Hi,

This is an interesting question and I was just looking it up a few days ago.

Answers to your questions:

1. Yes, google can and does read ampersands and plusses and does show slightly different results depending on which you use.

2. Maybe, if you check the SERPs for ‘black & white football’ and ‘black + white football’ are they different? When I took a quick look they were different - so once your ‘black & white football’ page starts ranking, check SERPs for ‘black + white football’ – you may be in the same place for this keyword, or you may be much lower. If you’re at the same position there’s no need to optimise another page, if you’re lower then maybe you should create a page. Be sure to check search volumes first though, there’s no reason to spend time creating a unique and optimised page for the keyword using a plus instead of an ampersand if nobody is searching for it.

3. Yes they notice and treat each one slightly differently. Take these 3 example searches for ‘design and branding’:

   https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=design+and+branding&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&ip=0.0.0.0&pws=0&uule=w+CAIQICIA&gws_rd=ssl

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=design+%26+branding&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF- 8&ip=0.0.0.0&pws=0&uule=w+CAIQICIA&gws_rd=ssl

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=design+%2B+branding&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&ip=0.0.0.0&pws=0&uule=w+CAIQICIA&gws_rd=ssl

We’re seeing a lot of the same domains showing up - with a lot of the same pages - but in different positions as well as some sites sneaking onto page one for one term, and halfway down page 2 for another. Take www.steve-edge.com – currently at 7^th for ‘design & branding’, 16^th for ‘design and branding’ and 20^th for ‘design + branding’.

So there’s the answer - yes Google can understand plus signs and ampersands, and yes they do treat each query slightly differently. You may be found at the same position for all variations, you may see fluctuations between each SERP, but what’s most important is checking to see if people are actually searching those terms with plus signs or ampersands before going to make the page - because there’s no point creating and optimising a page that nobody is looking for when the page they are looking for is being found fine.

Hope that helps!

Tom

Hi there,

If you don’t want these pages to appear in the index then yes, noindex follow would be the best directive to ensure any link juice still flows through them pages into other indexed pages, such as your blog posts found on those pages etc.

The harm of using noindex is when you are actually bringing in organic traffic through those pages, so have a look in analytics before you start noindexing. Take a look at organic traffic where your paged pages are the landing page – you could use a filter for something like page/ or page/[0-9]+ (or however your urls are structured for pagination) to look at all of these pages.

If those pages are bringing in organic traffic, why not optimise your metas and encourage even more users onto those pages? If they aren’t getting any entrances from search, you’re safe to do whichever you prefer - you could noidex,follow them to drop them from the index and keep the PR flowing.

Those pages aren’t harming you so you’re safe to leave them if you’re unsure, but always check entrances from search before you drop ANY page from the index. That way you can be sure you won’t lose any of your traffic.

Hope that helps,

Tom

Hi there,

You’re fine to have your product description quoting the text around the side of the product, but if you were to change it to something like this without quotes:

The words around the edge of the lazy susan read: Explore nature. Dream big. Take time to smell the flowers. Enjoy the changing seasons. Seize the day. Relish the night. Live life to the fullest.

…that would have the exact same SEO value as the existing description. Quotes are only counted as exact match keywords when searching in Google (and most other search engines), but don’t actually affect the way the page is seen by Google. The same way that using bold and italics to emphasise your keywords would not directly influence rank (but make your content more easily digestible, earning it more links and indirectly affecting rank), your quotes are also used to enhance human readability – but either would be fine.

Take a real world example: I pulled a page from my history which included a quote, “favor composition over inheritance” - (http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/65179/where-does-this-concept-of-favor-composition-over-inheritance-come-from)

Take a look at the screenshot I took below (from an unclean browser, sorry) – or you can run a search yourself – and we still see Wikipedia at the top, with its DA 100 (and no quotes); we see stackoverflow rising above stackexchange, with a higher DA; one result has more links than the stackexchange page, one has fewer. But they still perform better.

The stackexchange page with 5 counts of “favor composition over inheritance" (with quotes) is still outranked by the others.

• The 3^rd result uses the keyword 6 times, twice in quotes.
• The 2^nd result uses the keyword once without quotes.
• The 1^st Wikipedia result uses the term once without quotes and still ranks #1 due to its other (better) metrics.

