too have also seen a relative drop, then you do not need to worry too much. Just keep on doing what you are doing and improving your site and you won't go too far wrong.

Tim

Wonderful news Matt, Russ and David, glad its been sorted

In fact all links to user profiles are failing for me..... is it just me??? including the profile pic links.

I wasn't sure which category to place this in as Support doesnt feature Q&A or the Moz site in general so I dropped it under other research tools to which the Q&A kind of is

Now I am not sure if it is just me and that you have rectified the issue, but when ever I click on the "posted by" links to the user. I am getting a page not found error.

The links in question can be seen in my two grabs and effect all posted by links on the Q&A section of Moz.

A simply trailing slash after .com "/" will do the trick

https://moz.comusers/view/636129 - BROKEN
https://moz.com/users/view/636129 - FIXED

Aj5S2Pj,YfSQEmZ#0 Aj5S2Pj,YfSQEmZ#1

It might be a different process but it is another way to embed the API data.

https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/embed-api/

But if you are wanting to implement the API to export to Google docs then Umar's Distilled guide is a good start.

Headers look fine and as you correctly said your robots and meta robots are also ok.

I have also noted that doing a site:www etc in google search is also returning pages for your site so again showing it is being crawled and indexed.

To all intents and purposes it looks ok to me. Someone else may be able to shed more light on the issue if they have experienced this error to this degree.

Just to check it that the live one, or just a test in GSC. Can you send a link to your site maybe in a PM.

Have you followed the following and in Google Search Console tried testing your robots file.

test your robots file guide.

If you are allowing all, I would maybe suggest simply removing your robots.txt all together so it defaults to just crawling everything.

Hello Falguni,

I believe the error is saying pretty much everything you need to know. Your Robots file or robots meta would appear to be blocking your site from being crawled.

Have you checked your robots.txt file in your root - or type in http://www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt

To ensure your site is being crawled and for robots to have complete access the following should be in place

**User-agent: ***
Disallow: To exclude all robots from the entire server

**User-agent: ***
Disallow: **/**If it is the a meta tag causing the issue you will require, or have it removed to default to the below.

As opposed to the following combinations which could result in some areas not being indexed, crawled etc

_Hope that helps

Tim_

I agree that getting the fundamentals right is your first port of call and John's link above is a great start which covers many of the aspects you really need to get right.

I would also suggest making sure you have all the relevant social channels linked up and being interacted with, this should  help you generate additional engaged traffic to your site.

Secondly, if you have a local presence for the business get started with this. Moz Local would be a good place to start as this should provide you with additional SEO benefits.

Finally, you mentioned you are getting a lot of referral bot/spam traffic, I would suggest you try and clean up your analytics and block unwanted crawlers as without you will find it hard to determine genuine traffic to your site. There is a great article from Carlos Escalera on removing ghost referral spam that I would highly recommend you read.

Hope that all helps.

I've personally not heard of them myself, but their site looks like a legitimate business. They probably have been doing some metacrawling of search engines which send searches to the major search engines to determine a sites rankings which they are collating or maybe even creating there own index data like moz.

As it is a free to paid service it is probably a way to get people on board, e.g. you have been digging into your analytics referrals a bit more and now might try their service.

I have also done a quick search and there appears to be a few blog/reviews of the service. Maybe give it a try!

Here is a review from back in Sept 2014.

It would seem that there are a couple of DNS issues including not finding a reverse address for the IP on one of the bigCommerce name servers.

Could not find reverse address for 104.195.80.2 (2.80.195.104.in-addr.arpa.).
PTR record(s) for the address could not be found in the .arpa-zone. (ip6.arpa. for IPv6 addresses and in-addr.arpa. for IPv4).

http://dnscheck.pingdom.com/?domain=justkeyrings.co.uk

Have you checked your robots.txt file to ensure you are not blocking google and other bots from crawling your site?

This should work:

User-agent: *
Allow: /

Update: I have opened your robots.txt and it is saying disallow!!
Secondly it can take a little while for your site to be fully indexed so be patient.

I have done a few bits in Magento before and found it relatively easy to develop further and include new elements, pages or blocks.

At the end of the day Magento is a hugely customisable and very good e-commerce platform, so I don't think the system is the problem, it would sound like you are being held back by your developers. As per Franciso, I would suggest looking for a few new developers to help you with the system.

If you are constantly trying to further optimise your site such as with a/b tests, better UX, UI, SEO and more then I would consider setting up an in-house team that can concentrate on it full time and that way you update as and when required not months down the line.

The only issue I can think of from an SEO perspective is more from the stand point of competitor spying/research. There was a time when you could simply look at a competitors site structure and determine all of their targeted keywords just from the meta tag, so in effect free keyword research.

This has changed somewhat and as soon as it was no longer determined to boost rank most simply dropped the tag.

Nowadays it is simply just not recommended to use them.

Hello Sophie,

I am not sure which CMS you use, but I personally have not used the keywords meta tag for some time now. Not due to it being a spam signal, but simply because it is no longer used as a ranking factor.

To alleviate your issue and not show your tag but still continue to use the CMS field, could your developers not look into the template files that are used and remove the location where a meta tag is dynamically added to your header. That way the CMS can still have the field for search queries but not be present in the pages code structure.

That way you get the best of both worlds, without causing you any issues. Hopefully I have understood how your site works and this is a possible solution.

Tim

As per the confusion I too was thinking it would be individual pages for each business in a location. As for the markups I suppose it depends on the different businesses being used.

If however they are all on one page then as per Andy I am not sure you can feature all the schema at the same time without causing some issues.

I was in the middle of very much the same kind of response when an email pinged up with a new answer.

What CleverPhD has stated in his great answer is very much the process I have tried to follow over the last couple of years and I also try and stick to one source for positions, as when compared most other tools they are relatively close to one another.

Secondly as stated again by CleverPhd, people have so much personalisation going on especially with Chrome and Google that I tend to only use the positions as close ballpark figures and hope they maintain the same area.

As per the previous two posts, I would imagine that it will help Google determine the locality of the pages and that of the featured businesses a little easier, just make sure you implement it correctly so you don't conflict with each entry.

More details on local schema markup can be found below.

https://schema.org/LocalBusiness

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/business-location-pages/schema.org-examples

Brett provided the great testing tool above too

Cheers

Tim

To me it sounds like you have done everything spot on so far. You are including relevant product reviews and they are easily viewable which is definately on the right lines..

I would also possibly look into putting the individual review snippet schema around your three product reviews to compliment your aggregate rating. See here for the Review Schema details

Overall it looks like it should work. However,adding the snippet does not guarantee it will be displayed, but you will give it every chance to do so..

I would recommend following Carlos Escalera comment on referral filters. I followed his process about a month back when I noticed ever increasing volumes of referral spam hitting our site.

His recent comment found here will give you an overview or you can follow the entire process on this article.

It worked a treat for me utilising both .htaccess to restrict spam crawlers and GA filters to clean up my traffic data.

http://www.ohow.co/what-is-referrer-spam-how-stop-it-guide/

Despite having them implemented correctly I am not 100% sure that there is a way to absolutely guarantee they will show up, I think it is purely at the discretion of Google to determine if they are genuinely useful and add value. They do not always show up for my site when using broader searches either.

Although you may have your review snippets implemented correctly it is unfortunately down to Google with regards to if they feel it meets there guidelines and shows your star ratings in the organic listings.

Just because you have them implemented does not necessarily mean they will use them.

Double check these guides are met. Source Linked at end of comment.

From article on Google

To be eligible for reviews and ratings rich snippets, be aware of the following extra guidelines:

• Make sure the review or ratings markup refers clearly to a specific product or service as shown in the examples above. Do this by nesting the review or ratings within the markup of another schema.org type — such as schema.org/Book or schema.org/LocalBusiness — or by using that schema.org typed element as a value for theitemReviewed property.

• Make sure the reviews and ratings you mark up are readily available to users from the marked-up page. It should be immediately obvious to users that the page has review or ratings content.

• Review and rating markup should be used to provide review and/or rating information about a specific item, not about a category or a list of items. For example, “hotels in Madrid”, “summer dresses”, or “cake recipes” are not specific items. See also our structured data policies for multiple entities on the same page.

• We will not show review rich snippets for adult-related products or services.

• If the markup contains a single review, the author's name needs to be a valid name. For example, "50% off until Saturday" is not a valid name for a reviewer.

For all the review snippet structured data guide from Google see here

Hello Esther,

Before going ahead with a move to HTTPS for what could be little gain, have you thought if there are other things that could be done first that will benefit you more e.g responsive UX etc.

A move to HTTPS can be a big job and needs to undertaken very carefully to minimise problems, check, check and check again all redirects, canonical links, external, internal links etc to ensure that you give yourself the best chance to succeed in a move.

For more on moving to HTTPS take a look at a good article from Branded3 about some of the additional pros and cons.

Hmmm, I think this could depend up on how well things are going a the minute. Are your sites performing well and are they bringing in the customers/leads you are hoping to attain.

There is nothing wrong with having all of these sites, but how do you market other products should the customer land and expect one product, only to find its not quite the one they want. These customer could be leaving without performing an action , yet your other site may have one of the products they desire available, but they did not know.

I would probably suggest having a main branded site that houses all of your items, that way you are able to cross sell your items and people have a greater choice to select from. I would then maybe hold onto these additional micro-sites for any peripheral traffic you have and possibly try drive people to move onto your main branded site.

Just be careful of creating too many sites that link back to yourself which could be seen as a little unnatural. Your micro-sites could be phased out in time once your main branded site gathers pace and develops into a larger presence.

Hope that offers some ideas.

Absolutely agree with Patrick, if it does not feel right and you feel uncomfortable/spammy in doing it then don't.

Always opt for a strategy that is open, clear and provides your end users with a genuine experience.