There are a number of factors which could affect the position of these pages for this keyword, such as anchor text for links to those pages, partial match keywords in the text and other ranking factors which I did not look into – but hopefully it will give you a real example of quotation marks not directly affecting the value of a keyword in Google’s eyes.

Write the descriptions the way you that sounds best to you – and optimise them for human readability, as quotes versus no quotes doesn’t make much of a difference.

Hope that helps,

Tom

QfVCYKH.png

Hi,

To answer your first question, using hreflang tags in your sitemaps is a perfectly fine implementation of the tags, they will work whether they’re coded into the of each page, set in the sitemap or set in HTTP headers. This page will be useful for you as it explains all three methods quite well: http://www.branded3.com/blogs/implementing-hreflang-tag/

But when you add them to your sitemap you should include all variations of the page, along with a default – so if a French or German searcher accesses your site, you can define whether they’ll be served the Spanish or English page, like this:

<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>

To answer your second question about countries, you are fine to use hreflang=”es” to define all Spanish traffic, but using country codes can be useful in some circumstances. For instance if you have a site talking about football, you could use hreflang=”en-us” for a page which refers to the game as ‘soccer’ and use hreflang=”en-gb” for the page calling it ‘football’.

This Google Webmaster support post explains using both quite well under ‘Supported language values’ which I recommend you take a look at as well: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Hope that helps,

Tom

Hi,

For starters you could use the ‘Fetch as Google’ option in Webmasters Tools and see what your page looks like to search engines, or use a tool like browseo.net to do the same thing. Or you could make sure the page is indexable and link to it from somewhere and do a search for “one of your hidden text strings” (in quotes) to see if that content has been crawled and indexed.

If you can’t see your content then you may have a problem, and as crawlers can distinguish between hidden and nothidden text it may be more than just blocking your content from helping you rank. It might actually look like you’re trying to stuff keywords into your content without showing them to the user.

I think the easiest and simplest fix would be to remove the class which makes these elements invisible, and dynamically add that class with a little bit of jQuery just for users with scripts enabled:

This way when a crawler (or a user with javascript disabled) visits your site they will be served the page with the content visible, with it only being hidden if the visitor is accessing the site with javascript enabled.

Hope this helps,

Tom

Hi,

This is an interesting question and I was just looking it up a few days ago.

Answers to your questions:

1. Yes, google can and does read ampersands and plusses and does show slightly different results depending on which you use.

2. Maybe, if you check the SERPs for ‘black & white football’ and ‘black + white football’ are they different? When I took a quick look they were different - so once your ‘black & white football’ page starts ranking, check SERPs for ‘black + white football’ – you may be in the same place for this keyword, or you may be much lower. If you’re at the same position there’s no need to optimise another page, if you’re lower then maybe you should create a page. Be sure to check search volumes first though, there’s no reason to spend time creating a unique and optimised page for the keyword using a plus instead of an ampersand if nobody is searching for it.

3. Yes they notice and treat each one slightly differently. Take these 3 example searches for ‘design and branding’:

   https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=design+and+branding&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&ip=0.0.0.0&pws=0&uule=w+CAIQICIA&gws_rd=ssl

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=design+%26+branding&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF- 8&ip=0.0.0.0&pws=0&uule=w+CAIQICIA&gws_rd=ssl

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=design+%2B+branding&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&ip=0.0.0.0&pws=0&uule=w+CAIQICIA&gws_rd=ssl

We’re seeing a lot of the same domains showing up - with a lot of the same pages - but in different positions as well as some sites sneaking onto page one for one term, and halfway down page 2 for another. Take www.steve-edge.com – currently at 7^th for ‘design & branding’, 16^th for ‘design and branding’ and 20^th for ‘design + branding’.

So there’s the answer - yes Google can understand plus signs and ampersands, and yes they do treat each query slightly differently. You may be found at the same position for all variations, you may see fluctuations between each SERP, but what’s most important is checking to see if people are actually searching those terms with plus signs or ampersands before going to make the page - because there’s no point creating and optimising a page that nobody is looking for when the page they are looking for is being found fine.

Hope that helps!