I have just found this post which seems to outline most of my issues.

See here. Although I am not sure it will help you or not Trenton. I am going to do a little Screaming Frog search to see if there is an errand link.

I too am using Yoast and still getting these troublesome errors on GSC. We also do a lots of draft posting, but for me the error is not solely restricted to an area of our site that uses wordpress, it happens globally to our site.

I have checked the sitemaps on both desktop and mobile and both are returning the same for me.

If the .com domain is to be retired in the near future have you considered redirecting your existing .com links to your .co.nz domain via 301 redirects. This will hopefully give your .co.nz domain a boost. also have you put in a domain change with Google.

As both sites are running do you have potential duplicate content issues hindering efforts? Just trying to get a feeling for what you did when you instigated your domain move/transfer etc.

I just wanted to check that you had tried performing these search in each locality before getting a bit worried. If you are doing the search for the FB page here in the UK it is most likely that a local UK version is displayed, where as if you are doing a search from with Germany via google.de is there a chance the DE version is shown instead? Just wanted to rule it out first.

Have you done a who.is search on the domain to see if that provides any clues. You may then be able to find out if it is a client etc.

http://who.is/whois/ssosecure.com

I have not heard of it from a spam referral point of view, but that does not mean it is not a new one on the scene. To remove this referral traffic filter your analytics by hostname to remove it if needed.

The best article I know on removing referral spam is here.

First of all having looked at your site, may I say "Amazing photos", I partake in a few shots myself but mainly motorsport.

Having looked over the site your menu from first glance appears great to me both from a well structured source code point of view, but also from a usability perspective. I found it nice to be able to drill down into any particular section that I happened to be interested in and I think that's the main point. Let the users get as far as they can without having barriers in the way, having to go via multiple pages rather than using your already good/quick menu would make it a more problematic when moving around your site which could in turn increase exits.

You could maybe implement a search facility to enable your users to filter the images based on a variety of categories, e.g. landscape/colour/topic etc

I have recently followed Carlos' blog posts and have to say the steps worked a treat. Hopefully the Google Analytics team are working on a way to transfer filters across different analytics accounts to make it easier to keep all sites referral traffic free.

I believe there are a couple of possible solutions to this.

1. You could set up canonical tags on the pages that utilise query parameters so that they always point to the parent page.

Alternatively

2. You could set it up so that your robots.txt file disallows all query strings, thus preventing them from being indexed. (be careful with this version in case Google cant crawl the original source)

Disallow: /*?

it will take however a further crawl from Google before you could see any changes to the indexation of your pages.

Also in Webmaster tools you have a query parameters section within the Crawl menu. You can add in the variables in order to tell Google how to handle them. Learn more here. Hope this helps.

Tim

Have you given Moz's Open Site Explorer a trial yet.

Simply type in the URL you want to look into and it will give you valuable insight into the pages inbound links and other useful metrics such as page authority, domain authority, spam scores of inbound links, social shares etc.

Definately worth a try.

Is the content the same though for the two sections?

For me if one is about jumper products you sell and the other about reviews of jumpers, I think they do very different things, but I can see there will be an overlap and you want to elimate this to Google has a clear definition of both.

Could you not implement to different schema types. One for blog related listing articles etc and one tailored towards product schema, hopefully this will help google to determine the sections a little better.

If however, they are in effect the same pages and content why not implement a series of rel canonicals to the preferred more important pages.

Hope that helps

I agree with Alick300 rather than having two domain names which will simply dilute your brand identity, why not simply go for local based results and implement specific landing pages for certain location you wish to market too.

maybe something like www.rainydaysumbrella.com/newyork or www.rainydaysumbrella.com/chicago etc

Since the EMD update, keyword rich domain names have had significantly less value. Concentrate on creating a rich brand experience with great content and customers at the heart and you won't go far wrong.

If, however you feel you cannot live without owning both domains there is no harm in owning them both some people simply do this as a safety net so others cannot utilise them. Before you buy one or maybe both domains, make sure you do a historical check of the domains to make sure there is no hidden negative history that you may have to tackle.

Goodluck selling your umbrellas

Hi Chris,

Unfortunately I think you have hit the nail in the head about the blog leading to a high bounce rate. Having had a quick look over the content it does seem to be very much aimed at helping the user rather than engaging with them, but the content is really great so keep on creating it, that is maybe alongside some new ideas below.

Your current blog posts are just a one hit wonder where people get the information they need (possibly about an error or fix to their printer) and then leave. Have you considered trying to mix these articles with cross sell or upsell elements to make the user either consider buying new/cheaper ink or upgrade to a new model printer.

In each article maybe highlight that models ink cartridge range or peripherals such as paper etc, or specific deals etc. If the article is about a particular outdated printer maybe have a cashback deal on a new version funded by any manufacturer rebates etc to help promote it. In the right hand sidebar maybe have some offers or deals tabs etc.

Finally, rather than just having a content strategy about older fixes why not start to add in product reviews about new products you have to sell.

Hope that all made sense