Tom

Hi,

To answer your first question, using hreflang tags in your sitemaps is a perfectly fine implementation of the tags, they will work whether they’re coded into the of each page, set in the sitemap or set in HTTP headers. This page will be useful for you as it explains all three methods quite well: http://www.branded3.com/blogs/implementing-hreflang-tag/

But when you add them to your sitemap you should include all variations of the page, along with a default – so if a French or German searcher accesses your site, you can define whether they’ll be served the Spanish or English page, like this:

<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>

To answer your second question about countries, you are fine to use hreflang=”es” to define all Spanish traffic, but using country codes can be useful in some circumstances. For instance if you have a site talking about football, you could use hreflang=”en-us” for a page which refers to the game as ‘soccer’ and use hreflang=”en-gb” for the page calling it ‘football’.

This Google Webmaster support post explains using both quite well under ‘Supported language values’ which I recommend you take a look at as well: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Hope that helps,

Tom

Hi,

For starters you could use the ‘Fetch as Google’ option in Webmasters Tools and see what your page looks like to search engines, or use a tool like browseo.net to do the same thing. Or you could make sure the page is indexable and link to it from somewhere and do a search for “one of your hidden text strings” (in quotes) to see if that content has been crawled and indexed.

If you can’t see your content then you may have a problem, and as crawlers can distinguish between hidden and nothidden text it may be more than just blocking your content from helping you rank. It might actually look like you’re trying to stuff keywords into your content without showing them to the user.

I think the easiest and simplest fix would be to remove the class which makes these elements invisible, and dynamically add that class with a little bit of jQuery just for users with scripts enabled:

This way when a crawler (or a user with javascript disabled) visits your site they will be served the page with the content visible, with it only being hidden if the visitor is accessing the site with javascript enabled.

Hope this helps,

Tom

Hi there,

You’re fine to have your product description quoting the text around the side of the product, but if you were to change it to something like this without quotes:

The words around the edge of the lazy susan read: Explore nature. Dream big. Take time to smell the flowers. Enjoy the changing seasons. Seize the day. Relish the night. Live life to the fullest.

…that would have the exact same SEO value as the existing description. Quotes are only counted as exact match keywords when searching in Google (and most other search engines), but don’t actually affect the way the page is seen by Google. The same way that using bold and italics to emphasise your keywords would not directly influence rank (but make your content more easily digestible, earning it more links and indirectly affecting rank), your quotes are also used to enhance human readability – but either would be fine.

Take a real world example: I pulled a page from my history which included a quote, “favor composition over inheritance” - (http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/65179/where-does-this-concept-of-favor-composition-over-inheritance-come-from)

Take a look at the screenshot I took below (from an unclean browser, sorry) – or you can run a search yourself – and we still see Wikipedia at the top, with its DA 100 (and no quotes); we see stackoverflow rising above stackexchange, with a higher DA; one result has more links than the stackexchange page, one has fewer. But they still perform better.

The stackexchange page with 5 counts of “favor composition over inheritance" (with quotes) is still outranked by the others.

• The 3^rd result uses the keyword 6 times, twice in quotes.
• The 2^nd result uses the keyword once without quotes.
• The 1^st Wikipedia result uses the term once without quotes and still ranks #1 due to its other (better) metrics.

There are a number of factors which could affect the position of these pages for this keyword, such as anchor text for links to those pages, partial match keywords in the text and other ranking factors which I did not look into – but hopefully it will give you a real example of quotation marks not directly affecting the value of a keyword in Google’s eyes.

Write the descriptions the way you that sounds best to you – and optimise them for human readability, as quotes versus no quotes doesn’t make much of a difference.

Hope that helps,

Tom

QfVCYKH.png

Hi there,

If you don’t want these pages to appear in the index then yes, noindex follow would be the best directive to ensure any link juice still flows through them pages into other indexed pages, such as your blog posts found on those pages etc.

The harm of using noindex is when you are actually bringing in organic traffic through those pages, so have a look in analytics before you start noindexing. Take a look at organic traffic where your paged pages are the landing page – you could use a filter for something like page/ or page/[0-9]+ (or however your urls are structured for pagination) to look at all of these pages.

If those pages are bringing in organic traffic, why not optimise your metas and encourage even more users onto those pages? If they aren’t getting any entrances from search, you’re safe to do whichever you prefer - you could noidex,follow them to drop them from the index and keep the PR flowing.

Those pages aren’t harming you so you’re safe to leave them if you’re unsure, but always check entrances from search before you drop ANY page from the index. That way you can be sure you won’t lose any of your traffic.

Hope that helps,

Tom